Reading Literacy

p Reading Literacy

Within days of becoming President , George W . Bush sent Congress an educational reform `blue print ' that promised to eliminate the nation 's reading deficit by ensuring that every child can read by the third grade ' He proposed applying years of scientific research findings , now available , especially in the recently published report of the National Reading Panel that reviewed 100 ,000 studies on how students learn to read ' and provided a guide for scientifically based reading instruction ( HYPERLINK "http /www .rethinkinhschools .org http /www .rethinkingschools .org

Reading deficit

? It appears that the focus of entire educational sector is on finding ways and means including diagnosis , intervention and assessment on the context of Reading . While the national authorities continue to blame teachers and students for alleged failures in education , the others including parents and educators blame it on sterile attitudes towards current teaching and learning practices

According to Frank Smith , who has done an extensive research into language , thinking and learning , schools and educational authorities are much to be blamed for current learning practices that systematically obstruct the powerful inherent learning abilities of children , creating handicaps that often persist through life (Smith . F , 1998 . The Book of Learning and Forgetting

Marie Clay has made a significant contribution in the field Education that is well known as Reading Recovery . Clay maintained a high level of contact with children , parents , and educators . Reading Recovery emanated from close involvement into those closest to the sources . The research project was born out of concern for teachers , who despite well designed classroom programs and teaching were not able to change the path of students towards academic excellence . Clay focused on the question , What is possible when we change the design and delivery of traditional education for children that teachers find hard to teach (Clay , M . 1993 . Reading Recovery : A guidebook for teachers in training br

.97 . Clay has tried to redesign early identification and instruction of these children rather than the classroom programs

However , the credit of advancing the Reader-Response Theory for the first time goes to Louise Rosenblatt in 1938 . This theory remains a dominant approach even today especially in the teaching of literature Reader response theories reject the New Criticism of late 1930s through 1950s which were based on the assumption of the centrality of texts . The teacher 's role was confined to teach the skills of close , concise attentive analysis while discouraging expression of and attention to differences to students ' own individual responses . By 1960s and 70s there occurred a paradigm shift in the teaching of literature that shifted the focus from text as authority to text as interacting with students . Rosenblatt 's work is primarily interested in describing readers ' process of engagement and involvement for composing their own `poem . In the 1938 edition of Literature as Exploration , she examines responding as an `event ' in these words

The special meaning and more particularly , the submerged associations that these words and images have for the individual reader will largely determine what the...