For The Love Of Literacy
For the Love of Literacy provides podcasts about the exciting advances in literacy instruction, from morphology and orthography (the spelling system), to meaningful sight word memorization, and sentence construction and comprehension. We focus on the often overlooked aspects of literacy and their links to language development.
We tie learning to read, spell and writing to their roots in spoken language. This makes teaching and learning these abilities much easier because literacy learning is driven by language learning. The major components of spoken language plus vocabulary knowledge strongly predicting and largely determining growth in reading, spelling and writing.
Our guests are not just knowledgeable the links between language and language but know how to implement this learning in the classroom.
You will hear from noted researchers including Linnea Ehri, Marcia Henry and Peter Bowers as well as teachers who have developed lessons that engage students and enrich language abilities. Check back weekly to discover more Fulfilling Literacy Lessons and Clarifying conversations. Feel free to reach out to me at Bruce@ReadingShift.com.
For The Love Of Literacy
The Sentence Pathway to Decoding and Comprehension -- Xiuhong Tong & S. Hélène Deacon
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If you have ever wondered why your students struggle with word reading, or read accurately but with limited comprehension, then you may want to flip your approach to reading instruction. Start at the sentence level by using Xiuhong Tong and Hélène Deacon’s groundbreaking Linguistics Pathways Model, which provides two parallel paths leading to reading comprehension.
The first pathway leads to word recognition by morphological decoding. Deacon and Tong show how word reading and meaning arise from an awareness of how morphemes—the meaningful components that compose all words—are linked to graphemes. Unlike phonics decoding, students develop word reading, spelling and vocabulary knowledge in unison, which supports reading comprehension.
The second pathway is a syntax to sentence pathway. Syntax, the blueprint for creating and understanding sentences, is the layer of language that most directly supports reading comprehension and fluency. Together, words are not only read with meaning but as part of meaningful sentences – which largely determines text comprehension.
Xiuhong Tong and S. Helene Deacon 2025. The Linguistic Pathways Model: Capturing the Multiple Dimensions of Reading Development. Reading Research Quarterly