The Teaching of Reading: What can parents do???

[Catflap]

Hi there to all who have followed my phonics ramblings on many a thread, and indeed to those who haven't but are interested in this thread title!

I have commented a lot on the state of poor reading teaching in schools and described the effective method of synthetic phonics which is beng taught in a few schools but largely ignored by the educational establishment.

It has been fascinating reading the comments and observations that everyone as parents has on their children's reading - it amazing how many of you pick up on things that the teaching profession are not accepting. I have always found parents to be a preceptive lot. However, what is also sad in this case is how many of you put your trust and support in your children's teachers - which I wholey support because we are losing that fast - but in this case it is sadly misplaced.

The Reading Debate is discussed quite widely online now and has made its appearance in the news recently. You can do a search for 'synthetic phonics' and it will present you with plenty to read, but a thorough site for discussing the issues and providing you with information is the Reading Reform Foundation website

The thing is, lots of you are recognising the issues and are understanding the sort of methods that I describe and see that it makes sense. But what do you do??

I thought I would just post with a few suggestions, as it would seem pertinent after all my advices to offer some pointers for more positive action! Thing is, it's not that rosy an outlook, all the while the Government continue to rrefuse to accept that there might just be something in this synthetic phonics lark and teachers are driven by pressure from above...

However, should you believe that there is something in it and feel it could help your child, I would personally suggest that you have the following options open to you:

1. Do nothing. The chances are that your child will eventually struggle through like many thousands have in the past and will read successfully, or in some fashion, or will struggle and be offered some sort of remedial help eventually.

2. Teach them yourself. Get your hands on some resources and information and provide your child with the skills and knowlegde they need. This is of course is labour intensive, has some financial implications and could be seen as not your job...

3. Find a reading tutor that practices the same philosophies. This could be hard as there are few scattered around, but by posting on the messageboard of the above RRF site, I'm sure you will find someone who could help. (I myself am planning to get into that at some point, but not whilst dd is still so small and more are planned!)

4. Hound the teacher and then the school. Equip yourself with all the necessary facts and information and maybe get a team of parents and ask questions and get answers. Maybe even contact your LEA.

Meanwhile, online tuition will continue to be available whilst I am still managing to access this board!

Hope this helps give a bit more direction and a conclusion to previous discussions.

"used" to call it that....what do you think I am - an OAP or something!

Catflap I agree!

My DS is in a very high achieving private school with very small class sizes with FT teacher and classroom assistant, who hear the children read every day.

I read with the class on Friday mornings and whilst most of them 'got it', my DS certainly didn;t!

It wasn't until he started doing group sessions with the SENCO who is a firm believer in synthetic phonics that he really started to get a grip - he went through about 3 stages of reading books in 4 weeks having struggled all year on teh first level! I found all of catflaps past posts and was rivited by them and the sense they made given my DS's experience!

This year has been so good for him so far - the time he spent at the end of last year doing synthetic phonics has put him way ahead of the other children this year when they are doing spelling tests - he at last has managed to find real success at academic things and his whole attitude to school is amazing

The children who seemed to be reading well last year have turned out to be almost completely clueless when it comes to spelling - it really has doen them a disservice!

I really hope for you QofQ that your DS is one of the successful ones, because you have shot your mouth off so much on this thread, based on very little experience so far, that it would be painful to watch you come back and have to eat your words should your DS be one of the unlucky ones

They do teach phonics (along with other methods) at DS's school - but again I guess you're another who though - "oh it's only her - she'll be talking cr*p as usual won't bother reading what she's actually saying"

oh yes you'd just love that wouldn't you

Oh and I must remember on Monday to tell DS's teachers that he's not going to learn to read well because of their teaching methods.

And lets just ignore the fact that this afternoon while playing a 'spelling game' (chad valley one) with him he was saying the letter sounds phonetically - must have been imagining it as he's being taught badly......

Very interested on the last post. My DS (4) in Year 1 really struggled with reading and I have done the sounds with him and tend to cover the rest of the word as he is reading it which is something that I saw was done with Dyslexic children and then he gets it but his spelling is good. At his school they did actions with the 45 words which is the only way he learnt them. I believe it is part of brain gym.

No, QofQ, I really have no idea ow old you are but was figuring in your 20s or 30s probably. I have found that many parents of kids in my class refer to decoding as 'spelling out' (and although they are generally my, or older, I never had it referred to as that as a child, that I can remembr, anyway) and have not heard it used since I have been working. By 'used' I just meant in the past, and we all have one of those, regardless of how old we are.

just waiting for someone to tell me he'll never learn with Chad valley toys - as JP (or other similary expensive scheme is far superior)

reading some of the comments here it reminded me of another thread (oct 04 with cod in the title...).
Anyway, QoQ, my son may also be a lost cause, he learned letters the Letterland way in nursery and JJ now in reception.

"The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, itd eosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!"

mixed - interesting post, as I was also wondering about these findings with the mixed letters and how that goes together with decoding!

QofQ - why on earth woul I think that of you?

I like you, I like your posts, you are intelligent and articulate and yes, plain speaking but I like that!

I just think that your open hostility to catflap even in the face of lots of peple's real experiences is perplexing!

If we were to turn your argument around then what you are really saying that those of us who had children who were failing at reading were in shit schools! That couldn't be further from the truth!!!!

Teaching phonics and using synthetic phonics are not the same thing! Do you know which your school uses?

I would never advocate telling a teacher how to teach, nor has Catflap ever done that. What I would advise is for any reading that parents do at home with their children that they use synthetic phonics as the reading method - even when reading school texts.

So although DS is reading ORT this year - we still decode new words using the synthetic phonics that he knows.

QueenofQuotes, re: your post of 9:40:41 - I feel sorry that you are clearly so steaming mad by all of this, when I feel it is needless.

No one has ever said your ds's school don't teach phonics - in fact, all schools have to these days and pretty much won't get away with not doing it.

I'm sure no one thinks you're talking cr*p and won't read what you are saying.

There's no need to tell ds's teachers anything of the sort, because quite clearly, according to you, he is reading well - I never said children don't with these methods.

Let's not ignore the fact your ds was using sounds while playing a spelling game - that's great, he has obviously picked it all up really well which is great.

It seems you have taken this all rather personally which was never the intention and never actually stated anywhere. Please try to be less sensitive about it all. You are pleased with your ds's reading, so there really is no need to worry any further.

Mixed - I'm sure Frogs would have some good analyses as to why it works!

I can imagine though that if any child learning to read were faced with that message it would indeed be gobildigook!!

well lets face it - almost everyone that has posted with "high praises" of every post you've ever made, has also decided to rip to shreds the list which I have found useful from DS's school - yourself in cluded.

People have conviniently 'mis-read' what I've said, and any post which in any way contradicts your point of view has been ripped to pieces too.

QoQ, why are you taking this so personally? This is about science, not about catflap. The points she's making are not original, and she's not claiming they are. It's simply that science has over the past 20 years learnt a tremendous amount about how the human brain processes both spoken and written language, and very little of this has actually filtered through into current classroom practice.

Sure, most children will learn to read using a mixture of methods, because they will extrapolate for themselves the rules underlying letter-to-sound correspondences. Some, like my dd1 will teach themselves to read just by having access to books. But some children will not be able to deduce the underlying system of rules for themselves, and those are the children that will fail to learn to read well, or may even be diagnosed as dyslexic.

No-one's saying your ds isn't being taught well. It's just that there is now a scientific body of knowledge which would enable virtually all children of normal intelligence to learn to read easily and well. And it's incredibly frustrating that that isn't being put into practice, particularly for the children who are being failed by the system.

mixed - I have come across this passage lots of times now, and I know it was debated a lot on the Reading Reform Foundation message board. I can't remember what the conclusions were, but will try to find it.

I do know, however, that whilst the passage says that however muddled the letters inbetween are, it can still be read, if you look closely at the words, it is invariably only neighbouring letters that are switched. In Cambridge, it is only the a and the m that are changed! If you were to truly muddle them:

The pohmenneol peowr of the haumn mnid. Ainrodccg to racreesh at Cirgdambe Uvistreniy, it denseo't meattr in wah oderr the lrtetes in a wrod are....

it becomes a little more difficult.

We do attend to each letter in sequence, but because we are so familiar with the words that are muddled, we can make sense of them. Again, we are examining such little puzzles as fluent, articulate readers. Imagine giving this passage to an adult with a reading age of a seven year old. - imagine giving it to a seven year old.

The reason (I suspect) that the jumbled letters can be read easily is that as fluent readers we do indeed recognise whole words, because we've internalised the patterns of written English so well that we can immediately identify a word just from its overall shape, assuming the process of jumbling doesn't change the shape too much or make it ambiguous. It's noticeable in that jumbled passage that some words are much more easily recogniseable than others a few I did have to look at twice and I suspect that will be to do with things like word frequency, possible ambiguities, the predictability of a word from the sentence context, and whether the jumbled version adheres to English phonotactic rules (rules governing which sounds can appear next to one another).

But beginning readers don't work that way, just as fluent readers don't when required to decode nonsense, or unknown words. Then you slow right down, and use your phonetic decoding skills (which you were either formally taught or deduced for yourself) to read the word. Instant recognition of whole words comes much, much later, after you've encountered a particular word a few hundred thousand times and internalised all sorts of other information about word frequency, sentence structure and legitimate spelling patterns. That's why it makes no sense to start out by teaching whole words, apart from the very few true sight words which aren't amenable to phonic decoding.

The 7 year old children that I know (not many) would have more difficuties reading it with the letters in the correct order than me, memorising the whole words.
DH is (trying) to do a postgrad course in education and the little I read is about the advantages of using a combination of different methods in teaching.
Maybe I'm just trying to justify I let my ds learn the alphabet using different methods (o dear, just thinking about all the videos he has been watching about the alphabet, and dd, she is a lost cause now as well.)

so fair enough to an English speaker it's 'easy' to read the mixed up words.

How do you explain the fact that my DH was able to read that passage first time he saw it...English isn't is first language.

OK, a bit more serious now. I agree that when encountering new difficult words you read it phonetically "letter for letter" (or whatever you call it), I know I did whenever I learning a new language.
Problem with ds now is that, although he knows the sounds of most letters (26 not 44), he will just guess the words (wrongly). I try to let him "analyse it" but he is too impatient.

QoQ, English is my 3rd language but still managed it first time...

He may not be a native English speaker, QoQ, but presumably he has attained a reasonable level of fluency? I would be surprised if someone with only a couple of years of secondary school English could read that jumbled passage with ease.

Individuals do vary in their ability to process this kind of material. Nobody really knows what causes these individual variabilities, but it's likely to be some combination of innate ability and the way they've been taught. You get similar variations between individuals if you do comparably confusing things with spoken language as well.

The point is you will always get some people who will perform at a high level whatever system they learn under. It's not just reading -- some people will have good mental maths skills even under a school system that doesn't actively promote them. And then there are other people who don't have such innate skills but can acquire them by putting in the practice. Which is why my dd1, who is by no means exceptionally mathematically gifted, can add numbers in her head that have me reaching for paper and pencil.

It's not even as though any of this is scientifically controversial. But some people are resistant to it because they are threatened by the challenge to their preconceptions and their long-established practice.

FFS - who said they were 'resistant' to it on this thread?

I don't recall anyone saying that they thought phonics were cr*p and sholdn't be taught in any shape or from

QofQ - maybe you and frogs are on different wavelengths as far as defining 'it'

frogs - superb last sentence - can I nick it for future use....??

QoQ - it is not the MNers who are resistant - but their schools - take Issymums' school for instant - excellent results, but they don't use phonics. Mine is the same.

oh p*ss off back to your little pedestal.

Oh god, I give up, this is like arguing with people who don't believe in evolution.

For the record, all the scientific evidence shows that the most efficient way of ensuring that all children learn to read efficiently and well is to teach them using a system of synthetic phonics. Using a mixture of methods is less effective, not more.

Don't believe it if you don't want to, but it's still true.