Week 1 Discussion: National Reading Panel

National Reading Panel
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Institutional Affiliation


National Reading Panel
There has a debate for decades on which method is efficient to teach reading. The debate was described as reading wars as it had caused the emergence of opposing groups amongst the experts, politicians, and even the policy makers. It was a war between a group that supported the phonics method and the other that supported whole reading. The Congress together with the Secretary of Education played a role in the convening of the National Reading Panel (NRP), whose agenda was to assess the different methods used to teach children to read and evaluate their effectiveness by asking the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to oversee the activity (National Reading Panel, 2000).
NRP found that the best method is one that incorporates phonemic awareness, phonic skills, fluency, and comprehension strategies. Phonemic awareness involves realizing that a word can be disintegrated into smaller units known as phenomes (National Reading Panel, 2000). It should, however, be known that it only provides the basic foundation in alphabetic that lasts beyond training for normal achieving children, but it is not efficient for disabled children (National Reading Panel, 2000). Phonic skills involve understanding phoneme sounds can be combined to form written words, which in turn improves t...