To be shocked that the national average reading age is 9-11

[SailorSerena]

I often think why are people finding this confusing? It's not difficult! Did any of these posters even read the OP!? When reading threads here. On another thread I saw someone say so you know what the national average reading age is? When peoples comprehension was criticised. So I googled it. And I'm appalled!

How on earth is the UKs reading ability so poor that the average adult has the reading ability of a 10 year old child!?

I'm dyslexic and in my 30s. I can read, and have quite an intellectual job. This doesn't surprise me. However, i didn't struggle much with reading, but did (and do) with writing and times tables. But for me primary school focused on reading, writing arythmtic, then secondary school focus was more analysing and understanding. In very general terms. I still feel stressed when trying to do primary school level things. Sometimes you get to a passable level and realise there's no point progressing further if it's too difficult and it's best to focus on your strengths instead. And, yes an average 9 year old should have a passable level of literacy.

On the education system, I think England starting literacy so young compared to many other countries (4 instead of 7) puts many children off loving learning.

You’re not the first person on this thread to criticize phonics, but I thought it was widely accepted now (having fought the good fight even)?

English is my DS’s second language and not taught in school so I am trying to get him reading and I defaulted to phonics methods even though I don’t think it’s how I learned. So if there is alternatives I would be interested in learning more and also what are the problems with phonics?

Those in the 30-35 age group are the most likely to have been exposed to the whole word/real books teaching of reading and then later to Searchlights or the 3-cueing method. Older people learned to read using phonics, so the older age groups will read much better.
Whole word is a method that assumes we do not read individual letters but whole words. Bear with me; this meant that children were taught words by sight using flash cards and reading books with predictive vocabulary (John hit the ball. Oh, John! Hit the ball' - that sort of thing, which was to some extent around in the 50s but children were also taught letter and sounds using flash cards, sitting in a circle around the teacher) and some tools to 'guess' words they did not know. This method was added to the Searchlights scheme under Blair's National curriculum system. There, the teacher, using a Big Book set on an easel, pointed to the words of the text as they read them and the children chimed in. They were also taught the 3 cues for identifying words (the Searchlights) which were the context e.g. what word is likely to come next in this sentence: 'the car sped down the -' word begings with 's', using the pictures to identify the word e.g. there is a picture of a dragon, so the word is 'dragon', and finally the least effective method, working out the sounds of the letters (phonics) e.g. 'get your mouth ready to say the 'sss' sound' etc. None of these methods are effective, although about 80% of children will probably learn to read anyway. The 20% who did not were told it would be sorted out in secondary school (it wouldn't, of course).
The teaching unions, education experts and some members of the profession were dragged kicking and screaming back to using phonics, specifically systematic synthetic phonics (SSP), along with the knowledge-rich curriculum that is needed to comprehend the words on the page when you have read them. To make sure that SSP was being used a phonics test was introduced at the end of year 1, containing 20 real words using phonics taught up till then, and 20 made up words - explained as being the names of alien creatures with pictures of those creatures - also using the phonics taught up to the end of year 1.
This check (it's not a test) has caused ructions among some teachers who think they need to teach nonsense words (they do not - the whole point of the nonsense words in the check is to see if the child can use phonics to read them) and that mechanics is being substituted for comprehension and enjoyment.
What comprehension and enjoyment anyone gets out of struggling to guess the words from the context (ok only for meaning), the pictures and what letter the word starts with, I cannot imagine. But use of those methods means a whole tranche of young people from the late 80s to the 2010s were deprived of the skill of reading - hence low overall reading age average.
Be warned, the teaching unions want the phonics check removed. Labour is likely to agree. Also likely to agree that other methods than SSP + knowledge rich curriculum can be used to teach reading.

There is no problem with phonics. They are the only way to learn to read a phonetic language, which English is. It uses an alphabet and all alphabetic languages are phonetic. English has a complex code with c. 44 sounds which have to be mapped onto 26 letters, which are combined to make some sounds e.g. c+h to make a ch sound.
In addition to phonics the child needs a rounded vocabulary and an appropriate (and expanding) knowledge base, as well having plenty of books beyond their phonics level read aloud to them along with books which use phonics at their level, so they can practice and succeed in reading a book.
SSP systems are available to buy. I used Debbie Hepplewhite, but there are other schemes.

Working memory for everyone has a limit of 4 items. This is why we commit knowledge to long-term memory by rehearsing, testing and retrieving. It should become so embedded that you are not aware of drawing on this knowledge.

I am 43 and it was look and say when I was at school. In secondary school there was a fair proportion of the class who couldn't read fluently. My kids are learning with a phonics scheme - this seems a really good system as the whole class seems to be able to read at a similar level. Also the reading books (little wandle) contain a wide range of vocabulary so it will be helping with that aspect too. A lot of these are pretty obscure words and probably no more familiar to an average 6 year old than a made up alien name, so I don't really get the hate on the phonics test.

He probably did know it, but without that particular bit of meta-language. I.e. he'd done discovery maths rather than been explicitly taught. It's not axiomatic to someone without the correct mathematical vocabulary that the sum 2x2x2=8 is the same as 'the cube root of 8'. Bad teaching.

This is a truism universally acknowledged. I can read a paper on nuclear physics. My chance of understanding even 1% of it is poor to non-existent. Nor would I be able to ask questions about the text. What I lack is the relevant knowledge-base. Given the knowledge base then the text becomes easily comprehensable.

Your young adults studying Of Mice and Men more than likely knew nothing about the 30s, the Great Depression, racism in the US in the 30s, the position of women, the lure of Hollywood for young girls, life on a ranch etc. You can teach them that. I worked with a class of 16 year olds studying this book, and Macbeth. They were a mix of second language speakers and children with various special needs and reading levels. We read Macbeth - talking through and acting scenes, reading them round the class, checking understanding and writing the relevant essay (had to teach how to structure an essay) at the end. They enjoyed Macbeth and we went to see it in a local theatre (prestigious production as it happened). They were able to discuss the merits of the staging afterwards (they did not like it, and would have preferred a more traditional medieval set) and how well Macbeth was portrayed. We also set up an 'interview' with Macbeth, so they could ask questions - local amdram actor who knew the play well and was cleared for working in schools.
In effect we (I and another teacher, it was a class that merited 2 of us) taught them all the background knowledge they needed to understand a book by Steinbeck and a play by Shakespeare. At no point did we simplify language in any way, but we did explain the vocabulary, and reading WS aloud tends to show the meaning of the words better than silent reading. We managed to get some of them Cs at GCSE and most Ds - they were expected to get G or F. It's possible and we did it in 3 hours a week over a couple of terms (these were not the only things we studied, either).
It is helpful to no-one to teach e.g. literature and expect young people to tease out nuances without being explicitly shown what they are, what the background is etc. It's the equivalent of teaching children to swim by throwing them in the water without floats.

Well that‘’s what I thought, until a few days ago!

I remember learning 2/3/4 letter words on flash cards in kept in a tobacco tin and taking turns to read them at the teacher's desk. Once we had learned them all we stuck them to a piece of A4 card as a sort of dictionary and reading the flash cards was replaced by ladybird books about pirates and puddle lane

The method you mention is 'look and say'. It relies on recognising words by sight from the start and does not teach a way to decode unknown words. 'Look and say', which started to appear in the 50s - was overtaken by 'whole word' and 'real book' methods, which rely on the same idea, that the child learns a sight vocabulary, using the shape the letters make to recognise a word. 'Real books' is supposed to work by the child looking at lots of books, having books read alound to them etc and learning to read by sight, i.e. you learn to read by reading, by osmosis as it were. These methods only works so far - there are 450,000+ words in English and a good, proficient reader can read them all (if not understand them all, as that depends on background knowledge which must be taught/can be learned by a good reader's wide reading). A typical person has a vocubulary of between 5k and 20k words - and impossible number to learn to recognise by sight.
Phonics (+ a knowledge-rich taught curriculum) allows a reader to read every word they come across, know its meaning, work out its meaning from context or look it up/ask someone the meaning. Research into how we read shows that good readers look at every letter of a word when they read (and hear the words in their head just as a musician hears the music they are reading). Poor readers dart all over a page trying to work out what the groups of letters say.
What has changed your mind about phonics lately?

I'm not surprised.
Reading is like any skill, the more you practice the better you are.
I used to read at least a book a month, I don't read a book a year now.
So many of us are on our devices.

I've begun doing more crosswords to help my vocabulary to stay sharp.

One in fifteen people have Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) but the vast majority of the population have never heard of it. It's unsurprising to me that reading levels are poor when do many people struggle to understand language in any form.
https://speechandlanguage.org.uk/educators-and-professionals/resource-library-for-educators/developmental-language-disorder-dld/

Interestingly, I've found my new job harder (I'm an editor) purely because of a lack of subject knowledge. I can write extremely quickly and fluently about a subject I understand and know well. Having had to learn a lot about an unfamiliar industry over the past few months has made editing stories for the websites I'm on much harder.

I wrote a news story last week from a press release that literally made no sense at all to me, purely as I hadn't been familiar with a lot of the terminology abbreviations, technical jargon etc. I had to ask a colleague to read and sub-edit it, as I was worried it wasn't making sense.

However, my actual reading ability is fine and good. It's the lack of underlying knowledge and subject understanding that can hinder it in some cases. I agree with the PP who gave the example of teaching Shakespeare to a group of students who grew better with more knowledge.

That sounds like a comprehension test? Just curious.

Well, no; there's a difference between a simple sentence of a few short words, and something more complex......a cafe menu or a novel.

That's an unfortunate attitude given that English is a phonetic language and teaching the phonetic code (which for English is complex) is the only way to be sure a child is reading properly. Phonics is necessary for a good reader. It is not, of course, sufficient, because the other requirement is comprehension. Comprehension requires a wide and growing vocabulary (so lots of stories and poetry read aloud to the children and discussed) and a knowledge rich curriculum. I've said earlier that I won't understand a text on nuclear physics as I know next to nothing about nuclear physics. I will easily understand a text on medieval warfare, however, since I have a good knowledge base for that.

Kumon appear (from their adverts) to use the whole word system of teaching reading i.e. the children learn to read by pointing to and repeating text. Analytic phonics are taught i.e phonics is randomly taught rather than systematically. As they continue their instruction they move from repeating after the instructor to reading to the instructor as they begin to memorise and recognise familiar words.
What does Kumon do about unfamiliar words?
You cannot learn by sight every word in English (all 450,000+) so I am not surprised teacher was unhappy. A habit of reading words from memory rather than decoding is no help with new vocabulary. Yes, children will learn to read because many work out phonics without realising that they have. Some will be crippled by this method of teaching.

@Grammarnut What has changed your mind about phonics lately?

I thought that phonics was universally accepted as the best way to learn to read. But on this thread I have seen two or three negative comments about the system. I wouldn't say I have changed my mind, and you make a very good case by the way, but it seems that phonics is more controversial then I realized.

All reading age tests also test comprehension to a certain extent but general knowledge and comprehension and confidence with vocabulary are all bound together.
I personally have never found any practical benefit in trying to separate out the strands. In school I guess in life we read for a purpose to understand or to be entertained usually. Luckily its relatively easy in school to use the read age tests, if a student scores highly over a period of time say 3 tests in a year we know they will be able to read and have a solid understanding of course materials and therefore they have the tools to do well in exams.
Mostly the tests shows us who doesn't read and often who hasn't read any substantial amount for years. Very few SEND issues show up in reading age tests. They are pretty short less than 30 minutes which helps.

This is anecdotal.
I don't remember learning to read I could always read! I was reading in nursery and always read day and night in the holidays I could visit the library every day. A levels in lit and language degree in history. Haven't read so much in the last 10 years except vtonthe grandchildren. I fall asleep as soon as I start reading now.
Anyway I bought a children's version of A Christmas Carol to read to GS6 in December I spent 40 mins one afternoon reading it to him. My God I felt so dim couldn't really make head nor tail of it!
Conclusion reading age can decline rapidly.
I have long COVID and peri menopause so that does not help. But it has really been a slap round the face with a wet fish awakening for me. I now intend to get myself off the screen on an evening and set myself the challenge of rereading some classic literature.
I bought an easier children's version of A Christmas Carol too and hopefully the children's version I was chewing on, with practice, GS will read at some point soon.

Surely the majority of reading ages decline from year 6 onwards even those who count themselves as readers.

The trouble with phonics is that it tries to shoehorn a phonetic system onto a language that isn't all that phonetic (just think of all the variations of how you pronounce certain letter combinations or the weird and wonderful ways you can spell certain sounds - ghoti as fish, anyone?). This in turn, means that it has become so complicated and technical, so you have all these poor little 4 year olds in Reception that are being bombarded with terms that a couple of decades ago you wouldn't have met outside a linguistics degree. Also, the emphasis on phonics assumes that all children learn best from the sounding out and blending approach, whereas there are a lot of children who find the whole word approach more straightforward (including many children with special needs who teachers are having to dig out 30 year olds reading schemes for). My nine year old took part in phonics but actually learnt to read from the Village with 3 Corners flash cards and books. I think a mixture of see and say/whole word and phonics would probably be the best approach, acknowledging that different children learn in different ways and learning "alien words" is completely pointless!

Hi, @tamade Yes, phonics is controversial! It is seen by many on the left as being right-wing since it requires what some consider 'drilling' of children to learn the sound correspondences (44 sounds, c. 170 ways of combining letters to make those sounds). And it does require the child to learn these, of course, just as one might learn times tables to automaticity (also considered a right-wing activity).
Phonics - or rather Systematic Synthetic Phonics - are not meant to be taught in isolation but many who are against this method use phrases such as 'barking at print' to suggest that using phonics to read is not 'real' reading. The phrase suggests that the child can read the words but not understand what they are reading, or not - as whole word/balanced literacy supporters would have it - 'make meaning' from the text. An oft cited example of this lack in phonics is the ability of Milton's daughters to decode Ancient Greek but not understand what they were reading i.e. Milton taught his daughters the Greek alphabet and its pronunciation but not the language. However, this example actually supports phonics. Had Milton bothered to teach his daughters Greek as well as the alphabet they would have understood what they were reading.
SSP is (should be) taught along with lots of books being read aloud to children both to increase their interest in reading and also to widen their oral vocabulary. It is also needful to introduce and continue with a knowledge-rich curriculum (not a curriculum based on acquiring skills such as critical thinking - critical thinking is first order knowledge, we do it naturally with the knowledge tools we acquire from experience e.g. that creature with very big teeth is a sabre tooth tiger and I would do well to keep out of its way). Reading (and history, geography, physics etc) are second order knowledge. We don't acquire them without being taught them.

The same people who believe (sincerely) that critical skills can be taught without a knowledge base also believe that reading will be acquired naturally when the child is 'ready' (see Rousseau's Emile). And some may. Others, like me, learn with methods like 'look and say' (I was taught to read by my mother when I was four - she used the Noddy stories, I think, but my spelling was haywire until I started learning French and our teacher taught us French phonics, which I seem to have realised I could apply to English as well!) but a sizeable chunk of children will not, and another chunk will never read to automaticity. Phonics + a knowledge-rich curriculum + lots of reading to children, do produce automaticity - the ability to read 'at a glance'.
Once we understand that reading is not a 'natural' but an 'acquired' skill (we have only being doing it for about 10,000 years so it has not had time to become 'natural' and perhaps never will) we can see it will not be acquired in passing by being read to and looking at real books, except by a very few children. Others will learn with whole word/look and say/real books etc with some prompting and they will very likely (as I did) learn to apply phonics. But some may not learn to read and some may never learn to read well enough to enjoy books. That phonics does teach virtually all children to read to automaticity, whatever their intellectual ability, is why I have supported it since the 90s.

I well remember asking the head of the infant school my son was to go to, when he thought a child was ready to learn to read (mid-80s - the height of natural methods of teaching reading) and his reply was 'as soon as they come through the school gate'.

Hi @curliegirlie 'ghoti' does not spell fish. It contravenes the rules governing English spelling thus: 'gh' is pronounced 'f' only at the end of words e.g. in enough; 'o' is only pronounced 'i' in women when it is pronounced as 'wimmin' (not a current pronunciation but usual in G. B. Shaw's day and class); 'ti' is only pronounced 'sh' at the end of words in the spelling 'tian' or 'tion' as e.g. in education.
English is an alphabetical languague. Alphabetical languages are phonetic and English is fully phonetic, though the code is complex and it also includes words which originate in other phonic systems, words such as 'centre' or 'quay' or 'psychology'.
There are different letter combinations for the same sound it is true. English has a complex code and the English alphabet only has 24 letters + two letters which have two different ways to write them i.e. i and j and v and w - y and w are also semi-vowels, which complicates some spellings and the 's' sound can be written either with an 's' or soft 'c' as well as 'ps', which Englishes the Greek letter 'psi'. In sum there are 44 sounds which must map to these 24/26 letters singly or in combination, and roughly 170 phonemes (sounds).
Some graphemes (groups of letters) can carry several phonemes (sounds). So the phoneme 'long a' as in pay, say etc can be written as 'ay' as in may, 'eigh' as in sleigh, 'ai' as in paid, or 'ey' as in fey. These can be taught and it is much easier to learn these 44 graphemes and their c.170 phonemes than it is to memorise by sight the 450,000+ words that make up English, or even the 5-20,000 words of the average vocabulary - which is why systematic (in the logical order) synthetic (blended) phonics is used to teach children to read English. Properly taught - so it's fun - (ssss, Sam the snake, anyone?) with plenty of reading aloud from books beyond the children's phonic knowledge, plus reading of phonically decodable books at the level of their phonic knowledge (so they achieve successful reading) and a knowledge-rich curriculum throughout their school years will produce readers who can decode to automaticity and who understand and comprehend what they read.
Other ways of teaching reading do not do this for all children, that is some 20% never learn to read properly. The Rose Report showed that phonics worked twenty years ago, which is why phonics has now been re-adopted.
As to learning 'alien' words, by which I presume you mean the 20 nonsense words of the year 1 phonics check, no there is no need to learn such - those words are in the check (as the names of aliens with pictures) to make sure a child is able to use phonics to read and is not just remembering words by sight. And which alien words would you find pointless, anyway? Here are a few non-words: hobbit, dwerrow, jaberwocky, borrogroves, stromkarl - all found in children or young adult's literature.
I picked 'stromkarl' because 'strom' was one of the 'alien' words in the early phonics checks. Great play was made of children being marked as incorrect when they read 'strom' as 'storm'. Making such a 'correction' was considered a hallmark of good readers. And indeed good readers tend to correct a misprint - but that is not what the phonics check was asking them to do, it wanted them to read what they saw, not say what they thought the word was. It was testing phonic knowledge and ability to apply it and reading 'strom' as 'storm' meant that the child was not doing this, i.e. they could not read properly and were perhaps guessing at words, or substituting a word that fitted - one of the marks of 'whole word' reading where a child is asked to use context to guess a word rather than work out what is actually on the page.

@curliegirlie - I should have said that good readers correct a misprint when they recognise it as a misprint, that is they read the misprint, do a double-take and look back at what they have read, then correct it. If is it just an unknown (to them) word, they will read it and then check the meaning.

@Grammarnut my profession is a million miles away from teaching but I find it fascinating how everything in life is so faceted if you care to look closely enough and of course I am engaging in the amateur enterprise of teaching DS.

On the knowledge rich curriculum you refer to, a teacher in an international school told me recently that one of the reasons that middle class children do better in reading tests is that they are exposed to more experiences which helps them to place what they read and is helpful for comprehension.

Exactly. Which is why I get very irritated when people talk about 'relevant' education esp in relation to English second language learners and working class children. Generally it means we should not be teaching them Shakespeare or chronological history or taking them to museums, art galleries, theatres and concerts. The Labour party has just said this, saying schools should not be wasting money taking w/c etc children to such places but to football stadiums etc. I am happy for anyone to visit a football stadium, but what the Labour party seem to mean is wholesale removal of 'middle-class' culture from working class children - who do they think set up Mechanics Institutes and the Working Men's Education Association, or Ruskin College? It was working class people desperate to learn that 'irrelevant' culture both from intellectual interest and also from knowledge that these things made progress up the income level easier.