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.

The use of more traditional phonetics-based lessons helps boys catch up with girls

Take a look at this article -- (it even includes a quote or two from MNers) really?

have you arrived at all your opinions from reading the guardian?

I am saying that I've seen effective phonics teaching work for children from all those ethnicities over the last 15 years, with the exception of Roma and Irish Traveller boys, since we don't have any.

Clearly I should cease this successful teaching immediately though, since a)you haven't found any research to back it up and b)it isn't in The Guardian. Great logic

The difficulty with Roma /Traveller children is they often don't have continuity of teaching but I have worked with a few "settled" families in fact my dissertation was an exploration of early literacy development in young children and included working 1-1 with a traveller boy.

'The coalition government?s proposal to test the reading of six-year-olds is a reminder to the education system in England, if one were needed, of the imperative of teaching young children to read.'

'All children should be reading at standards appropriate to Level 1A/2C when they are six, that is, by the end of Year 1.'

The case studies show only that essentially it is possible to do a certain thing but they do not say why this is a desirable thing to do. The depressing assurance of that paper that British children need phonics at age 4 while other children in the world, even children in other English-speaking countries apparently do not, is striking. Yes, as remarked before, chimps and toddlers can be taught to roller skate, but again as earlier remarked, are there other aspects of children's development that are being neglected (see Swedish approach) in the headlong rush to phonics and reading?

If reaching 'targets' means grouping very small children by attainment level, then that is very sad for the children concerned, who may be assumed to understand very well the significance of the groups they are placed in. The blithe optimism of the report about setting and how it enables teaching at the level children need obscures the fact that those who are galloping ahead will attain results that will push up the average for any given class when tests are analysed. The emotional effect on individual children of being in the bottom group will be felt down the road.

The admission that children in the middle range of attainment will potentially be taught by TAs while the qualified teacher devotes her time to the lowest and highest achievers is gobsmacking. Actually, the general business school approach evident in the report and the 'targets', 'accountability', 'testing' language, and emphasis on the strict adherence to the SP method (quality control) combined with the references to in-school training and use of TAs, made me wonder how long more there will be real, qualified teachers teaching classes, especially when you could conceivably train TAs to do the SP method (with a good deal of supervision) and pay them far less. That paper had the air of some Victorian patent method to it; the suggestion of reproducing individual school results on a massive scale brought to mind developments during the industrial revolution.

you can't have it all ways mathanxiety ...post links to show education is failing children/boys based on results them dismiss research that demonstrates phonics improves those results for boys ...

Mrz - when you say that the current reception class will not be reading do you mean they won't be fluent readers or on ORT stage 7/8/9? I never really understood what the purpose of reception was. Some teachers said it was about the children getting used to school routines and establishing friendships and other teachers were keen for the children to wizz through the reading schemes. Is it really the end of the world if they're not reading? Some of them won't even be 5 yet! I didn't push my daughter to do much reading in reception and she's doing very well now (in year one).

No I haven't arrived at all my opinions from reading the Guardian. I thought you'd be able to make more sense of them than all those studies I posted upthread that clearly went over the heads of a lot of people here. If you like, I can fish up some from the Torygraph if they would be more to your taste. However, the general consensus seems to be that education is in a state of turmoil, and that outcomes for the disadvantaged remain abysmal.

The bottom line is that British children start school at an earlier age than almost anywhere else in the world. They are pressed into formal learning from an earlier age, and they spend more than twice the number of days per year in school -- and there is still a huge gap in educational attainment between the deprived and the advantaged, and between boys and girls.

There is more than a whiff of snake oil about SP, 'new approaches', etc., etc., first with Labour and now the ConDems touting their magic solutions to problems that have been there for decades.

As for your claim that phonics products came about as a result of clamour from teachers and the implication that those companies exist as some sort of public service -- puhleeease. The selling of educational schemes and systems is a huge business.

From your Evening Standard link:
'Children from disadvantaged areas who received synthetic phonics training kept up with children from well off areas until the seventh year at school, whereas those taught with usual methods fell behind five years earlier.' So what happened after the seventh year? (Also note that the Clackmananshire study related to 5 year olds.)

They catch up and then they fall back compared to their more advantaged peers, which leaves them where exactly? Why do they fall back at that point?

Yadda yadda yadda - you lot still going on?

They catch up and then they fall back compared to their more advantaged peers, which leaves them where exactly? Why do they fall back at that point?

Mathanxiety - it seems to escape you entirely, that the proponents of SP for beginners, do not also claim that it is propels all children to the front of the pack. It gets them started, that's all, instead of languishing forever not even getting on the track. SP is not a 'cure' for socio-economic progress. It is a teaching method that is more successful than any other at teaching children how to read. Children continue to need to be educated throughout their school careers, and their lives. Advantaged children continue to be advantaged throughout their lives, and disadvantage also clings. Education ameliorates disadvantage.But literacy is a key for all.

Many parents are reluctant to leave learning how to read to Y1 and beyond, because too many other children are already forging on. So beginning to learn in YR is not seen as problematic.

Rather than delaying instruction until Y1 as you continue to advocate, perhaps we should ban parents like you from teaching their children to read before YR. (only joking) Would you have done things differently if beginners started in Y1 instead of YR?

I take issue with your assertion that 'it is a teaching method that is more successful than any other at teaching children how to read' -- it is in fact one of many that have similar outcomes. I am not the only one to disagree with you:

From 'Synthetic Phonics and the Teaching of Reading', Wyse and Goswami, Cambridge University -- '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. We analyse the available empirical evidence in English, and show instead that the data support approaches based on systematic tuition in phonics.' (Systematic as opposed to synthetic.)

The authors conclude:
'There is no empirical research base to justify the Rose Report's recommendation that the teaching of reading in England must rely on synthetic phonics.'
(And there is none to justify the teaching of phonics of any variety to 4 year olds.)

Further:
'the Rose Report's conclusion that synthetic phonics should be adopted nationally in England as the preferred method for the teaching of reading is not supported by empirical research evidence. Rather, as reviewed here, the available research evidence supports the importance of systematic tuition in phonics at a variety of grain sizes (e.g. phoneme, onset-rime).'

And in a further criticism of Rose, the authors argue that in fact a basic element of SP may be counter-productive in the teaching of English specifically:
'"The case for change that we discuss -- rests on the value of explicitly distinguishing between word recognition processes and language comprehension processes" (Rose, 2006, p. 74). However, reading is not simple. Reading is one of the most complex achievements of the human brain. Human brains that learn to read English may in fact develop extra neural architecture that is not developed by brains learning to read more consistent alphabetic orthographies (Goswami & Ziegler, 2006). In written language, as in spoken language, the ultimate aim is communication and comprehension. We argue that teachers are more likely to help children to achieve this aim if government recommendations for practice are built on a rigorous synthesis of the full range of evidence, including research about different languages and effective reading teaching.'

I highly recommend this paper to Feenie, Mrz, Malaleuca, and anyone else out there who has swallowed the SP propaganda whole. You should read it both for accuracy and comprehension.

(Please note it is not a Guardian article.)

SP has in fact been hailed as a cure for the ills of society by the governments that endorsed the flawed report that recommended it, introduced it and standardised it. It was one of the planks of the Conservative election platform. Guardian article on politics/phonics, and Summary of key points from election manifestos for those who take exception to the Guardian.

It has been hailed as a cure for what ails society just as every previous educational magic bullet has been.

I hope you are not suggesting, Malaleuca, by your reference to parents' reluctance to have formal teaching of reading delayed, that the anxiety of parents possessed by the zeitgeist, and not thorough studies and evidence, should be the basis of what is taught to all 4 year olds in schools all over Britain? Educational policy is muddled and misguided enough without anxious parents fearful of someone else's little Johnny getting ahead of theirs weighing in.

At the time my children learned to read, I didn't consider that I had 'done' anything to teach them, as they had sorted it out for themselves. What I thought I was doing was preparing them for formal learning in school, exposing them to books, songs, rhymes, vocabulary through conversation and reading to them. They ended up reading. I wouldn't change anything I did, as I think that kind of exposure would be helpful whether they picked up reading or not. As I mentioned, I worried that they had missed out on a necessary intellectual challenge or milestone, but since they were exposed to systematic phonics in First Grade (age 6ish, in the US) I figured any deficiencies could be cleared up anyway.

mathanxiety - I read that report you linked to.

I only have anecdotal evidence. My DD was taught the rudiments of reading in French starting with analytic phonics; in parallel, she was taught the rudiments of reading in English using synthetic phonics. She was 4/5 years olds at the time and speaks both languages fluently (she has two mother-tongues).

She found the analytic approach in French highly confusing and I don't think it provided any basis for anything. The synthetic approach, in English, using a fully decodable set of books (Jelly & Bean) has worked remarkably well for her and she has progressed regularly.

Fortunately, and strangely, her French school teaches analytic phonics in GS (Y1 equivalent) and then moves to a rigorous, decodable synthetic approach the following year. Approximately 20% of pupils who had been taught using the analytic approach in GS learned to read that year; the other 80% started to learn reading from the beginning using a synthetic approach. None of them are failing to progress (whole class teaching), though some, inevitably, need more teaching time than others.

Mathanxiety - like mrz, maizie, feenie and others, have taught for many, many years. I have taught students from pre-school age to adult, those who learn easily , to those who struggle mightily.
I disagree with the conclusions you have drawn from the Rose Report, Clack, etc.
My own experience would inform me even if the weight of evidence was not behind it. I have most cwertainly not "swallowed SP propoganda whole"

The phonics queen herself has yet again been making a (very confused) case for phonics in the current TES
www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6073421

There is also a link to a video. Which shows a bit of phonics teaching, but mainly just people arguing in favour of it - bit.ly/hE1Xga

If u want to know more about Ruth Miskin, read www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/apr/01/schools.uk2

Even she admits that English has a 'nighmare alphabetic code' and 'red words' which have to be taught not with phonics, but by a 'a rather cicuitous route'.

Thanks for posting the link to the article Mashabell, which I thought was excellent! There was a very odd comment from one of the people who responded to the article though.

The phonics test at six is pointless not only because it would measure much more how much parents have helped, rather than what schools have done

It is surely in general language skills where the literate and bookish home shines. Teaching children to decode is what schools are well able to do - far more achievable IMHO than making big differences to language, vocabulary, background knowledge etc.

The phonics test looks like a simple, straightforward test, of exactly what children have been taught. Surely that's all we can ask of a test, that it is fair, and valid, and tests what has been taught, to see if it has been learned.

"The phonics queen herself has yet again been making a (very confused) case for phonics in the current TES"

Which bit of the article confused you, masha?

"Even she admits that English has a 'nighmare alphabetic code' and 'red words' which have to be taught not with phonics, but by a 'a rather cicuitous route'."

No, she doesn't - you have rather mischievously misquoted her there. She doesn't say red words are not taught with phonics at all, she actually says:

"I keep them out of the picture as long as I can. We bring them in gradually and try to do them phonically as far as possible. We say to the children: look, you're going to have to put more effort into these red words." Of course children won't have to spell out c-a-t all their lives, she adds. Words eventually go into the orthographic store, or long-term memory, and the trick is to find the best and quickest route for getting them there. "For red words, it has to be a rather circuitous route."

So 'red' words are partially decodable, as several posters have noted before.

magdalene I mean they will be unlikely to read any text beyond recognising their own name

mrz - so you are saying that your newly-recruited newyly-qualified YR teacher doesn't know how to teach reading using phonics, even though she was trained as a primary school teacher post-Rose Report?

How do you account for the discrepancy between teaching policy and training policy?

However, the general consensus seems to be that education is in a state of turmoil

I think you missed out a word

However, the general press consensus seems to be that education is in a state of turmoil ... ask parents ask teachers ask children you'll be quoting the DM next

Bonsoir that is exactly what I am saying not only does she not know how to teach phonics, she doesn't know how to teach young children full stop! and this is someone who won a prestigious award as a student.
Interestingly she attended the same university as the final year student I have just mentored who also had minimal instruction on teaching reading and writing (2 hours total)

Do you know why this discrepancy between training and teaching policies exists? Are universities not bound to teach the skills that the government requires them to use when teaching?

sorry, not them but teachers

I'm not in favour of the national reading test for 6 year olds in so far as it is another layer of bureaucracy (schools assess children all the time it's how we know what we need to teach and as far as I can see it is the same test as contained in Letters & Sounds which some schools have used for a number of years) but I do think it will reveal some worrying information (if schools are honest in their results reported).