Description
In America today, 43 percent of our children fall below grade level in reading. In her meticulously researched and groundbreaking work, Diane McGuinness faults outmoded reading systems for this crisis — and provides the answers we need to give our children the reading skills they need. Drawing on twenty-five years of cutting-edge research, Dr. McGuinness presents bold new “phoneme awareness” programs that overcome the tremendous shortcomings of other systems by focusing on the crucial need to understand and hear reliably the sounds of a language before learning to read. Maintaining that any child can be taught to read fluently if given proper instruction, she dramatically reveals how dyslexia and behavior problems such as ADD stem not from neurological disorders but from flawed methods of reading instruction. With invaluable information on remedial reading programs that can correct various ineffective reading strategies, this book is a must for concerned parents, teachers, and others who want to make a difference. CONTENTS Foreword by Steven Pinker Preface Pronunciation Key for English Phonemes SECTION I. WHY IT’S HARD TO LEARN TO READ 1. Reading Report Card 2. Readers Reading: How Do We Do It? 3. Transcribing Talk 4. Alphabets: Splitting Sounds 5. The English Alphabet Code A Comment on Dialects SECTION II. A READING REVOLUTION 6. Science to the Rescue 7. The Child’s Mind and Reading 8. The Proof of the Pudding: Reading Programs That Work SECTION III. PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS 9. Beginning Reading Right 10. Mastering the Advanced Code in Reading, Writing, and Spelling 11. Helping Those Who Didn’t Make It 12. Remedial Reading Programs 13. What’s a Parent to Do? Notes and References Glossary Author Index Subject Index
