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Podcast: The Reading Instruction Show
Episode: What Elephants Can Teach Us About Reading Instruction
Description: The really big point is this: It’s the semantic connections that are most important, not orthographic, graphemic, or phonemic connections. When you encounter the words ‘elephant’ you don’t connect with short /e/ words. You don’t activate words containing the /ant/ letter pattern or words with silent ‘ph’ blends. You connect with elephant things, regardless of the letter sounds or patterns.Just hearing the word ‘elephant’ brought some of the elephant things in your elephant schemata to consciousness. Meaning that, if elephant were followed by the words sock, trunk, swallow, you’d be able to identify the word ‘t...