Could this be one of the reason our children struggle to read?
I certainly think so.
Below is an abstract from the "Journal of Learning Disabilities" that addresses teacher preparation and textbook content with regard to linguistic knowledge. There is also a link to the full article. While there are many excellent early elementary teachers doing an excellent job of teaching reading, unfortunately many go into the classroom ill prepared.
I experienced this myself. In one of the reading courses I took in my quest to have Casey learn to read, there was a brief!! overview of phonics. It became apparent that many of the students (young, post high school graduates) had been taught to read using whole language strategies because they had little knowledge of ‘phonics.’ I wondered how they would fare going into the early elementary classrooms with this short exposure to the fundamentals of decoding words. While I felt sorry for them, the mom part of me was actually more concerned with how the children would fare.
It's just one more reason that we provide information and resources for parents to be able to advocate for their children and even more importantly, take an active role in their child's reading progress.
Abstract: Two reasons may be responsible for the poor grasp of the linguistic concepts related to literacy acquisition by preservice and in-service teachers: a lack of attention given to such concepts by teacher educators (college faculty members) and a lack of relevant information provided in the textbooks used in college courses. In an earlier study, the authors found that many teacher educators involved in the training of preservice and in-service teachers were not well acquainted with these concepts. In this study, the authors examined the extent to which textbooks used in reading education courses contain the information about the five components of literacy instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension) recommended by the National Reading Panel. Such scrutiny shows that many textbooks do not adequately cover these five components and the related instructional procedures for teaching them. In addition to the paucity of information about teaching the five components, some textbooks present inaccurate information.
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