Then process of learning to read: A framework for integrating research and educational practice

The empirical content of this chapter stems primarily from research undertaken by my group at the University of New England into the early stages of literacy acquisition. I will couch my description of this research in a framework that we have adopted; one that may serve as a model generally for how children learn in an instructional context. I will also argue that the same framework furnishes a metric to judge the relative merits of research-based recommendations, useful in cases where these recommendations differ. At the same time, and for the same reasons, this framework provides a bridge between research and practice when it is combined with suitably conservative educational policy, as I will explain. Our framework poses the learning problem in this way: What does the child contribute to any act of learning, and what must the instruction provide? Put another way, what can we assume on the part of children, and what can we not assume on their part and therefore need to teach? The evaluation device for competing research-based conclusions that this framework offers can be put this way: (1) count the number of assumptions about the child's contribution that the competing sets of research-based conclusions make, and (2) value more highly the set of conclusions that make the fewest assumptions about the child's contributions, other things being equal.