Abstract
This chapter presents a qualitative comparison of initiatives from four English-speaking countries (Canada, England, New Zealand, United States) that outline the components of teacher content knowledge in teaching reading, including bottom-up skills related to reading acquisition at the word level (i.e., phonemic awareness and alphabetic principle/phonics generalizations) and top-down holistic processes (i.e., comprehension). The chapter authors contend that an understanding of the structure of the language is essential to delivering the explicit and systematic literacy instruction that is needed especially for students at-risk for reading difficulties. The authors developed, validated, and administered a knowledge survey of basic language constructs to compare teacher candidates’ performance from the four different countries. Findings show that teacher candidates from all four countries and in general lack knowledge of certain basic language constructs needed to teach early reading skills. Suggestions regarding how to improve teacher preparation to teach reading in English language arts are provided.
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Sandra Martin-Chang (Concordia University) and Alison Arrow (Massey University) for their assistance in the collection of datafrom Canadaand New Zealand.
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Binks-Cantrell, E., Washburn, E.K., Malatesha Joshi, R. (2020). Do Teacher Candidates in English-Speaking Countries Understand the Structure of the English Language?. In: Gallagher, T.L., Ciampa, K. (eds) Teaching Literacy in the Twenty-First Century Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47821-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47821-6_3
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