“The ‘fourth-grade slump’ (Chall et al. 1990) is the
phenomenon where some children seem to acquire reading
(i.e. pass reading tests) fine in the early grades, but fail to
be able to use reading to learn school content in the later
grades, when the language demands of that content (e.g.
science) get more and more complex. The fourth-grade
slump is made up of kids who can ‘read,’ in the sense of
decode and assign superficial literal meanings to texts, but
can’t ‘read’ in the sense of understanding, in any deep way,
informational texts written in fairly complex language.
From remarks like the one quoted above, it would certainly
seem that the problems poor and minority children have
with learning to read must lie, for the most part, some place
else than a lack of early phonemic awareness training or
other early ‘basic skills’ training. The fourth-grade slump
tells us this much (because here we see kids who have
mastered early reading skills of the sorts traditionalists
stress, but still can’t read to learn in the later grades).” (GEE, James Paul. Situated Language and Learning: a critique of
traditional schooling. London, Routdlege, 2004.)
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