BalancedReading

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The mission for BalancedReading.com is to provide research-based information and resources about reading to anybody who is interested in promoting reading skills and literacy. We do all that we can to provide information and resources free-of-charge. Unfortunately, operating and maintaining BalancedReading.com is a little expensive.

Recently, there have been challenges to the Simple View of reading. At the December, 2005 National Reading Conference in Florida, esteemed reading researchers Nell Duke and Michael Pressley hosted (along with a varied panel of experts comprised entirely of their graduate students) a discussion of the Simple View. It was the contention of Duke and Pressley and their entire panel of students that the Simple View is "too simple" to explain the complexities of reading and learning to read.

BalancedReading.com was set up as a resource to provide good research-based information about reading instruction to educators. Our mission is to bring research into practice.

Similarly, writing can be an essential tool in focused reading instruction. Reading is a process that is mostly internal and which is, for most of us, fairly rapid and automatic. Writing slows that process down, and externalizes it. If you want children to develop cipher knowledge, work with them on writing words, sounding them out as you encode them. If you want children to develop a richer vocabulary, work with them on using new words in their writing. If you want children to develop an appreciation for different genres of text, teach them how to write in a variety of styles.

I was talking to Marilyn Adams recently about this issue of motivation, and she told me something that gave me a great deal of hope for the future. We were talking about a product that she is helping to develop called Reading Assistant . In a nutshell, Reading Assistant is a computer-based program that understands human speech. Thus, Reading Assistant can present text on the computer screen for a student, and "listen" to that student read the text aloud. Reading Assistant monitors oral reading accuracy and fluency, and provides helpful prompts when the student needs a little help.

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