Sight reading and decoding

[runoutofnameideas]

How do slightly older children learn new words which are irregular - do they still decode somehow with rules I'm not aware of or learn them by sight? Something like "unusual" for example?

Do they work out that there are different ways to pronounce say the middle u and then try them out in their head or something?

Ds just finished reception. He is a very able reader (well I might just be being a proud mum thinking that!) and has zoomed through the levels (and before anyone says too quickly, he does understand and has good expression, rarely sounds out out loud) but he wasn't taught at his level at all for reading within school so I feel a bit lost about how this all works. He is a natural sight reader although he can decode if he has to so I am wondering if he will just learn these sorts of words by sight as he goes which is I'm sure what I did but maybe that's not the done thing these days?

Advice would be great if my question isn't too vague and confusing!

Well they've spent all their money on Read, Write, Inc. Sent every member of staff on the training course, and do it daily. So there's obviously no magic in Read, Write, Inc

I have seen a demo Read, Write, Inc lesson being taught. Our head teacher is a real Read, Write, Inc evangelist and so did a sample lesson for the parents to come and watch.

mrz - it's you as a great teacher that is teaching those kids - not the system.

Feenie - my dd has had a lot of extra help. All by people who have been on the Read, Write, Inc training course. So to me it seems it does come down to the quality of the teachers.

Maizie has just said that SP gets 95% of kids reading.... NOT 100%

aegeansky You are advising (wrongly) regarding phonic teaching in Reception. I'm sorry if you find you can't comment on recent government guidance. And I think it most certainly does call into question you/your school's expertise. Sorry!

@IB,

We've talked a lot about your dd and I do have great sympathy for you.

No-one has ever said that SP will teach every child to read; indeed, although mrz posts on here, and is a staunch and very expert SP teacher, she says herself that her own son was mystified by phonics and learned, somehow, to read very well without it. So the possibility does exist that your dd may just be one of the exceptional children.

On the other hand, it may well be that her school is not teaching effectively, despite the fact that they are using Read Write Inc. It is possible i)that the staff weren't trained in the programme, orii) that they were trained a long time ago and personnel changes mean that many of the originally trained staff aren't there any longer, and how well were the new staff trained?

It would be really difficult to judge unless an expert in SP teaching went along and observed what was happening.

On the other hand, didn't you say that the school uses ORT? That's always a bit of a bad sign [wink}

oops, ignore my last post. You're all going too fast for me!

I would agree that not all teachers have a good enough knowledge of phonics to teach it as well as it could be taught and I do think this is where some children are let down. Unfortunately universities don't include enough input in "How to teach children to read" in teacher training programmes. Many report they had a couple of sessions on phonics

Maizie - this is the stage we are at. Waiting for the Ed Psych to come in and observe DD being taught Read, Write, Inc....

However, I have spoken at length to him, and he has absolutely no strategies to recommend other than Read, Write, Inc. Surely the SpLD team should have other strategies to try besides Read, Write, Inc?????

All of the teachers have been trained in Read, Write, Inc in the last 2 years. So their training is not out of date. It is just not the magic wand that it is portrayed as.

Feenie I am not advising! I am describing how in one particular school, RWI set one sounds are taught before set two sounds. Children are kept in literacy groups that allow them to master the set one sounds before they move to the set two sounds. That's all.

The practice continues in years 1 and 2, where necessary.

I'm not saying that's the only way to do it. It is a bit cheeky of you to contest this example on the basis that it doesn't fit with your experience. The school has a majority of EAL children as well as a lot of SEN, if that makes it any clearer why this practice may have been adopted.

mrz - I wish you could move to SCotland and teach my dd! She has severe dyslexia but although I love the school I hate the way they teach reading! (apart from Jolly Phonics in P1 it seems to be mostly whole word learning and guesswork)

aegeansky, you cited words as phonically irregular where they are not, and then made a statement about Reception teaching which flies in the face of what the experts and recent government guidance say.

When I pointed out your error, you said "Feenie, that's just not right" and continued to argue. I am not the only person on this thread to contest your 'example'. However, you've chosen not to reply to anyone else.

I think half the problem here is that both Feenie and Mrz are incredibly able, passionate and knowledgable teachers - I only hope one day to come across a teacher with half your passion - never mind your knowledge.
In a lot more respects than just phonics, I think you probably put many of our dc's teachers to shame.

aegeansky that is exactly why I'm not a fan of Read Write Inc in FS & KS1 (I think it's great in KS2 once kids have the basics) I don't like the "ability" grouping so early I think children need to have the chance to succeed and if they are only exposed to set 1 that's all they can learn ...

We need to clone MRZ .
It would single-handedly raise literacy rates across the UK!

Aegean - if you read the OP, ds is at purple level so the whole point of the question is that he is coming across the more complex sounds in his books.

Incidentally he does seem to now try different sounds for say a c and apply them until it sounds like the right word if that makes sense so I agree with whoever said that youngish children can make sense of all this.

Can I hijack my own thread??! MRZ, ds wants to learn to add bigger nos. He is dead swotty and very bright with maths (loves talking about prime numbers . I started showing him earlier but got interrupted.

I'm saying for say 54 + 24, there are 5 tens in the 54 and 2 in the 24 so we add them and then the units, i.e. the 4 and will show him with the numbers on top of each other. Is that right??

IB,

I should imagine that the Ed Psych has no other strategies to recommend other than the RWI because all the research on 'dyslexia', or specific learning difficulties related to reading, tends to show that systematic phonics instruction is the most successful strategy.

I do suspect that the child who doesn't respond to phonics is actually so rare that EPs don't often encounter them (if at all); if 'mixed methods' don't work and 'phonics' doesn't work there isn't really anything left to try apart from the completely unproven 'alternative' stuff...

I must say, I find it unusual that the ED Psych is saying that because most seem to be wedded to sight words and mixed methods!

My problem is, that, however much I try to think my way round 'different approaches' to teaching the most 'challenging' pupils, I can't think of any way that is logically as effective, either. The sticking point I keep coming back to is that it is ultimately far more difficult to memorise every written word as a discrete 'whole', by virtue of the fact of the sheer quantity of words there are in the language. (Unless you are one of those rare individuals with a photographic memory)

But I know that, in what appears to me to be defiance of logic, mrz's son did it! I wish I knew how. Does mrz know?

Thanks, Scooby.

at cloning mrz!

wait is RWI the Ruth Miskin one they used on that dispatches series a few years ago? I get lost with all the various schemes!

mrz - saddened, but not too surprised, to hear about the lack of phonics training at PGCE. reminds me of my friend telling me that in the 3yr midwifery degree courses she was looking into, they only had 1 day to learn about BFing

nooo units first!

Maizie - it takes an awful lot of money to 'prove' a method. There are loads of studies that show that alternative methods work - but none of them on sufficient numbers of pupils etc. to be accepted.

There is also still an awful lot of debate about whether synthetic phonics actually does work or not - because the studies are so hard to do. For example if you send all the teachers of the SP group on a training course to teach SP, and the teachers of the control group aren't sent on a training course - is it a fair experiment?

For example the following report states
We show that the review provided no reliable empirical evidence that synthetic phonics offers the vast majority of beginners the best route to becoming skilled readers.

What clever ideas are there for improving how children memorise whole words?
Those who memorise whole words do it without any particular instruction. They do it because they can. Subsquently they may become part-word assemblers, maybe more effective than memorising whole words, and presumably finding some characteristics to distinguish the most similar-looking (mullet, magnet, mallet, millet, mangle, mental and so on)

Decoding is often intensely disliked by children. It is tiresome, time-consuming, and grownups aren't seen to do it, yet all the lovely words just spill out of their mouths.

But it is possible to provide instruction and practice to improve ability, and there are many studies that substantiate that the most effective and efficient method of instruction is SP.

The major SP programmes on the market have differing characteristics, and it may be that some are better with the very low progress children than others. These sort of studeis have not been done.

When first teaching reading I was told to get one programme firmly in my head, which I did, very good advice. (I have got 2 or 3 others in there.) Many teachers teach from general principles rather than a specific programme. Or if they deliver exactly the same programme, the amount practice done at home may be outside teacher's control.

I know from the programmes I use (all SP) if I do a words read count, with some programmes it is possible to get more words read per minute than with others. Some programmes are decontextualised which must have an effect compared with those which are continuous text.

What I am getting at, probably not very well, is that for the very low progress children like Indigo's child, such details may be more significant than for the majority of learners.

MRZ, thank you, that's a good point and I completely agree with your logic.

I've got to say the idea of more of me is [nervous smilie] My family say one of me is more than enough

maizie I'm not sure how my son manages to read so well but he honestly hasn't a clue with letter sound correspondence. If he'd been on RWI he'd still be on set 1. We had all kinds of issues in reception because his teacher insisted he needed to sound out words and he couldn't remember the sounds so she wouldn't give him a book ... he was reading about Nato deployment of troops in Europe at the time at bedtime (it made me sleep) When he was 7 I asked for a referral to an EdPsych who found his reading age was considerably above his chronological age and said he was fine (in spite of the fact he wasn't writing at all) eventually in secondary school he was assessed as ADHD with possible Autistic traits
A few years ago I taught a 4 year old child with ASD who demonstrated the same ability to read anything put in front of him (no guessing or using pictures involved just fluent reading ) He could even read even the poorest handwriting with no effort...

IB,

Did you not read the critique of that 'meta-analysis? I did post a link to it, (or Maverick did) but it is here:Third post down

Let me tell you that there is absolutely no debate at all about the efficacy of synthetic phonics in the 'scientific' community. Cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists and even 'dyslexia' researchers all agree that structured, systematic code-based reading instruction is the most effective method to teach reading. Their agreement is based on 40+ years of reading research. Just as a matter of interest, have you read any of it?

The ones who muddy the waters are those who have been trained in 'look and say', been subjected to deliberate, inaccurate anti-phonics brainwshing and who have presided over the appalling, falling, standards of literacy which have obtained ever since the 1980s (and don't anybody quote SATs levels at me because they are not as reliable as reading tests, which remain unchanged from year to year, and well respected academics have very seriously questioned their validity)

You have to understand that the anti-phonics tendency are completely opposed to testing of any sort. They fought against the USA introduction of scientifically based reading instruction (i.e. phonics) only on the grounds that testing wasn't, in their view, a valid measure of reading ability. So they never participate in or acknowledge the validity of 'scientific' trials.

Well, if surveys of teacher attitudes and children's beliefs in themselves as 'readers' are what impress you, as opposed to evidence that your child is making measurable progress, fair enough.

But please do me the favour of believing that I am an intelligent and rational human being who isn't supporting an unproven methodology with quasi religious fervour. I am supporting it because it works better than any other method of teaching reading at present in existence and I have daily evidence of it because it teaches children who their primary schools have written off as unteachable.

Sorry, I'm getting cross.

Maizie - Sorry. I'm not against SP. I think it is an excellent way to teach reading. (Although I am surprised it normally works with 5 year olds...)

I have just seen it totally fail to work for my DD. And wish that my SENCO and the SpLD team would look to alternatives rather then keeping on with a system that is clearly not working for my DD.

I can believe that SP works for 95% of kids. And therefore agree that it should be taught, and that all teachers and SENCOs should be well versed in it.

But for the SpLD team / Ed Psych to have no other tricks up their sleeve is wrong and unacceptable.

The phonics-sceptics might like to read this article too (sorry, but the first link has been erased as a result of the article):

www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4521

mrz, what you've described with the 4yr.old ASD child sounds like 'hyperlexia'

can I please shamelessly plug my own new thread (on this forum) and ask all you reading experts to give it a look? thanks... :)