Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It: A Scientific Revolution in Reading - Softcover

Mcguinness, Diane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684853566 ISBN 13: 9780684853567

Publisher: Free Press, 1999

Synopsis

In America today, 43 percent of our children fall below grade level in reading. In her meticulously researched and groundbreaking work, Diane McGuinness faults outmoded reading systems for this crisis -- and provides the answers we need to give our children the reading skills they need. Drawing on twenty-five years of cutting-edge research, Dr. McGuinness presents bold new "phoneme awareness" programs that overcome the tremendous shortcomings of other systems by focusing on the crucial need to understand and hear reliably the sounds of a language before learning to read. Maintaining that any child can be taught to read fluently if given proper instruction, she dramatically reveals how dyslexia and behavior problems such as ADD stem not from neurological disorders but from flawed methods of reading instruction. With invaluable information on remedial reading programs that can correct various ineffective reading strategies, this book is a must for concerned parents, teachers, and others who want to make a difference.

About this title

From the Publisher

Chances are, if you can read this book, you're lucky. Even so, you may be reading it less well than you could. The fact is, you probably learned to read the wrong way, but somehow you've managed to get by, even do well. Many children and adults are not so lucky.

In America today, 43 percent of our children test below grade level in reading. Among adults, 42 million are functionally illiterate. The numbers are staggering, but in our schools, the problem is only getting worse. Most schools teach reading with phonics, the whole language method, or some eclectic combination of the two. Unfortunately, these methods are failing our children; phonics by 30 percent, whole language by 50 percent.

We are in crisis. Now, what are we going to do about it? If we're wise, we'll read and use what's in this book at home -- and in every school in America -- because it is the first thorough diagnosis of the problem and the first viable solution. The old methods don't work, and this book will tell you why. Psychologist Diane McGuinness draws on twenty-five years of solid reading research that shows exactly how the current system fails and how to fix it.

She explains that the ability to read depends on the ability to hear the sounds of our language correctly, and on a working knowledge of something called the spelling code, which is the key to how English spelling works: what letters and letter combinations go with which sounds. This connection of sounds and the symbols that represent them is crucial to learning how to read, and McGuinness explains it with rigor, clarity, and expertise. Moreover, she shows how this method is scientifically proven and has transformed so-called dyslexics and troubled readers into expert readers and spellers, often in astoundingly short periods of time.

Diane McGuinness has given us the blueprint for a reading revolution -- one that offers real hope to the millions of children and adults who are failing needlessly in school and in life.

About the Author

Diane McGuinness, Ph.D., is a cognitive-development psychologist and Professor at the University of South Florida. The author of When Children Don't Learn, she lives in Sanibel, Florida.

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684853566
• ISBN 13: 9780684853567
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400