This series celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Reading Rope created by Dr. Hollis Scarborough in 2001. The origins of Dr. Scarborough’s Reading Rope date back to her lectures for parents on the complexities involved in learning to read. Originally, she spoke of skilled reading as resembling the “strands” of a rope.
The Reading Rope consists of lower and upper strands: the word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words) work together as the reader becomes accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice. Concurrently, the language-comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge) reinforce one another and then weave together with the word-recognition strands to produce a skilled reader (International Dyslexia Association, 2001, 2 (7)).
This series will commence with an overview of Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope and summary of the series followed by a monthly series of lectures and discussion related to each strand of the reading rope.
