MELIT

(Reading Recovery – Marie Clay’s Theory of Literacy Processing)

 

• All students can learn.
   

• Children come to literacy with varying knowledge.
   

• Children construct their own understandings.
   

• Learners extend their own learning.
   

• Children take different paths to literacy learning.
   

• Reading and writing are complex problem solving processes.
   

• Reading and writing are reciprocal and interrelated processes.
   

• Learning to read and write involves a continuous process of change over time.
   

• Literacy learning involves the reading and writing of continuous texts (whole –part – whole).
   

• Optimal learning comes from building on children’s strengths that make it easy for children to learn.
   

• Optimal learning comes from learning about the unknown from the very well known.
   

• Optimal learning comes from a gradual release of responsibility to the learner.
   

• Observation and gathering evidence of how children are working on print provide the basis for effective instruction.

 

(Allington, 1998; Clay, 2001; Clay, 2005a, 2005b; Jones &Smith-Burke, 1999; Routman, 2005; Watson & Askew, 2009; Wood, 1998; http://readingrecovery.org/reading-recovery/teaching-children/early-literacy-learning)