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 you are extremely selective in which research you choose to believe based on nothing more than your own bias and backed by no personal experience that I would say is very dangerous

It is truly sad that someone would choose to ignore the conclusions of excellent research

Are you saying that Wyse & Goswami's paper is 'excellent research? Why should their 'research' (which that paper isn't, it's just a paper setting out their objections to SP teaching) be any more 'excellent' than that of other researchers in the field of 'reading'. How about Greg Brooks, who submitted a critique of their paper in the next volume of the Journal of Research in Reading? (not available on-line as far as I know unless you subscribe to the journal)

Their paper is a roundup of the excellent research of others and a comprehensive critique of the Rose Report including the Clackmannanshire studies.

And to answer your earlier question 'please explain why these methods have been used in schools for the past few decades and why, with these methods, there has been a consistent 'failure' rate of 20% (based on the only 'national' measure of 'levels' at the end of KS2)' -- it is because the powers that be have done exactly what Mrz, et al, have chosen to do when it comes to research; that is, to ignore it.

Would that be the Greg Brooks whose critique of the proposed reading test for 6 year olds appeared recently? The same Greg Brooks who said at a UKLA conference '(Prof. Greg Brooks, who was present throughout the day, was invited to join the panel and contribute some remarks on the Rose report and synthetic phonics.) He said that he did not think there was enough research evidence that showed that phonics is good for comprehension, and that there was no clear evidence as to which of synthetic or analytic phonics was the better. He did, however, say that for beginning readers synthetic phonics was a ?clear winner? for teaching word identification. He also stated clearly that synthetic phonics was now part of the Framework and could not be evaded.' A ringing endorsement then of SP as envisioned by the government, by Greg Brooks.
[[http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=167&n_issueNumber=58]

Maizie,
The research of Wyse, Goswami and Brooks is 'more excellent' because they are bilingual or trilingual.

Acc. to the latest research by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the brains of biliguals perform at a higher level.
See 2nd half of Indi article
www.independent.co.uk/news/science/speaking-a-second-language-can-delay-dementia-onset-for-years-2219280.html

really Masha your research isn't "more excellent" because you speak many languages ...

No mathanxiety we have chosen to look at a huge range of research (not just that supporting a narrow view) and looked at with background experience ... surely if research said snow was black you wouldn't question it if your experience said no it is white ...or would you?

mathanxiety

I've been flamed previously for being too academic in my dislike of Rose, and share your view about how policy was formulated ignoring evidence, so have some sympathy.

Yet the government's own meta-analysis (Torgerson et al, 2006), privileging RCTs, did show that systemic phonics teaching produced better results. Whilst that report was keen to show that the case for synthetic phonics was as yet unproven, neither did it find any other systemic method superior. I've tried to fit new studies into these data, and don't find they alter them greatly. Rose goes much further than this, and I hate it for doing this and pretending it wasn't, but...

faced with established SP programmes which are a subset of what works, and cannot be shown to be a substandard group of that set, surely SP is the practical choice to go down (even if you are sceptical on the SP/AP debate)?

Where I sort of lose patience with the insistence on SP is because SP needs to be taught well, as all acknowledge. Railing against how SP has been misunderstood and poorly trained for is good and valuable, but doesn't change the fact my DSs will read better with a teacher enthused and teaching using Searchlights than someone who feels obliged to deliver SP and expects them to make duh-/o/-guh into dog not dogger.

I think it is indeed hothousing if you see reading at reception age as a competitive sport.

Mrz, it is hardly as clearcut a case as you seek to make out. I think it is actually the SP booster club that has decided to ignore all but the very scant research (that is at best inconclusive) favouring SP. There is very much the air of zealotry about most of the 'SP and nothing else' arguments here.

Adela my suspicion about SP in particular and the haste to implement it is that it is more teacher-proof than other systematic methods this is a double edged sword that may end up costing the teaching profession far more than is currently anticipated, not to mention the quality and value of early years education for the children who will be the subjects of the vast experiment that is contemplated. (Because this has not been tested on 4 year olds up to now.)

The testing component raises the possibility of interjecting a level of 'quality control' into the process of teaching that will result in a huge amount of pressure on school administrators, teachers, and saddest of all, small children, to 'perform' -- and all at an age when other English-speaking children in different parts of the world are proceeding at a much more relaxed pace.

I think there is a strong element of hothousing to the programme. The scheme reeks of business school models applied to the classroom, assembly line education; raw material in one end, processing accomplished in prescripted stages (all of which can be tested) throughout the year, and finished product out the other end at the end of the year.

I think teachers who are thoughtful and flexible should be worried that their work is going to become micromanaged and scripted to a high degree, and I think parents should be worried that their children are going to be shoved through a giant shape sorter to an even greater extent than they are now, without regard for their individual quirks or individual learning styles, or individual neurological development. It will be teaching by numbers and learning by numbers.

"I think there is a strong element of hothousing to the programme. The scheme reeks of business school models applied to the classroom, assembly line education."

The thing is, mathanxiety, that some sorts of learning are very efficiently done by a highly analytical approach. My DD learned to swim and ski very successfully and ultra-fast with a highly analytical approach. Of course, she then has a long way to go before being proficient or elegant in either sport. But the basic movements are, in my opinion, very well taught when broken down into tiny components and then built up again. None of us think, surely, that there is anything odd about arithmetic being taught that way?

Good SP teaching isn't really 'teacher proof' (or just technical) since all good SP teachers (and Rose in the SVoR) are very aware of the need to develop reading by focusing on language comprehension and general knowledge of how books work, even if they don't wish to do that alongside primarily GPC-building or decoding tasks.

The worry to me is more that SP seems teacher proof, which might mean one side of an SP programme being delivered by a series of technicians who ignore the need for the other. Or that 'better' training focuses on making it a purely technical method.

AdelaofBlois - I agree very much with your sentiments, and I am a little about the way my DD is taught SP in French, with almost no exposure to real books in the classroom. They do endless writing, copying, dictation etc but very little comprehension.

Not that I am worried about her, because she gets ample literary and verbal input at home. But for a child not getting that input, it is worrying.

I think the attraction of SP for Whitehall is precisely that it has the potential to be done by rote and that 'better' training will aim to make it purely technical, as you say. "Good teaching" -- there lies the rub. The outcomes for students whose SP teaching will not be optimal despite the best efforts at quality control will be equal to the outcomes for any method with sub-optimal teaching, imo. Good teaching is the holy grail of education.

Bonsoir, one of the criticisms of SP (as outlined in Rose and now enshrined in the UK reading curriculum) is the lock, stock and barrel adoption of the 'simple view of reading' -- 'clear differentiation between word recognition processes and language comprehension processes, so that teachers could assess performance separately in each and plan different kinds of teaching for each dimension...' described here.
'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 think you are right to worry about children who are not getting the literary and verbal input at home.

Swimming and skiing involve firing on all cylinders once you take your foot off the bottom or find yourself pointed downhill with a pair of skis strapped on after only a brief practice in the shallow end or the baby slopes. Both of those sctivities can also be learned by being dropped in at the deep end too, so to speak. To deliberately separate decoding from comprehension is similar to teaching swimming by having a child practice their leg kicking and arm movements while lying on a kitchen stool -- you still have to learn some of the most vital components of the skill once you hit the water.

Arithmetic can be taught by rote or by other means, but that is a bunfight for another day.

mathanxiety - I think you don't know much about sport . Having watched my DD learn ski-ing, swimming and reading (in two languages), pretty much simulataneously, I can assure you that the pedagogical approach was incredibly similar!

I think you are overstating your case on SP. Like all pedagogical practices, it is not infallible, and it certainly shouldn't be used in a language vacuum. But apart from that, I think it's incredibly straightforward and useful.

mathanxiety

Being able to assess what is causing comprehension problems in younger learners has been a real boon to my practice-and I would not hesitate to say that there are learners across the ability scale who demonstrate great disparities in their decoding and language comprehension skills, and benefit from appropriate intervention.

The problem I have with Rose's SVoR is not that, but the insistence (to avoid Searchlights multi-cuing by the backdoor) that 'language comprehension' skills should be taught only implicitly by some nebulous environment, and that there is NO difference between written and spoken language (because there is, and being able to explain it would help comprehension greatly).

But I don't think that is really anti-SP or even anti-SVoR, so much as a problem because Rose obviously adopted it to recommend SP (not the other way round) and couldn't be bothered to do what good SP teachers do-which is fill in the other side of the SVoR equation imaginatively and sensibly- nor to explain what interventions might be appropriate there.

The problem is not so much the evidence or best practice, but what might be done with the rushed job that was Rose once it attains canonical status in training as well as in schools. And good SP teachers are as worried about what that means as their non-SP wanting opponents.

Since I've taught decoding by phonics all of my teaching career it is pretty safe to say Rose has had no influence on my practice whatsoever and as I keep telling mathanxiety I don't consider myself a SP teacher as my background is in LP.

Well hold onto your hat, because Rose is about to influence your practice significantly, Mrz. Did you read that link you posted a while back? The 12 exemplary schools one? SP is the wave of the future, and it is coming to a school near you soon.

Adela I am with you on the difference between written and spoken language. I think the testing element of the new SP regime will operate against teachers who wish to balance or mitigate the full-on SP approach Rose envisions.

Sadly the way departments of education work imo is that once a question is considered 'settled' the case is closed until some crisis emerges or gets drummed up, or an election rolls around, and then some new Rose will be set up to figure out where to go from there, as fast as possible, and the next set of magical proposals will be PR'd and implemented.

Yes I read it mathanxiety (you did notice it was from 2008 didn't you?) you seem to be reading things that aren't there and jumping to conclusions.

Since this seems to be the place for it, any reponses to this, before I get quite excited. Seems to leave off much where this thread did...

Thanks more bedtime reading

mrz said:
'I don't consider myself a SP teacher as my background is in LP'.

Would you mind explaining this please, mrz.

maverick I studied Linguistic Phonics and prefer the "label" to that of Synthetic Phonics which I personally don't think "sells" the product to parents

Just a few cursory remarks, Adela:

4.3 'The check will continue to assess only decoding using phonics because this is the crucial skill which enables children to become effective readers.'

Sheesh, they really have 'got religion', don't they? It's the zeal of the born again...

(Where would I even start with a statement like that?)

'4.18 One purpose of this check is to drive good quality, systematic teaching of phonics in schools..' Quality control, Mrz, and again '4.19 The check should also allow schools to benchmark their performance in the teaching of phonics, so that they can drive improvements where necessary and set suitable expectations for their pupils.' Read in conjunction with 4.3, I think you should forget about not teaching SP.

The whole paper shows that the SP policy really is a massive experiment. Clearly there are a lot of kinks to work out even in the test with the choice of non words where two or more pronunciations would be perfectly logical and where EAL children pronounced w/v. A test of phonic decoding skills where children are allowed to effectively sight read words is not going to tell anyone what they need to know about how effective the teaching of SP is. The discussion of difficulty levels belies the stated aim of simply finding out who needs an intervention. If this was really the purpose of the test, then a simple cutoff could be identified. I suspect nobody yet knows what constitutes a reasonable standard for Y1, and that this will emerge over the course of a few years.

'A number of children, including mid or high ability pupils, did make a surprising mistake on the cvc non-words, despite their simple structure. This could be because children on this age sometimes make unnecessary mistakes or the font used was unfamiliar, but it may also have been because some pupils needed to get used to the idea of decoding non-words.'
This discussion of non-word difficulties is ridiculous. The font is presumably the same as that used for the real words. And they can figure out the statistical likelihood of messing up on the real vs non-words. What they saw with the non-words was that children are probably not simply decoding words based on their SP exposure, but learning to read by a multitude of different paths despite SP being the one true religion. It's a classic case of seeing a phenomenon and drawing very obtuse conclusions.

The whole point of including non-words that have not been seen before is that they must be sounded out. Surprising failure means something is wrong with the theory underlying the method (suggesting that learning to read is not as simple as the SvoR suggests, or the teaching is not effective, or perhaps the teaching is fine but the children are not capable of absorbing SP at the tender age at which they are taught)

How they drew the conclusions they have drawn in Annex C is still baffling to me.

mathanxiety

4.3 'The check will continue to assess only decoding using phonics because this is the crucial skill which enables children to become effective readers.'

perhaps it's because comprehension is already being assessed (we are talking 5 & 6 year olds) in Y1

4.18 One purpose of this check is to drive good quality, systematic teaching of phonics in schools.

quality control is the only real purpose I can see for making it a national test

4.19 The check should also allow schools to benchmark their performance in the teaching of phonics, so that they can drive improvements where necessary and set suitable expectations for their pupils.'

I think we will be OK as our pupils learn at a faster pace than L&S

As I haven't read the whole document yet I won't comment further

No, Mrz, they are saying that SP is the only way to teach decoding and they are going to test to ensure compliance with the new religion, not because comprehension is already being tested.