No 2 June 2025
Prof Joseph Wright (1855-1930)
Why is creating meaning for the student so important in my teaching?
Let’s look at the word “saw.” It was teaching of this word that empowered me to see how quickly and easily we forget that children need explicit teaching of “how the written language works.”
The definition of the word “saw,” from the Oxford Dictionary online
saw1 /sô/
noun
noun: saw; plural noun: saws
a hand tool for cutting wood or other materials, typically with a long, thin serrated steel blade and operated using a backward and forward movement.
a mechanical power-driven tool for cutting, typically with a toothed rotating disk or moving band.
Zoology
a serrated organ or part, such as the toothed snout of a sawfish.
verb
verb: saw; 3rd person present: saws; past tense: sawed; gerund or present participle: sawing; past participle: sawn; past participle: sawed
cut (something) using a saw.
"the top of each post is sawed off at railing height"
make or form (something) using a saw.
"the seats are sawn from well-seasoned elm planks"
cut (something) as if with a saw, especially roughly or so as to leave rough or unfinished edges.
"the woman sawed off all my lovely hair"
make rapid to-and-fro motions in cutting something or in playing a stringed instrument.
"he was sawing away energetically at the loaf"
Past tense of the verb: see
Too often, instruction is reduced to rote repetition: “Say this word,” “Repeat this word,” until the child either grasps it or doesn’t.
When a child struggles to read, the blame frequently falls on the student rather than on the inadequate instruction that fails to nurture their understanding.
To truly support all learners, especially those who face the greatest challenges, we must rethink how reading is taught and ensure our methods honor the complexities of language and cognition.
Professor Wright : A child points, and is taught a word. Tree. Later, he learns to distinguish this tree from all the others. He learns its particular name. He plays under the tree. He dances around it. Stands beneath its branches, for shade or shelter. He kisses under it, sleeps under it, he weds under it. He marches past it on his way to war, and limps past it on his journey home. A king is said to have hidden in this tree. A spirit may dwell within its bark. Its distinctive leaves are carved onto the tombs and monuments of his landlords. Its wood might have built the galleons that saved his ancestors from invasion. And all this, the general and the specific, the national and the personal, all this, he knows, and feels, and summons somehow, however faintly, with the utterance of a single sound. 'Oak.' Saxon word. Proto-Germanic. Cognates in Old Norse. 'Eik.' Language is never nonsense. Language is meaning. History. Layer upon layer upon layer. And a word without meaning is -- what? Merely a sound.
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