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Regular Parents: This teacher asked parents to take most of the responsibility for teaching the sight vocabulary, while he himself taught the spelling patterns. Parents were given advice and materials to provide and play reading games with their children. This method worked extremely well. It was noticeable, though, that where parents did not attend the supporting reading-workshop session, much less progress was made. This reinforces our view that regular parents contact between parents and teachers is essential if a PACT scheme is to flourish.
This also applies to parents who are anxious and over-concerned about their child's progress or their own capacity to help. These parents may, however, need some extra help from the teacher. Whereas the so-called 'competitive' or 'pushy' parents will usually have the confidence to help their own child once they know how to do so, the anxious parent may need more support. One anxious mother we met said that her son finds her 'bossy' but sees his grandfather as kind and tolerant, and suggested that surely he would be a better person to hear the child read on a regular parents basis.
However, it would have been ethically unacceptable, to both teachers and parents, to include such a condition. Again, Jenny Hewison and Jack lizard6 clearly demonstrated, in a working-class area, that up to 50 per cent of parents already hear their children read on a regular parents basis which would mean that, even in the control groups, many children would have been heard reading at home. Thus these control groups could not strictly be compared with experimental groups where parents were being asked to hear their children read. For these kinds of reasons it is difficult to claim with certainty that it was the fact of parents hearing their children read at home which caused the improvement in reading standards in the Haringey Project. (See references 2 and 7 for fuller discussion.) |
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