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 have an issue with phonics teaching which is that it teaches to an accent. So, e.g., in Scotland we pronounce the letter 'r' so I was very pissed off that my (English) children's teachers told them that ar, er, ir, or and ur were pronounced with an extended vowl and no 'r'. Non-rhotic English has spread from the SE over the 20th century, has phonic played apart in the decline of linguistic variety?

Secondly, non-phonic languages like Chinese have 50,000 characters and yet China has comparable literacy rates to Europe. Which suggests that whole word learning is possible for very large collections of words and for a large majority of people. Interestingly China has not moved to a phonic writing system despite its perceived advantages because currently a written document can be read across the whole country but if you move to a phonic writing system you'd need multiple versions to reflect the language differences across the country.

And those famous scrabbled sentence memes (Yuo cna porbalby raed tihs esaliy desptie teh msispeillgns) show that we do a lot of contextualisation when reading.

I'm not going to argue with the proven benefits of teaching phonics but it's clearly not the only way to learn to read and there are benefits to other ways of learning to read.

Generally it means we should not be teaching them Shakespeare or chronological history or taking them to museums, art galleries, theatres and concerts.

DD1 told me that when they had a school trip to see Blood Brothers there were lots of kids who only went because it was an afternoon off school, she said by the end they were all completely enthralled. That said I assume the drive to teach 'relevant' things is well-intended. And it's worse in science, at least most people acknowledge that people get pleasure from the arts and that they have value. But knowing the square root of something? That's not important at all apparently, even though it's essential to determine volumes.

I always thought the rules of pronunciation in English were sufficiently complicated that you’d get confused sometimes regardless of the system you learnt. I don’t really understand how you account for words like seconded, that can have differing pronunciation depending on the context, with phonics.

@DalzielOrNoDalzielAndDontPascoe

I seem to remember in the very early days of Mastermind the scores were much higher than they are today but that the questions were harder. Maybe I'm looking back with rose coloured glasses

I'm from the North East of England and also have a problem with the accent thing, we are sent videos from the school (my daughter is age 4 in reception) and it's often a person sounding out a word (you can't see the word) and you have to put the sounds together and say the word. I've found that often it just doesn't work because they aren't saying the sounds how we would, "r u n" didn't sound anything like run in our accent for example.

They also have sight words that don't work phonically, words such as "the" or "said" but they are also including "put" as a sight word, put is phonetic in our accent, I'm actually struggling to understand how it isn't phonetic in any accent 🤷 but the whole thing is quite confusing to me let alone a 4 year old.

you make an interesting point but most Chinese characters (except the simplest set) are composed of radicals which give hints to both meaning and pronunciation for example 钛 tai (ty) means titanium and is composed of a radical fo from stone 石 （石头） and a radical that “everyone” knows 太 also pronounced tai and means too (as in too big)
so with a few tools you know that you are reading about something that comes from the earth a metal and pronounced tai, with some awareness of the world you can work out that it is titanium. So we’re back at the life experiences and knowledge of the world part of the equation……..

'Seconded' which can mean both to give secondary support to a motion, light emphasis on second syllable, and 'seconded' to be sent to another organisation or department etc as an add-on in order to give/get support, accent on first syllable. (NB English is not unique in having such homographs.)
This is taught through extension of vocabulary and is part of the reading aloud of texts and knowledge-rich curriculum aspect of teaching reading, rather than phonics. Phonics will allow the reader to lift this word from the page, context will give the relevant meaning and pronunciation.
Hence: I read the book (present tense) and I read the book (past simple) are easily understood in context:
I read the book as I am walking down the road (say: reed)
I read the book last week (say: red).
Phonics allows reading of the word on the page. Context conveys meaning and often pronunciation. Which is why it is impossible to 'read' a word with accuracy only using context. Thus:
'The car drove down the s-' is often given as an example of how you can work out the unknown word from context. The reasoning goes that the unknown word starts with 'str'. We know at once that it cannot e.g. be 'road'. Look at other words beginning with 'str' and we can eliminate strand (a thread) and straight (a sort of line) so it must be 'street'. The example is by a US citizen but even so anyone can see that all three words are possible, using the alternative meanings for strand (a beach) and straight (a length of road esp. on a motor race track) as well as street. Only recognising the letters and being able to blend them into a word will give what is actually on the page - and accuracy matters. I do not want a pharmacist or a nurse to be guessing at complex words on a prescription, based on context rather than the actual letters.

I never understand the concept that 'the' or 'said' don't work phonetically. Clearly they do, but the 'th' and the 'ai = short e' are rare. They can be taught. Because 'the' is used so often (I pronounce that offen btw) it gets taught as a whole word because it is phonetically complex.
Schools should use the local accent for their phonics teaching. Daft not to. However, RP should also be taught - later.

I like 'Blood Brothers' and it is relevant to class. However, I daresay DD's class would have been equally enthralled by 'War Horse' or 'Henry IV Part II' had they been studying it. A play made real on stage is wonderful to see! (I took a class of young people with who were classed as mildly SEN (poor readers, in fact, but with additional needs) and second language learners to see Macbeth - which we had studied - and they loved it, too).
What our current government is suggesting, however, is that theatre visits are irrelevant to w/c DC or second language DC, and they should be going to something that belongs to their culture - I think rapping, graffiti artists and football were mentioned. I've no objection to any of those, along with theatre, museum, art gallery and museum visits.

But then I think they still learn their "letters" and basic numeracy
A friend of mine from Poland was worried that his son would be too stressed starting school so early. I told him not to worry.
Fast forward three years, his wife does one hour a day work with their son, because they are shocked that children are not stretched more.
And don't get me started on blummin phonics. OK it may be good for some kids but why do children who can already read, have to sit through an hour a day of that? Surely it would be more useful for them to, you know, actually read a book?

@gatheryerosebuds my daughter (year 2) picked up reading quickly and did get bored in phonics. She's enjoying English much more this year. It's her favourite subject. I tried to understand phonics going to a school lesson session with crying baby in tow so left early. I mentioned to the teacher because the phonics lead was putting pressure on parents to do it at home, she said my daughter doesn't need to do any extra work, so me and my daughter do not talk about phonics. We did to begin with but she gets annoyed with me because I'm wrong apparently....glad it's over and I hope my little one will pick up reading as quickly without having to stress about phonics.

I was in Germany as a child and, yes there they hit the ground running at 7. But, in the area I lived I don't think they did even basics nurmarcy and literacy before school.

My daughter could definitely be stretched more, but she's happy.

I don't really have anything to contribute here, but I have enjoyed the read! It's been very interesting.

Accents are interesting and you are right that teaching via phonics might influence dialects or cause confusion to the kids.

I went to my child's class for a parents-stay session once. The teacher was from Northern Ireland and was trying to get the children to guess words by giving clues. The clue was "a tree that rhymes with ham" and nobody got it (including the parents). The answer was "palm", which rhymed in the teachers head, but to a load of children in the south east (and most of the parents) "palm" rhymes with "harm" rather than "ham". I don't know if the teacher chalked it up to the difference in accents or just thought we were all simpletons for not getting such a simple clue 😂

You could read more books! Why not join a reading group? It doesn't have to be the sort that prescribes a book to be discussed every month, some do genre and have discussions about books members have read, take recommendations, go to book readings and author signings etc.

its 9, not 9-11

Also - half the people you meet in the street have an IQ of less than 100

IT is what it is.

To be honest, when I did an IQ test I was in the bottom 10% of the population and yet I have a degree from Oxford....😂

The teaching fad when I was 5 years old was teaching reading using the ita phonetic alphabet.
I arrived at school able to read. I had drop that and learn ita. Once I was fluent in ita, I had to drop that and learn regular reading. The teachers had a marvellous time . I think it was very confusing.

Phonics are useful and children need to be exposed to them. A child of 5/6 may be reading (I was, learned at 4) but they may be reading inaccurately - this will show up in the phonics check. Also, exposure to phonics helps with spelling. I, reading at 4, was a poor speller until I learned French phonics at 11/12, somehow (I do not remember how) I transferred French phonics to English and became a 98% accurate speller (and still am). So it's not a waste of a child's time to do phonics - I sat reading (Janet and John) while my contemporaries did phonics because I could read. I honestly would have benefitted from the phonics.
Learning to read English (like other phonetic languages) can only be accurately done using phonics - they work for everyone; other methods work for some.
Phonics is necessary but not sufficient to be a competent reader. A wide knowledge base is also needed, to facilitate comprehension.

@Grammarnut sorry completely disagree

I think it’s soul destroying

I actually completely agree with phonics being a key part of giving children a head start in reading.

I'm.not a teacher nor trained in phonics or educational development but I can see at a basic level how much learing sounds facilitates recognising parts of any word. School have done a fantastic job of teaching my DS aged 6 to read so far using phonics, and his reading ability is quite ahead - he is reading at a year above his level.

Again, I think phonics has its place and definitely helps lots of children, but equally there are many who would find a whole word approach easier. It's for that reason that I think schools should be more flexible and teach a mixture of phonics and the whole word approach.

Phonics was always going to be a non-starter as a route into reading for my DD with Down's syndrome. But I've also seen how it has complicated reading for her 6 year old sister, who struggles with reading and until very recently was sounding out every single word she was trying to read, including key words like the, even if she'd just read them on the previous page. So I think phonics can also be a barrier to fluent reading.

Why is learning 'ssss - Sid the snake' and so forth soul destroying? Soul destroying is sitting in a year 9 classroom unable to read the textbook or do the work. Phonics + wide reading aloud of stories, poems etc.by the teacher (with lots of talk about them), and a knowledge-rich curriculum will cure that bit of soul-destruction.

My point was that children who already can read are forced to spend one hour per day learning the sort of phonics even I wasn’t able to do ( out of context of actual words).
I did say that it’s clearly a great way for those who struggle to read, but there are also children who can read by year one and yet have to sit through this every single day for a whole hour instead of being allowed to read books and do mini reading comprehensions which would be far more educational for fthem.

@gatheryerosebuds I agree my daughter is in year 2 and could read well by the end of reception. She is loving English now. She was getting bored of phonics and at home she'd read books and id ask questions. The phonics books sent home had comprehension questions too but she was beyond these. However, she did seem to enjoy phonics most of the time, but it wasn't her favourite.

Being able to read is very different to being able to understand what you are reading. The more time you spend reading the more you explore both the subject and language. I can read German fluently but understand very little.
DS was fascinated by dinosaurs as a young child, he had a large collection of non-fiction books about dinosaurs but was a late reader. I refused to read dinosaur books to him so he learned to read quickly so he could read them to himself. 15 yrs on he still has an encyclopaedic knowledge, although doesn’t admit it. He skipped the reading out loud stage. He was just lazy , happy to let others read to him. It was the content of books he was interested in not the words. Luckily his teachers realised early on that he was an advanced reader and put him onto the free reader books quickly. His grammar, comprehension and use of words is exceptional. He was known as the grammar policeman at school and spent twelve months at 6th form volunteering in a local primary school helping with reading skills.
His ability to mimic accents and voices helped make reading interesting to the children he assisted.
I think the most important part of learning to read is for children to realise how it allows you to access so much more of the world around you.
We have always had a weekend newspaper. DS would pick it up at a young age when something piqued his interest. There are so few opportunities for children to engage in the written word with digital technology. You can entertain yourself with videos and photos without the need for the written word.
Communication is moving away from words, and digital communication leads to misunderstandings due to the lack of accurate grammar. As is often seen in MN.