you won't believe this

[Molly Millians]

Hi all,

For my two cents...

As I special education teacher/doctoral student,  I agree with your
comments. I find that the drive to increase test scores dominates not only
reading but other aspects of children's development.  This is based upon the
readings in educational newsletters and policy reports, as well as from
speaking with parents and observing  in many different schools. This outcome
based view seemed to be part of the LENA information for parents.

After looking at the LENA website, I found the marketing of the tool to
reflect the drive  for results. It reinforced the importance of parents to
talking  their children, but not necessarily how. From a teaching
perspective, quality is as important. The trend I am seeing through the
review of records, test scores, and from parent and teacher reports for
elementary school-aged children is they  have developed adequate expressive
language, especially in vocabulary recognition and in the  length of
utterances.   However, it is their application, their depth of
understanding, and their ability to generalize that is concerning. If
parents are to use the LENA as a tool, it will be important to provide
information on how to interact with the infant.

There was an interesting report on NPR Morning Edition  on Thursday,
February 21st about the impact of the limited opportunities children have
for imaginary, unstructured play and children's ability to self-regulate
this included the use of language.  This was two-part report and spoke to a
range of psychologists, teachers, and a cultural historian who explored
play, culture, and child development. The piece was well researched and was
easy to understand for parents and those without a background on child
development. It would be beneficial for more reports of this be become
available for parents.

 I like the idea of providing parents information generated from those who
research in the field, such as the NPR report..It would be important for the
articles etc. to be provided by those who are not vested in the success of a
product.


Molly Millians (Marcus Institute, Atlanta GA/University of South Africa)


On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 12:11 AM, Tom Roeper <roeper at linguist.umass.edu>
wrote:

> Dear Margaret---
>     No doubt you are right---politics in education is dominating
> reading instruction and I am sure that individual children feel
> it.   It is another area where teacher's and educators voices
> need to be more clearly heard.
>
> Tom
>
> PS.  One educator's voice, my mother Annemarie Roeper,
> is one such voice.  She
> just wrote a book "The "I" of the Beholder" about the
> Roeper school (now 66 years old) which reflects where
> my views originate.
>
> On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 6:02 PM, Margaret Fleck <margaretmfleck at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > --- Tom Roeper <roeper at linguist.umass.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > Dear Everyone,
> > ..... How strenuously you push a child who is behind in reading is
> > > largely a parental decision. In retrospect I think we pushed
> > >
> > > my daughter, now in law school, a bit too hard when she had trouble
> > reading,
> > > though her continuing absolute inability to spell suggests a deep
> > difference
> > > is still present.)
> >
> > Actually, these days it seems to be a political decision.    Since the
> > public
> > schools in the US suffer
> > rather dire consequences if the kids (disabled or not) can't pass
> > standardized
> > tests, these
> > kids now get pushed rather hard, regardless of what the parents want.
> >
> > Margaret (Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Tom Roeper
> Dept of Lingiustics
> UMass South College
> Amherst, Mass. 01003 ISA
> 413 256 0390
>
> >
>

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