Hi there everyone - I'm a teacher and a new mum and have just been pointed to this site so have joined!
I thought I would contribute to this thread as the teaching of reading has been a particular passion of mine since Ihave found out so much about it.
The key question asked in the original post - how do we teach children to read?.......well, shockingly, most teachers don't know the answers to that one and perhaps more shockingly is that we aren't trained how to at the training colleges.
I began to read around ont he subject when I became frustrated at mot being able to fully help my Year 1 children who were struggling and I realised I had no real idea how children learn to read and how best to teach it. I read a book called 'Why Children Can't Read - and what we can do about it' by Diane McGuinness. It was the most enlightening thing I have ever read and transformed my teaching and my children's learning.
However, most schools and training colleges have not heard of this book and it is not on reading lists. The National Literacy Strategy continues to ignore major research into the teaching and learning of reading and schools continue to fail 25% of children.
The thoughts and opinions voiced on this thread alone convey a deeper understanding of young children reading than most teachers seem to have! You have all spoken with such common sense - something many teachers seem to have lost.
The thing is, the methods used to teach reading obvilusly do work to some degree - we all learned to read and most children do succeed: it's just that they could succeed much quicker and more effectively and securely, and those 25% could succeed also and there wouldn't be so many illierate adults in the future.
Current practice is to mix methods together in the hope that one will stick and a child will find what helps them. Exposure to books, using memory to match spoken and written words, some phonics, word/flash cards etc all serve to help children make sense of our written word eventuallyu - some quicker than others....and some not at all.
I became disillusioned when my struggling children weren't making sense of any of the methods and what knowlegde they did have seemed incorrect or incomplete.
They would always attempt to sound out unknown words, despite being encouraged to 'read the whole sentence and then guess' or use the pictures to help. It seemed that most children learned to read during individual reading time which was very time consuming for me and then they only managed to read because of huge clues from me all the time - they never managed it independently. Plus, the phonic knowledge they did have didn't seem right - a child once came to the word 'little' which they didn't know so carefully sounded 'luh-i-tuh-tuh-luh-e' (if you can understand that typing of how children sound out!)and I wondered how on earth they could be expected to get a word from that random collection of meaningless sounds.
However, with the help of the aforementioned book, I learned all the answers!! And I bet you are rather desperate for moe to share them with you know, after all this rambling!
Well, it can get quite complicated and there are big debates into it in teaching circles, which you can see at the TES Staffroom forums that I believe someone mentioned here, which can be visited here and also at the Reading Reform Foundation website.
But here is what I can share in brief:
Our writing is a code - our speech is broken down into individual sounds and represented in letters. When we read we lok at the individual or groups of letters, recognise the sounds and blend them together to form the fluent word. Those of us who have been doing this capably for years have generally forgotten or are unaware of this process. ALso, words are so familiar to us, we see them as wholes so foget about the importance of the phonics element. You can be reminded of your ability to read by trying to read unfamiliar words - names of people or towns that are unfamiliar, or texts such as this:
The fructificative goosefoot was foveolariously assembled. The frugivorous and frowsy fricatrice, whose epidermis was of a variegated fuchsinophillic consistency, masticated her chenopodiaceous repast morosely.
[The fruit-bearing goosefoot was full of pit-like indentations. The fruit-loving and frowsy chewer, whose skin was of a mottled and purplish-red consistency, chewed her goosefoot (species) morosely.]
If you have good sound/letter knowledge and blending skills, you would have read this quite effortlessly - if you learned to read via picture clues/whole word recognition/learning to find words within words/breaking down into syllables etc, you might have had a little more difficulty.
So, the key is, teach children the sounds and letters and how to blend them.
But this is wider than the alphabet - and our language is complicated, but not as irregular as people think so this method can work if taught systematically, thoroughly and quickly.
Traditional phonics teaches one sound for each letter of the alphabet and usually at a pace of 1 sound per week. This is too painfully slow to be productive.
There are about 44 sounds in our spoken language.
There are 25 consonant sounds: (sounds where there is some form of obstruction in the mouth with pronunciation e.g. lips, tongue etc touching)
b, ck, d, f, g, h, j, l, m, n, p, qu, r, s, t, v, w, x, z, ch, th (said quietly as in 'thin') and th (said noisily as in 'this'), ng, sh, zh
There are 19 vowel sounds: (sounds where there are no obstructiuons - 'mouth open' sounds; they are also all vocalised sounds, no 'whispered' ones such as 's' or ch)
a, e, i, o, u, oo (as in 'cook' in most accents) y (in its initial position e.g. at the beginning of 'yes' where we in fact say a really brief 'ee' sound, not the traditional 'yuh' which in fact doesn't exist in spoken words) oo (as in 'spoon') ai, ee, igh, oa, ew, ou, oi, or, ar, er and 'uh' - the indistinct vowel sound as in garden and 'sofa.
There are 26 letters of the alphabet. Clearly this is not enough for each sound to have one letter. So we mix and match - some sounds have one letter, some two, some three and some even four.
And nearly every sound has more than one way to spell it.
It all sounds hideously confusing, doesn't it?! - Probably because it's all new to you here and it's hard to explain in type only.
But I have had all my 4 and 5 year old dealing with this no problems - chatting about vowels and consonants; knowing one spelling for each sound in their first term in Reception - blending words with them and then learning spelling alternatives after Christmas.
By learning this way, children learn to unlock the alphabet code for themselves and read virtually any unknown word.
The thing is, teachers aren't taught this informtaion for themselves. I discovered it on my own because I happened upon the right book.
Schemes such as Jolly PHonics teach this seemingly complicated informtaion to children in a fun, multi-sensory way that has been proved time and time again to be nearly 100%b successful.
In the first week, children learn s, a, t, i, p and n. They can then read words like it, in , is, at, tin, pin, tip, snip, snap etc. The next week, they learn ck, e, h, r, m, d etc and the list of words that can be read gets increasingly and rapidly extensive! By Christmas, words like 'mushroom' and 'woodpecker' are easy!
However, you shouldn't be having to teach your children to read at home. Teachers should have this information and should be doing a successful job at school. You shouild just be reinforcing work and seeing the amazing results!
However, because the Government are so misguided, if your childern are getting the usual hotch-potch of teaching as it seems they are, it might be up to you. Visit the above sites and the Jolly Phonics handbook is available in Early Learning Centres and Formative Fun stores.
All schools will claim they do phonics at school - the National Literacy Strategy has a scheme and many use JP. However, if they chidlren are still expected to predict/guess words or learn them from word cards or read from memory or read words containing letters and sounds they have not been taught, then the teaching is not happening at its most effective.
My little baby girl is 5 months old now. She loves loking at books. People know of my reading passion and hove joked that I might be teaching her already.... I am not. I still value children's innocence and natural curiosity of the world. I hope to enjoy stories with her and develop her language skills so she can speak and listen carefully and be aware of her own language. I would rather leave all her teaching up to school. But if it doesn't happen properlywhen she is ready to read, I will ensure it does!
If you have made it to the end, thank you for your patience! I hope this has been enlightening and given you some useful information. There is so much more I could say!
Good luck with all your childern's reading - I wish them a happy and successful journey.
Catflap. x