Reading Matters
- ️Mon Dec 02 2024
Publications archive now!
An index of published articles by Mark Seidenberg and/or Maryellen MacDonald, with links to PDFs. Still updating but mostly complete. Here. Articles I recommend as interesting but not too technical: Lewis et al., What might books be teaching children about gender? [Answer: pink and blue stereotypes] Washington & Seidenberg article in American Educator about teaching…
December 2, 2024December 3, 2024
The Calkins Legacy
Maryellen MacDonald and I wrote this letter in response to the article by Helen Lewis about Lucy Calkins in the December 2024 issue of the Atlantic. This post can be downloaded as a PDF here. The December 2024 article does a good job of characterizing Lucy Calkins’ complex legacy, but she is not the “scapegoat”…
Calkins Redux
In light of the Dec 2024 article in the Atlantic about Lucy Calkins, I am reposting this piece of mine from a few years ago. Calkins is not the “scapegoat” for America’s failure to adequately teach reading. As the author of a popular but deeply flawed curriculum and a “thought leader” who cultivated a large,…
AI wants to help
AI tools that do remarkable things are appearing so often it’s impossible to keep up. I have just tried the innocuously named NotebookLM from Google and think you’ll be interested in the results. In June I posted an article (pdf) called “Where does the science of reading go from here?” I uploaded it to NotebookLM,…
The phonemic awareness discussion
There has been an extensive discussion of phonemic awareness instruction on the SPELLtalk list. It seems to have ended with a lot of uncertainty about the implications of my observations about PA for instruction, so let me try to boil it down. I’ll be pursuing these issues in greater detail here in the near future.…
The discussion continues….
I see that there are >100 responses to my last post, which will take me a little time to go through. The exchange is also continuing on the SPELLtalk list. I won’t have time to copy all of that over to this site, I’m afraid.
More on teaching phonemes
This post is part of an exchange about phonemic awareness that originated on the SPELLtalk listserve. It’s awkward having it in two places, but the posts may be hard to find on SPELLtalk. Here I’m responding to a reply from the original poster, Dr. Herron. Her post is here. I don’t know if we agree…
On the phonemes in “phonemic awareness”
This post is a response to a recent post on the SPELLtalk discussion from Dr. Jeannine Herron, a reading specialist active in reading education. The original post is in the SPELLtalk archive here, for people who have access. For those who don’t, I’ve reproduced it here. Dear Jeannine, I read your post about phonemic awareness…
Where does the Science of Reading go from here?
I gave a talk called “Where does the Science of Reading go from here?” at the Structured Linguistic Literacy summit on June 24. The slides from that talk are here. I have written a new article on this topic, available here. It goes into more detail and a wider range of topics. The Seidenberg & MacDonald article about…
Recorded version of Yale talk
The talk I gave at the Yale Child Study Center on 12/4/23 was not recorded. I recorded a version with a voiceover on 12/23. It is the same talk, with some additional information. The updated slides are here. The video of the talk itself is here. The links work on the blog post.