Stephen ParkerOct 20, 201924 minA Review of "The Reading Strategies Book"The Reading Strategies Book, by Jennifer Serravallo, is one of the most popular how-to-teach-reading books in use today. Published by Heinemann in 2015, this...
Stephen ParkerJul 15, 201914 minWhy Synthetic (Bottom-Up) Reading Instruction?Introduction All words consist of individual sounds, called “phonemes,” which seamlessly blend together when the word is spoken. The word SHEEP, for example,...
Stephen ParkerJun 25, 201925 minA Brief History of Reading InstructionIntroduction For more than a century, reading instruction has been involved in a high-stakes battle between supporters of two opposing methods for teaching a...
Stephen ParkerApr 29, 20198 minThe Alphabetic Code Made Easy The alphabetic code is the set of correspondences that exist between the most basic sounds of English (called phonemes) and the letters that symbolize those ...
Stephen ParkerApr 22, 201922 minSight Words, Orthographic Mapping, and Self-Teaching This 3rd blog completes a trilogy of blogs written expressly for reading teachers and interested parents. The other two blogs can be found here and here. My ...
Stephen ParkerMar 8, 201913 minSynthetic Phonics: What It Is and What It Is NotBackground: During the quarter century, 1975 - 2000, the dominant method for teaching reading in the English-speaking world was Whole Language. Its main char...
Stephen ParkerMar 3, 20199 minThe Simple View of Reading: Still Conclusive After 33 Years In this blogpost I take a look at the Philip Gough and William Tunmer classic model of reading comprehension, first published in 1986. After unpacking its ke...