Interesting comment about Phonics

[seeker]

I was showing a prospective new Head teacher round our school today. He is currently the Head of an Outstanding school in an area of significant social deprivation in London. Talking about Early Years and Literacy, he said something along the lines of "Well,we signed up completely to Phonics and the children learned to read very quickly, but we realized that they had very little comprehension, so we've dropped it as our main approach and we've gone back to using a big mixture of things."

That makes sense, the simple view of reading is half word recognition half comprehension, can't read without both. I have never been in a school that only teachers reading through phonics.

*teaches

Good teachers have always used a range of methods, depending on the child. We never stopped teaching phonics, despite the recent hoo-hah about 'trendy' methods that we supposedly all used before synthetic phonics were trumpeted in.
Can't say that I agree that too much phonics=less comprehension though. Why would you stop teaching comprehension?

I guess children can de-code words and appear to be readinf fluently, without actually understading what they are reading?

But as IF you wouldn't check understanding as well! Of course you would.

Well, I assume you would.
Even when a Year R child reads, surely you can ask some basic questions to check their understanding?

I wonder if the actual decoding itself is a bit clumsy and then distracts from the overall message of a sentence compared to if a dc is reading the same thing with more word recognition?

So if I'm forever there going c-a-t or j-u-m-p it makes reading the sentence more disjointed and the story flows less well first time.

Head presumably meant unthinking slavish adherence to phonics without using your brain. But that was never the way phonics were used in dcs schools. As Feenie says, you wouldn't, would you? Not if you were a good teacher. I have always thought of phonics as one thing that helps to explain things a little more clearly, part of the pattern.

I wonder if decoding makes reading words so easy that many children are reading texts beyond their maturity level. With Ds he can decode and follow the story easily but the more subtle ideas, emotions and jokes are lost on him.

I would be at the 'signed up completely' - surely good teachers have always and will always use a mixture of approaches?

But children wouldn't have any less comprehension if they learned to read with phonics than if they'd learned another way, would they? They'd still understand at the same level, but additionally be able to read at a level which they didn't understand.

It would be a very strange (and not very good) school that gave children texts way beyond their understanding just because they could read them. Surely all schools check for comprehension along with fluency. And surely you wouldn't stop checking whether children understood just because you were teaching them with phonics. It's not as if 'whole word' reading teaches comprehension specifically either - it just teaches pattern recognition.

I can read lots of words I don't understand in lots of languages - all the ones that I know the phonetic code for. It's a useful skill, because I can then find out what they mean.

slavish adherence to any scheme is wrong. When DH was learning to read in the 60's he was taught Look and Say. His headteacher said to MIL that DH will never learn to read using that scheme but they were not allowed to use anything else Finally when DH was 10 they finally sent him to remedial class where he was taught to read using phonics. I am sure he is dyslexic.

Roll on 35 years and my DCs were taught jolly phonics with a bit of everything else thrown in and it worked even for dyslexic DS. My DD just absorbed reading and I suspect you could have taught her any scheme and she would have learnt to read with no problems

My observations - limited to my dd only - are that phonics aren't the be all and end all. She learned to read pretty quickly and really from word recognition. We'd abandoned the 'sounding out' by the second term of reception. And, by year 1 it has no relevance to her reading or her approach to new words. (She makes an intelligent guess based on the context)

However, phonics are quite good for spelling.

Despite the reading approach taken on board, very few schools/teachers slavishly adhere to one system. They tailor their approach to each child.

So, I've never been hung up about which method is best because

a) it's only relevant for a very short while;
b) very few teachers go down one route only.

However, methods of reading seem to cause so much emotion which is weird when most people learn to read. (At least nowdays - my Mum taught in a school where 30% of parents were illiterate. Their children all learned to read, though)

Just as an aside, the Jane and Peter ladybird books are being issued by ladybird. I've just bought a few and enjoyed re-living the past. They are dead dull, using a key words method of boring repetition. But the picture are beautiful.

This article was in the Education section of the Guardian this week. Seems to summarise that a mix of techniques dependent on the kids is what works best.
www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jan/19/phonics-child-literacy