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.

I can say it is wrong when Masha claims that children struggle to learn to read and write in English because the evidence and experience shows that she is talking rubbish.

Oh mrz - of course English is a lot harder to learn to read than Italian or Spanish or whatever. Why argue the contrary? It just makes you sound terribly ignorant!

The point is learning to read in English isn't hard Bonsoir whatever Masha says and changing the orthographic system so we spell you as U isn't necessary.

There is only a problem because teacher training colleges don't give student readers any instruction - if they do it's generally of the mix and match variety which leaves a good percentage of children without foundational knowledge.

Mrz is correct. When little children are correctly taught and the alphabetic code is well understood by the teacher, children learn to read quickly. Some will take longer (as with the acquisition of any skill) and these are the children who need plenty of practice with good decodable books. These are the children who are so relieved when they see and understand the logic of the alphabetic code.

I'm currently mentor to a final year teaching student who has had no input at all in how to teach reading or phonics

I feel I have better knowledge of honics than my dd's teacher who pronounces nnn as nuh according to dd!

I have a 4.10 year old who reads Roald Dahl and dd aged 3 who reads simple stories, so I must be doing something right!

I find phonics ridiculously easy - really don't understand why it is difficult, after all we expect our reception children to understand them.

sorry, should say Phonics - the 'p' is a bit stiff, having split wine on dh's laptop!

"I find phonics ridiculously easy - really don't understand why it is difficult, after all we expect our reception children to understand them."

Absolutely

It's the teachers who sometimes don't have the necessary knowledge. Unions are anti-phonics; education lecturers are anti-phonics and ignorant - skills-based teaching is much too lowly for them; local authority 'advisers' often come from a mix-and-match background and haven't had appropriate training.

Msz. I don't suppose you are able to name the ITT where your student studied?

If teaching English phonics is so easy, why are so many teachers and other people failing to grasp its principles? - In the rest of Europe any literate adult can teach a child to read without any training.

And Mrz is wrong about Italian. Their 15-year-olds scored slightly more below the average of 500 than the UK in the latest OECD test, which was a comprehension rather than a simple reading test, but there was little difference between the average scores of all the countries. Most were close to 500. What the UK average hides, and the OECD surveys always comment on, is that the UK has some excellent readers but also far more exceptionally poor ones than any other European country.

When a study compared the reading ability of matched English and Italian 10-year-olds on the same words in both languages, the Italians did vastly better.

Princessglitter, u are clearly doing everything right and have very bright children too. Lucky u. But spare a thought for the children who don't get the help from their parents that u have been able to give yours, and who have far poorer language skills than yours, trying to decode the words 'great treat' and 'threat' or 'only one other' and several hundred more like them.

Princess glitter you sound rather like my old self, who (privately) couldn't understand why anyone couldn't do any of the things I found so easy. I'm sure you don't mean to but you sound unbelievably naive about the problems some people have learning to read and are taking credit for things that are not necessarily down to what you've done. If you've any thoughts of teaching anyone except for your dc please go and try to learn something you've always found really difficult. Tennis coaching improved my teaching no end- I finally knew what it was to really struggle with something others found easy. But carry on enjoying your reading children.

littlebylittle - good point, try to learn and teach something you don't have a talent for - I was always quite average in Maths, but very often I found I can explain it better than a Maths teacher with the appropriate degree.

So, what's wrong with teaching the mechanics of reading, the one's who learn words by sight will progress anyway and the one's who need more structure get it.

But what I find amazing is that primary teacher training doesn't include phonics instruction - I would have thought KS1 teachers knew what they were doing? I pick it up as my DS learns to read but 'great, treat and threat' I couldn't decode.

I am a teacher, littlebylittle - not a primary teacher though - have not got the patience. I do understand that some children struggle and yes, my dds are naturally good readers. There is still no excuse for a teacher to not understand phonics - that was the point I was making!

Just wanted to add - I am sure if my children had found reading difficult I may not have had the expertise to really help them - they did pick it up v easily.

However I still think I am entitled to take some credit for teaching them to read - as they did start reading as a result of me teaching them at home. I do not think they would have been at the level they are now had I not done some phonics with them at home.

www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf can you show me where Masha

overall reading Italy -486 UK - 494
access and retrieve Italy - 482 - UK - 491
integrate and interpret Italy - 490 UK- 491
reflect and evaluate Italy - 482 UK - 503
continuous texts Italy - 489 UK -492
non-continuous texts Italy - 476 UK - 506

'An emphasis on early reading before a child is ready to absorb, understand, comprehend and interact is self defeating.'

Early reading can be a double edged sword. Those who can't in a class where it is pushed feel terrible about themselves and those who succeed at it feel marvelous -- neither response is healthy at the age of 4 or 5. The experience of early success or failure in an over-academic setting can be a millstone around the neck of all children.

Maybe comparing the approach to teaching reading in other English speaking countries would be more useful than comparisons with countries whose languages have more predictable pronunciations? They start teaching reading formally in the US in first grade, at age 6-7. My own DCs were all reading before that age, but the systematic approach (phonics, Dolch words, etc.) was a wonder to experience. The whole class progressed through exercises designed to improve the skills Pagwatch described through the elementary years (to 4th grade) once the mechanics were mastered (and they were mastered quickly, even for those children who did not speak English at home).

and functional illiteracy in 9 year olds in the USA is double that of the UK

So is the number of Spanish speakers, Polish speakers, speakers of 'non-standard English' -- the US does a very good job of teaching reading to children who speak English however.

The rankings are brought down by students whose families speak no English, many of whom come from incredibly impoverished and illiterate backgrounds in Central America and Mexico. Even Ireland, which came 5th in literacy rankings in Europe in 2000 has recently dropped to 17th as the influx of non-English-speaking and sometimes very poor immigrants has grown.

It's maybe useful to look at the range of scores in any given country in order to extract meaningful conclusions. An examination of international literacy scores here.

Schoolchildren in just one town have been found to speak as many as 150 different languages at home, highlighting the pressure placed on teachers by growing numbers with little or no command on English.

mathanxiety - it can be a great advantage - many of the children of immigrants - in particular the Chinese - get higher grades than white working class children. Spanish is a very transparent language and this should be an advantage when learning a second language.

The U.S. is riddled with 'balanced literacy' teaching with a smidgeon of phonics thrown in. It's disastrous.

It's not 'within child deficits', not feckless, or poverty stricken parents, not the influx of foreigners. It is the teaching. Mal-instruction. Period.

No balanced literacy baloney in the DCs' school -- it was phonics all the way. Same for the local public schools, which went the fashionable whole language route for a while in the late 70s I was told, but returned to basics when test results indicated phonics were going to have better results. This was a fairly homogenous, middle class suburban school district though, and results for such areas tend to be significantly better historically than results for city school districts where populations are much more diverse economically, racially, ethnically and language-wise.

I think in order to learn to read English a child really needs to be exposed to ever-expanding and improving standard English in the general environment. This is something a lot of Chinese immigrant families try to provide, while many of the children of white working class families do not receive the same exposure to superior vocabulary that some immigrant groups aim for. Knowledge of English has been a huge advantage for East Indian immigrants to the US, a real plus where integration and education are concerned.

It is important that parents come from a culture where literacy is present. Many of the Spanish speaking parents are functionally illiterate even in Spanish. They work long hours and don't have the time to attend English language classes. They live in Spanish speaking enclaves, watch Spanish-language TV and listen to Spanish radio, so the children don't have the exposure to English that they really need in order to develop the necessary ear. If a child is impoverished in his or her first language, is exposed to a limited vocabulary and not much reading material in that language, that child will not progress in English or literacy in school without heroic efforts by the teachers.

I think the Irish experience shows that tweaking of a successful curriculum in order to reach non-English speakers is necessary, that the 'ear' is necessary for most current methods of teaching reading, that continued growth in English language/ vocabulary learning must accompany the learning of reading skills. These factors are assumed to be present, and unfortunately they are not there in the case of every child in every school.

Spotty US attempts to teach non-standard-English speakers (African Americans) standard English before literacy could be tackled backfired due to perceptions of cultural insensitivity. The English that is spoken in large sections of the African American community is not readily understood by a lot of people outside that community. The FBI employs translators for wiretaps, etc. in many cases where suspects are under surveillance. African Americans lag significantly in literacy and academic performance in general in US schools.

Within Britain, there is a large achievement gap between the highest and lowest scorers on literacy and other academic tests. Functional illiteracy hovers at around 20% of the population and has for decades, despite the best efforts of teachers. This is a rate similar to the US rate.

Yes, Mathanxiety. We now have more than a century of evidence that in all English-speaking countries,
"Functional illiteracy hovers at around 20% of the population and has for decades, despite the best efforts of teachers."

And this is entirely due to the inconsistencies of English spelling. U really don?t have to be a genius to see that learning to read with abused letters, like the ?o? in ?only, one, won, once, other, woman, women, womb, wombat? is much harder than with spellings that have only one sounds (keep sleep deep).

The fanatical new evangelists of SP have the daft idea that anyone who draws attention to the reading and writing difficulties which the inconsistencies of English spelling create is against the teaching of phonics. They cannot understand that u can be angry about the educational disadvantages which English spelling creates but also understand how the current system has to be taught, starting with phonics, as James Dunn advocated in a teaching manual back in 1766:

1. Begin with the words that are absolutely regular, in the sense that they are pronounced in the way children would expect.

1. Build into the exercises material that unobtrusively revises earlier work.

1. Give special emphasis to the pronunciation of c and g, the first big difficulty.

1. Introduce other difficulties progressively....

But with spelling systems which have fewer? difficulties?, both learning and teaching to read and write are inevitably much easier, take less and leave fewer children failing.

If we got round to improving English spelling, the children who currently have a very hard time with learning to read and write would have fewer problems. (To anyone without Anglocentric blinkers like allchildrenreading and Mrz, this is totally obvious too.)

We could help to make young children?s much less stressful and confusing by doing very simple things like cutting totally useless spelling dross, by cutting TOTALLY REDUNDANT LETTERS from high frequency words such as ?arE, havE, givE, YOu, frIend? so they become more clearly differentiated from words where those letters serve a function (care, gave, drive, yonder, fiend).

The suggestion may seem outlandish, but would u want to go back to ?olde, worlde, worde, hadde, shoppe?? Until 1650 English spelling was full of redundant dross (if u want to know why,look at How English Spelling Became so Irregular on my blog). The dross-clearing job was never properly finished. We should resume it - to save children some heartache and the country lots of money.

Oh god almighty, there she goes. Masha, you are a complete loon. MNers are no more interested in spelling reform than TESers, possibly even less.

On second thoughts, go and post your guff in Pedants' corner, go on, it would be so funny.

Or you could do an 'AIBU to think that spelling should be reformed'?

Rofl

I have just summarised at
literacyinthenews.blogspot.com/ what learning to read and write English involves.

I will go into more detail just for learning to read next.