Why is MN so obsessed with reception reading?

[skiphopskidaddle]

It's a marathon, not a sprint. It doesn't matter if Johnny is on red and Amy is on lilac as (a) different schools go at different paces and (b) children develop different skills in different order.

I can't quite believe the number of reception reading threads I've seen this week along the lines of "what colour book is yours on?". I'm going over to the behaviour/development board now to check for obsessive posting about when children learn to walk. Cos it doesn't matter either, in general.

In Australia, the official school starting age is 5. However, teachers put enormous pressure on parents to delay starting school. My son started at 5 but only after I was refused a place a 4 schools on the grounds that 5 was 'too young'.

When he started school, out of 25 kids in his class, there were 2 kids aged 5, 9 kids aged 6, 10 kids aged 7, 1 kid aged 8 and 1 kid aged 4 (who had learnt to read at 3 in another country).

Except for the 4 year old who came to school already able to read, there was 100% failure for the remaining 24 kids in learning to read at school.

Every child received a good report every year and all parents were told their children were progressing just fine, thank-you very much.

By Year 3, all the boys and about half the girls had been labelled SEN (LD in Australia).

By the end of primary, about half of the kids were reading at more or less their chronological age because their parents had taught them outside of school.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 55% of school leavers have basic literacy & numeracy skills too weak for everyday activities.

Mathaxiety,

I have provided links to the evidence-based research that informs us at what age children are capable of learning to read. Instead of reading the research I have already provided, you claim I have not provided any evidence, and you provide no evidence yourself of what age children can or should be taught to read.

You provide no evidence that a play-based school experience is of any benefit to 4-6 year olds, yet you continue to make false and misleading statements about Zig Engekmann and Project Follow Through.

You grossly misrepresent my comments, for example:

"Ymeyer has poopoohed all play-based prereading activities and has cast aspersions on everything except straight phonics"

What I have said, is that the evidence informs us that the so-called "play-based pre-reading activities" have either neutral or negative effects on learning to read.

Reading aloud to childern does not teach them to read and has a neutral effect on them learning to read, while encouraging children to sight memorise whole words and guess meaning from context has a negative effect of learning to read because these strategies have to be un-learned in order for phonics to be learnt to fluency levels.

You claim that teaching phonics to 4 year olds distresses them. Why? I have seen video of teachers who teach phonics so badly that the children become confused and frustrated, but this is the fault of bad teaching, not phonics.

Mathaxiety states, "...just because the (play-based) approach in her son's schools didn't work for her son doesn't mean other children won't benefit from it.

Where is your evidence that the play-based approach works for other children?

Where is your evidence on which children benefit from the play-based approach and which don't?

"Reading aloud to childern does not teach them to read and has a neutral effect on them learning to read."

Gosh. That's a bit radical.

My sample of one very clearly demonstrates the opposite - that reading aloud to my child greatly encourages her to read to herself, in addition to increasing her vocabulary, improving her syntax and widening her range of expression. But maybe she is the exception that proves your rule...

My only real concern is that children who have APD and other related disabilities are not tortured by phonics only regimes in any school in the UK. And my aim is to prevent this form of disability discrimination which when it happens to child is a form of institutionalised child abuse, which is promoted and endorsed by the phonics only lobby.
Research has shown that formal education should not begin until after the age of cognitive maturation 7 - 8 years old, which happens in the most advanced countries of Scandinavia. That is the age at which children stop growing out of development problems. All children develop different cognitive skills at different ages and a different rates. And during this time they also begin to naturally develop alternative cognitive skill options to work around their cognitive weaknesses and deficits.

We need an educational equivalent of the Medical Research Council to carry out independent and ongoing research with regard to all educational issues, especially the neurology of how we learn, and that the different cognitive skill strengths, weaknesses and disabilities are provided for in each education establishment so that teachers are adequately trained to identify each pupils learning needs and are able to adapt their teaching methods to match each childs learning needs.

Research technology has developed rapidly over recent years and it is possible to identify potential dyslexics from 6 months old, this has been established by another Scandinavian Longitudinal Research program.

The research with regard how we learn to read, the psycholinguistic models of reading have evolved from Alexia (acquired dyslexia) research from those who due to injury or illness have lost the ability to read. There are still many gaps in these models of understanding the neurological processes involved in the task of reading.
Some useful research paper collections
CiteULike Working Memory and Sentence Processing
CiteULike Phonology and MMN
CiteULike Language and Brain
CiteULike Human Memory systems
CiteULike Alexia(acquired dyslexia)
CiteULike Developmental Dyslexia
My communication and Neurology research paper collections (including a reading collection)

I agree Bonsoir.
How can reading aloud to your child have a neutral effect on learning to read?
It is teaching the child:
that print has meaning
words are symbols for what we say
how to use a book
that there is an exciting world to explore in books
new vocabulary
syntax

PLUS:
concentration
sharing
listening skills
sequencing
expression and meaning

.....and probably lots more.

As I said before, many of you are far more clever than me on this thread, but I think that with all your theories of Direct Instruction and neural pathways of cognition and learning, you are forgetting that we are talking about children.

IMHO there is no single learning experience and therefore no single teaching method for teaching phonics or anything else. This is why all new methods that are introduced will never succeed totally, as all children are different and learn in different ways.
We can discuss which way is the right way and which way is the wrong way until the cows come home, but you can bet your bottom dollar that your way (and my way) will always have a few failures.

just joined this thread but i have found a example of the typical nonsense spouted by the neurologically uniformed.
"Reading aloud to childern does not teach them to read and has a neutral effect on them learning to read, while encouraging children to sight memorise whole words and guess meaning from context has a negative effect of learning to read because these strategies have to be un-learned in order for phonics to be learnt to fluency levels."

Neuroimaging is the only technology which can inform how the brain process information and uses various cognitive skills to perform tasks such as reading.

processing phonic information is only part how we gain meaning from the man made communication system, the visual notation of speech.

and there is no unlearning to be done it is more about combining both the whole word and phonic skills to enable decoding and comprehension.
Neural Representations of Visual Words and Objects: A Functional MRI Study on the Modularity of Reading and Object Processing
FMRI of Ventral and Dorsal Processing Streams in Basic Reading Processes: Insular Sensitivity to Phonology
[[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19899646
Changes in reading strategies in school-age children.]]

Reading aloud does all the things that you say it does, but with regard to actually learning how to interpret the squiggles on the page and convert them to words it has no effect.

I would agree with you that there is no known method of teaching reading which is guaranteed to succeed with every single child. The point about structured, explicit, systematic instruction in the representation of each of the discrete sounds of the language by a letter, or group of letters, and how to use that knowledge to decode and blend for reading and segment for spelling (Phonics) is that it is the method which reliably teaches the greatest number of children to read.

For that reason, it is joyfully embraced by just about all teachers who try it, declaring that they have never had so much success previously and they would never go back to their 'old' methods.

Teachers who pooh pooh it are usually those who have never taught it exclusively or have never taught it at all. Adherents of 'other methods' are unable to point to any data, any kind at all, which shows their preferred methods to be superior, though they will poor scorn on any data produced in favour of 'phonics'. I might mention here that the percentage of children achieving a L4 in 'Reading@ at the end of KS2 has remained at about 80% for a number of years now. This means 1 in 5 children leaves primary school virtually unable to read. This is a result of the extensive use of 'mixed methods' (methods promoted by the DFEs until 3 years ago). Individual schools using good, focused rigorous phonics teaching achieve 90% plus...

I am not that convinced by National Curriculum 'levels'; I think, from the standards of reading we find in our Y7 intake each year, that the 80% is a bit on the high side...

Parental beliefs are very often sweet and sincere but are usually uninformed by any experience of teaching large numbers of children to read, or remediating 'strugglers'.

I am an adherent of good phonics teaching. I agree that it makes sense to teach the sounds, both for reading and spelling. We do an hour's phonics teching, four days every week, using Read Write Inc.

However, children are constantly exposed to 'text'. They do guided reading and home reading; they read game instructions on the ds, roadsigns, shop signs, headlines, cross curriculum information,etc, etc. Every single lesson the children do at school has reading attached to it - even if it's just the objective on the board! So we can't really be absolutely sure that it is only the phonics that is helping them read. (Maybe I can offer my next year's class as a control group and keep them in a dungeon for a year with no external stimuli?)

We also have to accept that some children will pick up reading from being read to by parents just because they are visual learners, and can learn word patterns.

I meant an hour a day's phonics teaching, four days a week.

Oh, I thought there was a reference to L&S and phases, and poor training..

Bonsoir, I managed to duplicate your results with 5 subjects of my own without even meaning to -- I strongly suspect your sample is not an aberration.

Ymeyer Of course you're not going to see video of anyone causing distress to children who are not ready to read. Why would the horn-tooters who post on Youtube do such a thing it would be the opposite of self-promotion after all? In children who are not ready (and readiness is not indicated by being a certain age in a certain classroom in a certain country while a certain fad is in vogue) trying to teach them phonics will frustrate and puzzle them, and depending on the level of insensitivity or anxiety of the adult helping them, will cause problems in the relationship.

'What I have said, is that the evidence informs us that the so-called "play-based pre-reading activities" have either neutral or negative effects on learning to read.'
-- I don't know what 'evidence' you've been looking at, but your comment flies in the face of everything that is known about brain development and cognitive development. Play-based pre-reading activities are vital to the development of phonological awareness, which in turn is a vital precursor of reading (songs, rhymes, rhythm activities). Some pre-reading activities also help develop visual acuity and recognition of patterns. Some help to get the eye in the habit of looking from left to right or getting the body moving from left to right. (I have seen a theory that crawling is an essential pre-reading activity but the two DCs of mine who read earliest were also the two who didn't crawl, so I have doubts about that and would like to look further at it.)

Again, Ymeyer, my issue is not with phonics, but with the age at which phonics is taught in England (apparently not Wales - apologies for keeping on saying UK here). I have seen phonics work with children aged 5/6 and I was very happy to send my DCs to a school whose curriculum included essay writing and the other skills you mentioned your DS's school didn't teach. (In contrast to your description of a protracted process, I saw it work smoothly and fast with children that age). I do not advocate play-based or steiner-ish or child-initiated learning beyond age 6 or 7, but I definitely do for children younger than that.

Speaking out for language; Why language is central to reading development -- a really interesting paper on the huge importance of language for both initial decoding skill acquisition and later development of comprehension skills.

And no, Project Follow Through tells us nothing about phonics and 4 year olds, which is the group in question -- moving the goalposts to '4-6 year olds' at this late stage of the game doesn't alter the fact that a flawed project that had murky origins has no implications for the teaching of 4 year olds.

I have claimed that trying to teach some 4 year olds to read using phonics could cause distress and have a negative effect on self image (and could also negatively affect the self image of 4 year old children who succeed well in a classroom where the option of success or failure exists). I could make the same claim for trying to teach them to ride a 2-wheeler or any other skill they might not be ready for. Children of 4 are not ready emotionally for the experience of success or failure at a skill that does not flow naturally, one that has to be taught, one where the child is aware of the daily expectations but maybe only dimly aware of the ultimate aim, and where the child's development might not yet have reached the point where learning the skill would be possible.

Just to make clear, I'm not a fan of steiner ed for anyone of any age....

By not teaching beginning reading in reception to all the children, children like mathanxiety's own, whom she taught in an indirect way to read at 3, will be even more advantaged.
The playing field is uneven enough, without that!

We also have to accept that some children will pick up reading from being read to by parents just because they are visual learners, and can learn word patterns.

As far as I can see, both phonics and 'whole word' is a matter of matching a sound to a pattern (except that phonics is much, much easier) so being a 'visual learner' really explains nothing.

I agree that children are constantly exposed to 'text', but it has little benefit unless they already know how to 'read' the words. They don't learn by osmosis..

Mathanxiety - you are being ingenuous. You know perfectly well that many/most University/Colleges of Education barely give time of day to teaching their students about the Alphabetic Code and how to teach children how to read. Also you must be aware that most advisers come from the generation of teachers, educationalists for whom phonics is abhorrent.
It is quite reasonable to expect that all teachers should be properly trained. It is reasonable to be critical of shoddy teaching and contradictory teaching methods,with phonics + WL masquerading as synthetic phonics. It is cruel to subject those children who do not learn to read with ease to muddled, illogical teaching. Those of us who actually teach the strugglers know just how damaging this is.

These 'trainers' have never taken any responsibility for the burgeoning numbers of children failing to acquire adequate reading skills. Hence the blossoming of dyslexia tutors, reading tutors, Catch-Up programmes, IEPs, Education Psychologists employed to test the children not reading and so on ...

It may seem counterproductive, but the ability to match the squiggles on the page to their specific sounds and then to sound out a word, actually develops phonological awareness. A few of the children referred to me were traumatised, coming from very disturbed families - they had no/little reading experience at home. As soon as they understood the logic of the Alphabetic Code, most were away. Conversely, as I said earlier, there were children of writers, editors, teachers, artists, from book-rich homes, who were read to daily,and yet had great difficulty counteracting their default 'guessing', looking at the pictures, techniques for learning how to read.

Equally, I have friends who went to progressive schools such as Summerhill and Dartington. Some flourished, others were greatly damaged.

maizieD

You said
"I would agree with you that there is no known method of teaching reading which is guaranteed to succeed with every single child. The point about structured, explicit, systematic instruction in the representation of each of the discrete sounds of the language by a letter, or group of letters, and how to use that knowledge to decode and blend for reading and segment for spelling (Phonics) is that it is the method which reliably teaches the greatest number of children to read."
You are almost there, the bit you missed is that for a quite sizable group there needs to be an alternative to Phonics. For those of us who are not able to process the discrete sounds of language represented by the graphic symbols we call letters.

Phonics is dependent on having good listening skills, ar being able to process the sound that we hear very well, and being able to associate those to graphic respresentations.
So for the 10% of children (medical research council figure not mine) who have a listening disability or Auditory Processing Disorder (which is one of the three cognitive subtypes of dyslexia) there needs awareness of the nature of this type of disability of which dyslexia is only one and least severe symptom, and teachers need to be trained to provide an alternative Teaching program to meet these childrens learning needs which will depend on the alternative cognitive skills they have been able to develope to work around their disability.

You are making good progress but still some way to go.

So dolfrog, what exactly is your alternative, and how has it been trialled with your subgroup of students and where can the rest of see it and replicate it?

maizieD
you said
"As far as I can see, both phonics and 'whole word' is a matter of matching a sound to a pattern (except that phonics is much, much easier) so being a 'visual learner' really explains nothing."

The bit you are missing is that it is those who are predominately auditory learners who are best able to use phonics which is an auditory based teaching method.
Those who are predominately visual learners will probably have an auditory learning weakness, or learning disability.
And at that young age you should be able to teach to a childs learning strengths what ever they may be and not be limited to the abilities or teaching skills of a teacher or the mantra of an education policy or system. This is about putting the childs needs first and the teachers or schools needs second.

It is not cognitively possible to create4 a single program based on a single sensory information source, you need to be able to use multiple sensory programs based processing all types of sensory information.
So teacher need to be able to use both phonics and whole whole word in order to develop all our sensory information processing abilities which we need for a wide range of tasks including the task of reading.
May be you should have a look at a 2004 summary of the psycholinguistic models of reading which have evolved from Alexia (acquired dyslexia or those who have lost the ability to read) research, and yes you can download the full research paper for free as well as read the Abstract)

Slowly but surely you will eventually understand all of these issues

All the evidence shows that phonics does not fail 10% of kids, but rather a far smaller group.

And as I've said before on many threads, Auditory Integration Training can cure many types of hearing problems:

• Hypersensitive Hearing
• Auditory Discrimination Problems
• Auditory Processing Delay

All of these problems will effect a child's ability to learn to read.

It would be far better to cure these problems where possible, rather than teach children and teachers how to compensate for it.....

Malaleuca

There have been no scientific research program regarding any reading program including phonics, there have only been the opinions of lobbyist, and some very distorted data presented by the lobbyists.

But there are over 6000 international dyslexia research papers available at PubMed of over 2500 during the last decade.
This is about understanding the different ways humans learn, and understanding the nature of our cognitive differences and having teachers who understand these cognitive differences and are able to match their teaching skills and methods to the different cognitive learning needs of our children
It is only in advanced countries in Say Scandinavia that they are putting these more informed practices in place.
We are unfortunately dominated by the marketing hype of the program providing industry, which only has the single aim of selling more of their specific product or range of products and have little or no interest in our childrens real educational needs.

IndigoBell

until we are able to use genetic engineering to be able to change a childs genetic make up there will be no cure for these disablities

So what you are describing is pure phonics fantacy

If 10& of children have APD which is only one of the problems which can prevent the ability to use phonics than there is a need to find alternatives to phonics for all who need them.
Other wise you are just using more marketing hype to sell a product and you are also promoting disability discrimination in the classroom

IndigoBell
Auditory Integration Training (AIT) does not and has never cured anything. More hype

AIT can help some work around their disabilities but it cures nothing.

So for the 10% of children (medical research council figure not mine) who have a listening disability or Auditory Processing Disorder (which is one of the three cognitive subtypes of dyslexia) there needs awareness of the nature of this type of disability of which dyslexia is only one and least severe symptom, and teachers need to be trained to provide an alternative Teaching program to meet these childrens learning needs which will depend on the alternative cognitive skills they have been able to develope to work around their disability.

So why is phoneme discrimination training recommended for people with APD, as in the programme you suggested to mrz a few posts ago?

You are making good progress but still some way to go.

You do make me laugh, dolfrog. I haven't moved an inch from where I was when we first 'met'. Would that be 4 or 5 years ago now?

Dolfrog that is absolute rubbish.

I have used AIT on 2 of my children. And it has cured both if them of their hearing problems.

Audiograms were done before and after. And in both cases their audiograms showed that their hypersensitive hearing had been cured.

They also did auditory discrmination and auditory processing speed tests before and after. And again both of them showed that they had been cured.

So on a sample size of 2 it had a 100% success rate.

I can't prove it would help every single child with these problems - but equally see no reason why it wouldn't.

But I don't have to help every single child. Only my 2. Which. Have done successfully.

My son has a speech disorder, at the start of therapy for which he was also clearly unable to distinguish between certain sounds (especially /d/, /p/, /b/, /c/ and /t/). These are also, not uncoincidentally, the sound she has most problem saying.

He didn't have AIT, just basically listening phonics teaching before school-working on initial sounds, which he also did at nursery in more playful formats (I Spy). And, for speech production, sounding out sounds and diagraphs in response to pictures (which also included the letter shapes)

As a consequence of even this intervention, these skills clicked and, moreover, he began to relate the sounds to the words he could see when we read together (since he knew words had meaning). He now still speaks unclearly and has some auditory problems (grommets soon!) BUT he has very good initial sounds skills. He can even 'blend' if you ask him what the letters are and then repeat them back well pronounced he will give 'his' word for the correct word.

Basically, 'phonics' has improved his speech and listening no end, even without other interventions.

Allchildrenreading -- it is clear to me from this thread alone that you are onto something with your comment on colleges of education and what exactly is taught there about reading and in fact classroom methods in general, from underlying theory to practice. It leaves teachers easy prey to the hype disseminated by the the various promoters of reading programmes. And still unable to say why any of the programmes should be attempted in Reception, on children who are 4 years old.

Malaleuca -- take a look at this link on language and reading ability again. If leveling the playing field is desirable, then I should really not have bothered much with my children, ignored them when they spoke to me, muttered back in monosyllables or told them to shutup.

Teaching phonics to disadvantaged children (at 4 or any age) does not ultimately level the playing field. Exposure to language, to standard English, to books and a reading culture at home, to a culture where intellectual activity is encouraged are the factors that make a difference. Above all, exposure to richness of language is important to build on the good start that phonics represents to many children and enable that good start in the first place.

mathanxiety you are clearly ignorant of what happens in schools if you think that teachers dictate how reading is taught in schools or influence the purchase of reading programmes.

Of course teaching phonics alone doesn't level the playingfield but it can help to narrow the divide. Phonics in a good early years setting is part of a language rich environment where children engage in all forms of talk, they sing, they listen to stories and poetry, they become tellers of stories and lovers of books.