Move From Teaching Reading to Language-Literacy Development

Teaching reading is just too hard with dozens of components that must be squeezed into our busy days. Developing language-literacy in an integrated manner is much easier as it goes to the roots of reading growth - spoken language. Oral language, when taught in a reciprocal manner with orthography, largely predicts reading, spelling and writing success. In this presentation you will learn why some children, the Literacy Runners, learn to read at an early age and often go on to develop fluency, comprehension, spelling, vocabulary, and sentence writing with equal ease. You will learn the methods that develop these language-literacy abilities in Reading Walkers and Joggers, so they reach the same level of literacy in a way that will make sense to you and your students. 

The key is to teach both young children and 7-to-17-year-olds how to play with the major parts of spoken language and orthography as if they are just Linguistic Lego blocks. You see how simple it is to show your students how to play with phonemes, letters and morphemes to build meaningful words, extend these words into multisyllabic and polymorphemic words, and combine them into phrases and sentences – in a single lesson. Best yet, this approach builds meaning, vocabulary, spelling, and sight word abilities at the same time. Let’s give all students the ability to experience literacy success from the first lesson.