ooh, have been offline for a couple of days and a lot has happened!
Would just like to make the following comments:
aloha
some fab posts - really enjoyed reading them. You make some great points: am taking note of many of them!
roisin and everyone who supported her message
to echo other people's thoughts - synethic phonics is all about equipping children with the skills and knoweledge to access the alphabet code. Why? To help them become fluent in decoding the written word. Why? To help them be able to find meaning in information; to help them be able to enjoy a good story and even their own abilities! Why do people persist in thinking that SP is devoid of comprehension and meaning? What would reading be without those things? Do people really think that SP proponents really just want children to bang away at boring texts without understanding what it is about??
The thing is, phonics teaching as an exclusive method has bad press derived from limited phonics teaching not working and unimaginative methods being demotivating. However, I am yet to hear of anyone (and this is through extensive reading and talking with fellow sp practitioners, be the teachers or parents, who have employed sp properly ) who has had their child taught sp and feels it is ineffective. No one. It just doens't happen. So everyone here who is dismissing its success for reasons they have little experience to back up really should go and find out a few facts first. Your comments against it really do show your ignorance about the full methods, philosophy and practice behind synthetic phonics.
I must also say that the support for class teachers is admirable. There are too many parents against from the start these days - far too keen to attack teachers for all sorts of ignorant reasons. However, teachers can only be as good as their training, their experience and analysis and their motivation. And much as we would like to beleive, few teachers have adequate training in reading - and many on online teaching forums will admit this - few actually sit back and analyse their own reading practices - too many just accept that there will always be this groups who will struggle - and many are demotivated by pressures and dictats from above... Teachers also have different priorities - I had a passion for reading...and I have to say my teaching of maths may have slid a tiny bit as I did not put a similar amount of effort into it. Many teachers teach reading in the ways that are largely successful and think no more about it - instead putting their energies into other aspects of teaching.
Also, this learning style nonsense is a current fad and should not have so much importance placed upon it. Before you think I am totally against it, let me say I am largely a visual learner. I have a photographic memory and will totally remember something if I see it and guaranteed to forget it if I hear it - that is, if I managed to pay enough attention to take it on board in the first place...
However, to determine the principal learning style of an infant is incredibly hard - not least because it can fluctuate.
In addition, many subjects have preferred learning styles and all must be taught for a balanced education regardless of preferred learning styles. Should we never teach art to auditory learners? Should we never teach appreciation and understanding of music to visual learners? Just as art is visual and music is predominantly auditory save for reading music) so reading is auditory and visual and the phonological awareness and matching of spellings must be taught to all children. Kinaesthetics are just an aid that helps all children - particularly those who are more that way inclined, but isn't there a famous phrase that goes something like 'I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand?'
By the way, I am not aiming that at the one person who I recall said their child was pronounced by a friend (?) to be a kinaesthic learner - it was more other comments of such a nature that led to my desire to comment on the whole learning styles issue.
As far as I'm concerned, having read widely and equipped myself with a lot of facts and practised teaching of reading for many years, the issue of teaching reading is black and white - as it the teaching of many other subjects who do not receive this sort of debate.
Our written word is a visual representation of our spoken word and was created for letters and series of letters to stand for individual sounds in our language. This is fact.
Although added to from all manner of different languages, our current English is still largely phonically regular and can be taught systematically.
Through being able to decode fluently and acquiring this skill rapidly, more time can be spent understanding and appreciating and extrapolating information from what is read. And more time can be spent enjoying what is read - because the reader can read. We should read to gain meaning - not use assumed meaning to guess the words, surely??
There are thousands of children out there who can show what a success synthetic phonics teaching is. If it were made compulsory and every teacher adequately trained to understand how and why is should be carried out, the results would be phenomenal and everyone would be wondering why the hell this was not done years ago. Until then, many more children are going to have to suffer.
It seems to be reading that creates the hottest debates - maybe because it is the most misunderstood. I don't hear of people beating on driving instructor's doors if they or their children have failed, demanding that they teach through a variety of methods. There is pretty much only one way to teach someone to drive a car. There is only really one way someone learns to read.