After the release of the Reading Panel’s 2023 report, we have again been reminded of the shocking state of reading competence in our schools.
One Twitter headline “shouted out” that first grade children don’t know the letters of the alphabet. One must wonder how knowing names of letters help a novice reader to get acquainted with the “squiggles” on the page, which is how neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene refers to words on a page for a pre-literate child? How do these little “squiggles” get linked with the sounds of the language that a child knows? How do they learn to associate the sounds in words with the letters on the page?
