The Importance of Learning Meaning
Researcher Sally Shaywitz followed the progress of student
from kindergarten through high school graduation. Some students
identified as struggling readers in primary years remained
persistently poor readers throughout their school years; whereas
others became accurate readers with strong comprehension skills
by the time they were in high school.
Using fMRI brain scanning technology, Dr Shaywitz discovered
that the improved readers had developed strong compensatory
strategies that distinguished them from the persistently poor
readers.
The good readers had more advanced vocabularies and used
context and semantic skills to gain meaning from text. The
poor readers appeared to rely solely on phonetic decoding
strategies and memory, without having developed good word
analysis skills.
Dr Shaywitz wrote:
“These findings have important educational implications
and are of special relevance for teaching children to read.
Consistent with our knowledge of the components of reading,
children need to be able o sound out words to decode them
accurately, and then, they need to know the meaning of the
word, to help decode and comprehend the printed message. Both
the sounds and the meaning of words must be taught.”
Davis Learning Strategies are designed to integrate well
with any curriculum already in place at a school. At the primary
level, the Davis tools provide an easy and direct way to develop
cognitive skills and enable children to learn word meanings
at the same time as they are introduced to other decoding
strategies. These provide the foundational skills that later
enable at-risk children to overcome barriers to learning and
to become capable readers.
Davis Symbol Mastery is specifically geared to building strong
analytical skills for discerning word meaning. The emphasis
on dictionary skills – looking the word up, reading
the definition, practicing using the word in sentences, modeling
the meaning in clay all require the student to both think
about meaning and develop an analytical framework that will
provide a lifelong pathway to effective learning.
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