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.

Mathanxiety To understand the vocabulary and sentence structures that result from decoding, children must have mastery over their native language as well as knowledge of the world. Otherwise, they only decode the letters
in the sentence into words that yield nothing beyond a string of seemingly disconnected sounds.

Those who use synthethic phonics in the UK find that children who don't have mastery over their native language make enormous strides in this respect from their growing ability to decode. Of course any reception teacher worth his/her salt will encourage talking, listening, engaging, play, painting, and will read lots of books, recite rhymes, nursery rhymes, and so on. It has had a very deleterious effect on reading progress in the States to emphasise phonological skills and delay the process of beginning to read. This is a whole extra layer that has garnered millions of dollars for the publishing industry.

AdelaofBlois - you may like to look at this film we made of a 4 year old who had significant hearing infections during his babyhood. Learning to decode fine-tunes listening, articulation.

Lindamood is effective, I understand, for some children with speech problems but it's very expensive - obviously well worth while if it helps and funding isn't a problem

Dolfrog and Indigobell
Have either of you any experience/reports of the Tomatis Centre in Lewis?

Dolfrog
If 10% of children are damaged by a phonics foundation and another 10%++ can't make use of phonics for other reasons, how come that there are schools which provide a sound phonics foundation, and a book rich environment and all children achieve at least a level 4 in SATs 2? Surely the phonics foundation would be sufficient to further disable the majority of these children?

"It has had a very deleterious effect on reading progress in the States to emphasise phonological skills and delay the process of beginning to read. This is a whole extra layer that has garnered millions of dollars for the publishing industry."

allchildrenreading - have you got a link to any study or research that supports that? It would be very useful for me in a point I am trying to make to my DD's school.

I don't think teachers in general buy or influence the purchase of programmes; OTOH on this thread some posters (who are teachers) have told of their own experience of influence over what their schools now teach -- there are references to persuading whatever powers there were to implement SP... Apparently not all schools are alike in the level of influence teachers can have over what is taught or how.

I think leveling of the educational playing field is a chimera. This is a depressing study of oral language ability at age 2 and literacy development to age 11, in contrast to other language studies that focused on 5 - 7/8 year olds. Some conclusions:

"Our findings indicate that early
expressive vocabulary at age 2 can significantly predict the 16 language and literacy outcomes such as letter identification, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension over the span of 9 years. Thus, expressive vocabulary at
age 2 is shown to be crucial to subsequent literacy development."

"Thus, our results show that children with
a larger vocabulary size (or even total verb size) at age 2 continue to be on an advanced language and literacy development trajectory than their peers with a smaller vocabulary size."

"It is worth noting that early vocabulary size predicted marginally the decoding skills on the word attack task of the two groups of children at third grade. However, our results are in keeping with previous studies suggesting that differences
in technical literacy skills such as word decoding, which are more affected by formal schooling, usually disappear by third grade (e.g., De Jong & Lesserman, 2001)."

"In a practical sense, our findings suggest that the groundwork for literacy development has to start as early as 2 years old. What should parents, caregivers, and early childhood educators do today to prepare infants and toddlers for the road to reading when they start formal schooling? It is as easy as providing children with rich lexical input and language-rich activities to help them in word learning at home or at the daycare center (Hart & Risley, 1995; Weizman & Snow, 2001). Children who hear more speech from their parents or caregivers, particularly in terms of a more varied and richer vocabulary as well as different sentence structures, are more advanced in their vocabulary and grammar development than children who do not..."

In short, the game is already lost by about age 2 for a lot of children. All phonics can really hope to do is teach decoding, but the deficiencies in the language foundation of many children, and the full effect of those deficiencies, cannot be cured or mitigated by teaching decoding.

Sorry, it got a bit broken up there...

Dolfrog,

Since you claim I am an, ?a example of the typical nonsense spouted by the neurologically uniformed.?. Would you be kind enough to let us know what your qualifications are in the science of neurology?

In the meantime, here are some comments from recognised experts and these experts appear to disagree with your claims of what research has and has not shown.

Daniel Willingham Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology Harvard University, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. His research focused on the brain basis of learning and memory, and the application of cognitive psychology to K-12 education.

'Brain-Based' Learning: More Fiction than Fact by Daniel T. Willingham, American Educator, American Federation of Teachers, Fall 2006.

"Neuroscientists are making great leaps forward in understanding how the brain works. Unfortunately, when neuroscientific claims jump to the classroom, the facts often get lost and the science misapplied.

John T. Bruerhe, the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience. His program Cognitive Studies for Educational Practice supports applications of cognitive science to improve educational outcomes.

Education and the Brain: A Bridge Too Far by Dr. John T. Bruer, James S. McDonnell Foundation. Excerpt:

"Brain science fascinates teachers and educators, just like it fascinates all of us. When I speak to teachers there is always a question or two about the educational promise of brain-based curricula.

I answer that these ideas have been around for a decade, are often based on misconceptions and overgeneralizations of what we know about the brain, and have little to offer to educators.

Educational applications of brain science may come eventually, but as of now neuroscience has little to offer teachers in terms of informing classroom practice.

Neuroscientists often they are puzzled by the neuroscientific results educators choose to cite, by the interpretations educators give those results, and by the conclusions educators draw from them.

"This article examines a set of claims that I will call the neuroscience and education argument. The negative conclusion is that the argument fails. The argument fails because its advocates are trying to build a bridge too far. Currently, we do not know enough about brain development and neural function to link that understanding directly, in any meaningful, defensible way, to instruction and educational practice."

AllChildrenReading - I don't know anything about the Tomatis Centre.

The AIT I am such a huge fan of was invented by Guy Berard who worked with Tomatis and was influenced by his work but he came up with a totally different treatment.

Mathaxiety,

You continue to misrepresent my comments and the findings of Project Follow Through yet you provide no evidence that supports your claim that phonics instruction is inappropriate for 4 year olds.

Surely, you must be able to cite something more concrete that your personal opinion and the personal opinion of others who agree with you?

Your opinion on what is and isn't 'developmentally appropriate' and your rejection of all evidence that contradicts your opinion is well addressed in the following;

Developmentalism: An Obscure but Pervasive Restriction on Educational Improvement

J. E. Stone

"... schools have largely ignored the availability of a number of teaching methodologies that seem capable of producing the kind of achievement outcomes demanded by the public. They are experimentally validated, field tested, and known to produce significant improvements in learning.

Instead, the schools have continued to employ a wide variety of untested and unproven practices...

In particular, teaching practices such as mastery learning and Personalized System of Instruction (Bloom, 1976; Guskey & Pigott, 1988; Kulik, Kulik & Bangert-Drowns, 1990), direct instruction (Becker & Carnine, 1980; White, 1987), positive reinforcement (Lysakowski & Walberg; 1980, 1981), cues and feedback (Lysakowski & Walberg, 1982), and the variety of similar practices called "explicit teaching" (Rosenshine, 1986), are largely ignored despite reviews and meta- analyses strongly supportive of their effectiveness (Ellson, 1986; Walberg, 1990, 1992).

...Dismissing experimental findings on the grounds that offer only good but not certain evidence of pedagogical effectiveness is to fallaciously make the perfect the enemy of the good.

... a longstanding but poorly recognized educational doctrine underpins the neglect of experimental evidence found in methods textbooks and in the attempt to find more effective teaching methods. It is a doctrine that pervades teacher education and one that disposes the teaching profession to favor certain practices and to ignore others regardless of empirically demonstrated merit.

Termed "developmentalism" (Stone, 1991, 1993a, 1994), it is a form of romantic naturalism that inspires teacher discomfort with any practice that is deemed incompatible with natural developmental processes (Binder & Watkins, 1989).

... Today it poses an obscure but powerful restriction on scientifically informed educational improvement and more broadly on teacher and parent efforts to influence the developing child.

Developmentalism's clearest present-day expressions include the "child centered" or "progressive" teaching seen in Canadian schools (Freedman, 1993), the "progressivism" or "Plowdenism" seen in the British Primary Schools (Alexander, Rose, & Woodhead, 1992), and the "developmentally appropriate practice" advocated by early childhood educators (Carta, Schwartz, Atwater & McConnell,1991)..."

singing with my own children, etc. took place if and when they felt like it. Not for the 10 - 20 minutes a day I might have wanted to do it or when it might have been convenient. I've cherry -picked this comment of mathanxiety's from a response to mrz becaue now I am truly puzzled. It seems you are not in favour of any adult input unless it is initiated by child? Are you opposed to state provided pre-school education altogether? Or just critical anything that does not look like the way you educated your children before they reached mass education?

No, my comment was supposed to question the assertion that SP is play-based; I highlighted the fact that there is a difference between children following their own interests during the day and children doing activities according to a schedule. I don't see the value of small children doing activities on schedule.

'Neuroscientists often they are puzzled by the neuroscientific results educators choose to cite, by the interpretations educators give those results, and by the conclusions educators draw from them.'
-- This isn't necessarily a criticism of neuroscience you know...

'Currently, we do not know enough about brain development and neural function to link that understanding directly, in any meaningful, defensible way, to instruction and educational practice."'
-- And this does not actually rule out the possibility that much will be learned that could be of immense benefit in the educational field.

You should examine your C&P pieces to make sure they actually bolster your arguments.

Here's a reason not to teach 4 year olds phonics they don't do it in other parts of the world where educational outcomes are either the same or better than in Britain. And since you don't accept that 4 year olds were not involved in Follow Through, I really have no more to say to you on that matter. However, the table in the Gossen article I linked to earlier wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement of DI whoop dee doo, the students' achievement levels reached the dizzying heights of the 50th percentile.

As for 'untested and unproven practices' -- not really true. Please go back and read the study I linked to Early vocabulary as a predictor of language and literacy competence as well as the many articles on neurobiology/ neuroscience, especially any by PR Huttenlocher. Phonics gains evaporate by age 8/9. This has been ascertained by studies. After that a student's early language foundation kicks in; those who haven't had one lose, and those who have, win.

Bonsoir

The best general references are Diane McGuinness' three books, Growing a Reader from Birth, Early Reading Instruction, and Language Development and Learning to Read. The chapter in Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us about How to Teach Reading is Chapter 6 Phoneme-Awareness Training. It's pretty heavy-weight stuff but Diane McGuinness is a superb researcher.

Dr. Richard Schutz' paper Social Science Research Network: The "New Science of Reading" is Pseudo-Science.

ssrn.com/author=1199505

directly refutes the evidence.

Mathanxiety There would be nothing wrong with playing until age seven if kids weren't exposed to mix and match instruction and weren't prone informally to pick up faulty ideas about what is involved in reading (the same may be the case for maths - but I don't know).

Child Development research indicates that the critical/sensitive period for reading instruction is age 4-5, with age 3-6 for kids at the extreme in spoken language and general mental development.

References for that:
Lise Eliot
What's Going on in There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First 5 years of Life

Gopnik, Mettzoff and Kuhl
The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells us about the Mind

I imagine that Diane McGuinness' Growing a Reader from Birth may have authoritative references but I haven't got the book to hand.

@mathanxiety

^Neuroscientists often they are puzzled by the neuroscientific results educators choose to cite, by the interpretations educators give those results, and by the conclusions educators draw from them.'
-- This isn't necessarily a criticism of neuroscience you know...^

No, it is a criticism of 'educators' reading too much into too little; too little which they imperfectly understand.

^'Currently, we do not know enough about brain development and neural function to link that understanding directly, in any meaningful, defensible way, to instruction and educational practice."'

-- And this does not actually rule out the possibility that much will be learned that could be of immense benefit in the educational field.^

No-body is saying that it does rule out this possibility; just that at the moment we don't know enough to form any useful conclusions.

allchildrenreading - thank you very much for those references.

From this review of McGuinness' book 'Early Reading Instruction' by P. Harvey, Exeter University:

'while this is a very well-researched book, it is also at times a very irritating read, not only in the lack of interest in any other research into reading (the NRP itself was dismissive of longitudinal studies on whole language approaches to reading) but also in the constant references to the author's own scholarship and publications. It's tempting to level the criticism at McGuinness that her readership, if indeed it is a general one, might benefit from a rather more balanced view of educational research (e.g., Pring, 2004). The positivist view that scientific enquiry is the only real and meaningful way to undertake research is not entirely convincing, especially in an area as complex and diverse as reading. In the early reading
classroom, phonics based on "reversible mapping systems" (p. 12) is doubtless a good place to start, and McGuinness argues the case convincingly. There is, however, little mention of what becoming a reader means in addition to mastering the phonics. By the end of Early Reading Instruction I felt the need to retreat back to Grabe to be reminded that learning to read is an exercise in developing psycholinguistic fluency as much as anything else. It is also interesting to compare the L2 discussions of basic morphophonemic issues in Birch. (2002) with McGuinness's occasional rantings. To be fair, the National Reading Panel did not address L2 reading issues, and these are therefore not highlighted in the book, although given the diversity of language use within the US population this might be seen as an omission.'

Very obviously, Diane McGuinness' books have been swallowed whole and only partially digested by many posters here, especially clear in the continued insistence that reading by any means other than SP can be harmful to children, or pick up faulty ideas about what is involved in reading. (Tell that to my DCs and the many millions of children the world over who have successfully learned to read without benefit of SP, including Diane McGuinness herself, presumably)

From "Two Ways to Skin a Kat" in the NY Times review:

'She does cite some convincing studies conducted during the last 10 years or so on the need to help children hear individual sounds in words. But to support her most extravagant claim the assertion that, with the help of her program, success in reading is hours away for all children and adults she invokes a lone and problematic study of 87 children. There is a long tradition of shrill manifestos in the history of reading instruction, and McGuinness's book is one more dogmatic contribution to that literature. Her acidic tone and nasty attacks on theories other than her own may delight her philosophical allies, but her stridency undermines the original points and useful ideas that give her book value."
(potential buyers beware)

Just to be fair, the 'Skin a Kat' review (would that be Nat the Fat Kat?) compared and contrasted the Lucy Calkins book 'Raising Lifelong Learners' and had this to say:

'CALKINS believes parents play a crucial role in all of children's academic learning not just in reading and writing, but in math, science and social studies as well. Her style of presenting ideas is the exact opposite of McGuinness's, but not much more attractive. Instead of shrill hypothesizing, she draws a picture of her homelife with her young sons that is too pretty for words. Yet beneath the saccharine cheer, you will find a good deal of sound advice whether or not you completely accept her underlying philosophy.

McGuinness and Calkins have in common an inability to see either the limitations of their own approaches or the value in opposing ideas. Both writers seem to have forgotten that we teach children, not theories. Children are not uniform. They come from different backgrounds and have individual strengths and weaknesses. Some will learn only in a highly structured program such as McGuinness's, where they can dwell on the correspondence of sounds and letters. For others, the looser although no less challenging approach advocated by Calkins is best. Either of these books, taken alone, is too sectarian to be broadly applicable. But taken together, they offer a usefully wide range of educational insights and suggestions.'

(And I would like to add the disclaimer that I am not Lucy Calkins.)

'Mathanxiety There would be nothing wrong with playing until age seven if kids weren't exposed to mix and match instruction and weren't prone informally to pick up faulty ideas about what is involved in reading (the same may be the case for maths - but I don't know).' Well apparently this approach works pretty well in Scandinavia, and presumably for maths too.

The 'faulty ideas' thing is silly.

Does early education make a difference? (Sylva, Melhuish, Sammons, Siraj-Blatchford and Taggart, ?Early Childhood Matters?, Routledge, 2010)

?Guided learning? was as important as children?s free play, although both are necessary for optimal development.

allchildrenreading
The work of Alfred Tomatis has been replicated and developed my many other support programs including The Listening Program.
And like many other progamsd such as Fast ForWord, Lindamood Bell Earobics, and many others thye all provide some form of support for some specific groups of children. However they do not work for all.
The real problem is that there is no requirement of the the program provider to stipulate how the program works, which groups will benefit from using the program, which groups will not benefit from using the program and which groups may be harmed by using the program.

With regard to phonics you need to first identify if a child is able to process the gap between the sound which make up a word, and or measure the the size of the gap between sounds which they are able to process. This is only one of the many clinical diagnostics that make up the battery of tests ina assessment for a diagnosis of Auditory Processing Disoder (APD) which the UK Medical Research Council sates as affecting 10% of children. So if a child is not cognitively able to process the gap between the sounds that make up a word it is pure torture to expect that child to use any phonics based program which depends on the cognitive ability to process the gap between sounds that make up a word in what isd defined a s blending.
Phonics programs require good listening skills, APD is a listening disability. So to force a child or even a adult who has APD to use a phonics program is disability discrimination.

ymeyer

If you read any of the international research of the last decade or so with regard to neurology, most of it is still cutting edge, and there is still a great deal to understand with regard to the inner workings of the brain.
The problem has been that some research has been skewed or ignored so that the education industries can continue to market their products.
My only concern has been a greater awareness of the disability which blights all of my family Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) which is a listening disability, or about not being able top process what you hear. In order to understand the nature of my own disability and ot overcome the ignorance of others I have had to initially lobby the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) to carry out APD research, and I was advise in 2002 that a parent support group would be required to monitor any APD research before the UK government would provide the MRC the funding to carry out any APD research.
I founded APDUK in 2002 / 2003, the MRC gained their government funding to research APD in 2004, and the MRC published their APD pamphlet in 2004
I have been consulting with both the MRC , the consultants at Great Ormond Street Hospital and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery regarding APD issues since 2000.
In order to understand and explain APD at various levels I have had to carry out a great deal of research, especially when so many education industry myths need to be exposed, and the scientific reality explained. You might like to read the research paper included in my many online research paper collections
or more specifically Communication and Neurology Dyslexia and Related Issues and Invisible Disabilities
Or you could also join one of the following online Research paper sharing groups at CiteULike
Special Education
Developmental Dyslexia
Working memory for sentence processing
Language And Brain
Human Memory Systems

and there are many more.

The real problem is the poor quality of teacher training who should be required to keep pace with all of these issues to remain in the teaching profession, much like Speech and Langauge Pathologists have to prove they have kept up to date regarding recent research developments in order to continue practicing.
Neurological research can be appled to the classroom when there is a willingness on the part of educationalists to listen, and learn, the problem in both the UK and the USA are the industries that provide the teaching programs do not want their loose their market share, and loose their income if they are not able to adapt to the new teaching requirements the new research recommends.

Re; mums coming into school to 'help' Don't even go there. In my experience these mums are bonkers, one I knew bought the whole of the Oxford reading tree when her children were in Reception. Five years later neither are particularly able readers. But it didn't stop the same woman from coming into school every five minutes, organising hopelessly inadequate workshops, 'famous' authors reading their books and then flogging them to the children, her ploys to gain entry were relentless and ultimately for the sole purpose of seeing what her children were doing.

From a digest of the (US) National Reading Panel's 2000 report:
(synopsis here)
'It appears that phonemic awareness is best taught in kindergarten and first grade' -- this was the conclusion of the Panel wrt phonemic awareness after examining 52 studies that passed a rigorous test in order to be included for consideration. Kindergarten and First Grade students are 5 at the youngest and can be as old as 7, Nowhere is the teaching of ohonemic awareness, let alone phonics, to 4 year olds mentioned. Phonemic awareness is not the same as phonics in the parlance of the panel; it is a preparatory exercise done before letter-sound links are taught and continued until segmentation can be accomplished easily by the students.

38 studies were examined, and in all over a dozen phonics programmes' results were analysed by the NRP. The result was that no single programme stood out as performing better than any others. Any kind of phonics is better than no phonics at all. When it came to a showdown between synthetic and analytic phonics, the results of the analysis of the 38 studies showed no statistically significant difference.

The section 'Advice For Teachers on Teaching Phonics' acknowledges the fact that reading skills level off once the demands of the material studied in school begin to outstrip the vocabulary of the students. The relationship between a good early foundation and consistent exposure to ever-increasing and complex vocabulary through the school years and success at the higher skills involved in reading is underscored.

Dolfrog you may be interested to know that teachers too have to "keep pace" with "issues" it's called CPD. I don't actually know many schools that use "industry produced teaching programmes".

I am curious, dolfrog. Have you read, in full, every single one of the research papers in your 'collections'?

I'm also sad, dolfrog. I haven't had a special post addressed to me this time...

The panel also concluded that the research literature provides solid evidence that phonics instruction produces significant benefits for children from kindergarten through 6th grade and for children having difficulties learning to read.

Kindergarten in the US is not for 4 year olds. It is for 5 and 6 year olds.

Still no evidence that 4 year olds are ripe for phonics instruction, and the NRP report's emphasis on phonemic awareness as a vital precursor to phonics instruction implies that for some children phonics instruction should only proceed after exposure to plenty of phonemic awareness activities -- so even later than Kindergarten for some.

Again, Reception age in the UK is not the same as Kindergarten age in the US. We are talking about 4 turning 5 and 5 turning 6 year-olds, respectively. There is s huge difference between a child who might have just turned 4 (Reception possibility in September) and one who might be a month from turning 6 (Kindergarten possibility in September) in terms of what they are capable of learning or the benefit they can derive from SP.

Commum -- I knew a mum like that, and what a pita she was for everyone .

mathanxiety it isn't true that all kindergarten children in the USA will be 5 many states take 4 year olds and Pre K for 3 year olds.

nces.ed.gov/pubs93/web/93257.asp an October 1995 report of The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), found that parents of preschoolers and kindergarten teachers don't always agree on what skills are necessary for kindergarten success. The reports states: "Parents of a majority of preschoolers believe that knowing the letters of the alphabet, being able to count to 20 or more, and using pencils and paint brushes are very important or essential for a child to be ready for kindergarten,