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.

Sadly I have to agree with Indigo most interventions aren't a quick fix for the relatively few children who have "real" difficulties and for them it is a long hard slog to find strategies that help.

Perhaps just to make it clear Reading Recovery can't be delivered by parents helpers, TAs or teachers it involves specially trained RR "teachers"

Right, that's very useful info mrz. Of course I wouldn't spell you as 'u' - just interesting to hear a range of ideas! So why are parent helpers used in schools?

So they can hear children practise their new-found decoding skills - particularly essential for those children who never get this at home.

Parent helpers provide practise for children who can read at some level because like most things the more you read the better you become once you know how. Children who are struggling to make that first step need teaching. I don't see RR as the answer it is very expensive and doesn't have long term benefits according to independent research although RR's own research suggests otherwise.

My disagreement with Masha lies in the fact she passionately believes that by changing the English orthographical system to include using U not you will raise reading achievement.

Indeed. The fact that some loons people believe that the world is flat is also a point of view - but it is total hooey, and as such needs to be challenged.

Ok, point taken. All I am saying is that it is good to hear all opinions and of course challenge them if you disagree. Thanks Mrz for your opinions. I now understand where you are coming from. I have some questions re reading mrz but will use another thread!

'charter schools' (essentially private schools independent of school districts) should be set up (Engelman runs such a school) -- Engelman can't be taken out of the context in which he works, which is specifically the American school system

Engelmann does not run a charter school, or any other school (I believe the only one he has ever "run" was the Bereiter-Engelmann preschool at the University of Illinois back in the 1960's). He has been involved in a number of school-improvement projects, most recently through NIFDI, the National Institute for Direct Instruction, which provides instructional and organizational support to schools and districts. NIFDI is a private company, not a school; it's run by Engelmann's son Kurt and others. Engelmann himself is still working on developing new curricula.

wrt Zig Engelmann and Direct Instruction:

"Some critics of DI see it as a betrayal of the humanistic, egalitarian foundations of public education, or as a "canned" or "teacher proof" curriculum deliverable via unskilled teachers. DI has been criticized for being so inflexible that it "handcuffs" teachers. More radical critics argue that the entire history of public education in the United States has been a political one, designed primarily to domesticate lower socio-economic groups, and that DI is in keeping with this broader, historical purpose. Libertarian and traditional conservative critics see the approach as too authoritarian and susceptible to political agendas.

Some proponents see DI as a means to promote social justice. All students?including poor and otherwise disadvantaged students?deserve to learn. Learning to read well increases the likelihood of high school graduation and the degree and quality of future employment. Similarly, it decreases the likelihood of incarceration and other socially undesirable outcomes."

This is from Wikipedia but it expresses what I meant by the storms that swirl around efforts to reform teaching practice and also educational administration itself in the US.

Engelmann's Direct Instruction model (I didn't realise he no longer has a hand in running any particular school) has been relentlessly promoted by him and by his son Kurt (the elder Engelmann started out as an advertising executive), especially as a solution for the enduring problem of educating inner city and disadvantaged children. A critique of the method and the methodology of studies supporting his work here. A teaching method that eliminates the disadvantage of some young children remains elusive. Indications are that an approach that does not take into account the emotional and self-identity aspects of learning and group dynamics is one that is doomed to fail. That is why I feel it is important to identify the optimal age for beginning reading instruction, if such exists. There's more to it that just imparting basic decoding skills.

"A critique of the method and the methodology of studies supporting his work here."

An analysis of Project Follow through HERE

Sadly for all you free thinking spirits out there research shows that repetition and 'rote learning' are more effective at securing basic knowledge than the incidental, learn by discovery stuff of constructivism.

Securing basic knowledge is only a part of the story. If it's accomplished in such a way that children are put off further learning or further learning needs to be adult-directed, are told something about themselves that may or may not be true or relevant in the long rum (that they belong in the slower group, for instance), and end up no further along in the end than children exposed to a different approach (that has as one of its merits that it at least did no harm to a child's self image) then why persist at it? Most children learn to read eventually.

Follow Through was designed to see what method from a wide selection had the greatest impact on the educational outcome of disadvantaged children up to 3rd grade (age 8 or so) -- this is only one section of the early childhood population, and the DI method may or may not have long term benefits even for this group. (afaik, Follow Through did not address the needs of students whose first language was not English, another major variable in the US, especially in big city districts where a large chunk of the population may well speak Spanish)

For children who are not disadvantaged, DI may not be necessary or may not be felt to be necessary "Follow Through demonstrated that public policy is based on public support, not on empirical evidence. Thus, the position that officials adopt with respect to teaching methods is most likely to be congruent with the position of the majority" (from your link, MaizieD) this is an indication that the majority of Americans with a stake in education (parents, etc) are actually quite relaxed about the things that British parents, etc., feel a lot of anxiety about.

Unlike Britain, American parents have a more or less direct say in the educational trends in each school district (the level at which basic decisions are made, such as curriculum, with many approaches to choose from and a non-centralised administration) and since property values in any given community depend at least partially on the image of the schools within it, this is something that preoccupies local voters and they tend to go to District meetings and make their feelings heard.

And there are many stops along the line between behaviourism and constructivism.

Hmm...

1. What evidence do you have that learning through constant practice and repetition 'puts children off learning'?

2. Why is DI only thought to be useful for the 'disadvantaged'?

I might have the US school system completely wrong, but from what I understand, schools have very little independence to choose reading programmes. And individual teachers have no say at all.

The thought of completely uninformed parents having a say on the curriculum is very scary. It might work beautifully in nice middle class districts, but what about parents who aren't interested? It also seems to have the potential for all kinds of abuse...

I do not believe that the "English orthographical system" needs changing to "raise reading achievement".
I think only this can be achieved by brining silly spellings which disobey the main rules should into line with them, e.g. 'u' as the open 'u' in 'use, unit', just as 'I' follows the pattern of an open 'i' in 'ice, item, ire'.

Anyone interested in testing if making English spelling more regular would make learning to read easier, can do so with any 5-6 yr old who has just learned basic English phonics and test him or her with more sensibly spelt tricky words, such as 'hav, giv, liv, sed, frend, enny, menny, tuch, tuf, cof, throo, wun, dun, wimmen, wunce, lo, mo, sno, sho, baut, caut, faut", i.e. with any of the hundreds of words which children now spend a cupl of yeers lerning after mastering basic fonnics.

But if yor blinkers ar firmly in place, u wil nevver test this and carry on pretending that lerning tu reed English is as eesy as enny uther language.

Wen I helpd children hoo had reeding difficulties and wer cleerly getting no help at home, I used to help them lern to reed 7-10 tricky words at a time by folding the paper doun the midl, riting the werds with thair normal spelling on the left and and in simpler spelling opposit, telling them to cuvver those up and tu use onely wen not shure how tu reed the normal spelling. It workd a treet, but thay kept asking wy wee can't spel sensibly like that aul the time, because it made reeding so much eesier.

But if yor blinkers ar firmly in place, u wil nevver test this and carry on pretending that lerning tu reed English is as eesy as enny uther language.

Wen I helpd children hoo had reeding difficulties and wer cleerly getting no help at home, I used to help them lern to reed 7-10 tricky words at a time by folding the paper doun the midl, riting the werds with thair normal spelling on the left and and in simpler spelling opposit, telling them to cuvver those up and tu use onely wen not shure how tu reed the normal spelling. It workd a treet, but thay kept asking wy wee can't spel sensibly like that aul the time, because it made reeding so much eesier.

What do you think magdalene?

"I do not believe that the "English orthographical system" needs changing to "raise reading achievement".
I think only this can be achieved by brining silly spellings which disobey the main rules should into line with them, e.g. 'u' as the open 'u' in 'use, unit', just as 'I' follows the pattern of an open 'i' in 'ice, item, ire'.

Anyone interested in testing if making English spelling more regular would make learning to read easier, can do so with any 5-6 yr old who has just learned basic English phonics and test him or her with more sensibly spelt tricky words, such as 'hav, giv, liv, sed, frend, enny, menny, tuch, tuf, cof, throo, wun, dun, wimmen, wunce, lo, mo, sno, sho, baut, caut, faut", i.e. with any of the hundreds of words which children now spend a cupl of yeers lerning after mastering basic fonnics.

But if yor blinkers ar firmly in place, u wil nevver test this and carry on pretending that lerning tu reed English is as eesy as enny uther language.

Wen I helpd children hoo had reeding difficulties and wer cleerly getting no help at home, I used to help them lern to reed 7-10 tricky words at a time by folding the paper doun the midl, riting the werds with thair normal spelling on the left and and in simpler spelling opposit, telling them to cuvver those up and tu use onely wen not shure how tu reed the normal spelling. It workd a treet, but thay kept asking wy wee can't spel sensibly like that aul the time, because it made reeding so much eesier."

Masha, you are completely barking.

Hey - I know. Let's not teach children of 5 or 6 years old any further reading/spelling rules, we could just change the entire English language to look like a 5 year old has spelt it! How could we have missed this obvious solution

Jeez, talk about dumbing down.

or just plain D U M B

Shouldn't that be dum

U R rite

I'm a bit stumped by 'lo', 'baut', 'caut' and 'faut'..

1. What evidence do you have that learning through constant practice and repetition 'puts children off learning'?

The rote type of learning is incredibly boring and does not foster creativity or any sort of thought process. Additionally, with DI, the reward system is incompatible with the concept of learning for its own sake or because a student finds learning enjoyable. The teacher takes central place.

2. Why is DI only thought to be useful for the 'disadvantaged'?

It was tried out on the disadvantaged initially, and designed as part of the War on Poverty in the Johnson administration with the aim of bringing disadvantaged children up to the level of middle class children. The hope was that eventually education would help eradicate poverty. The Follow Through experiment was also designed (poorly) to assess the effect of DI on the disadvantaged. The disadvantaged students had not experienced the whole language exposure that other students had in their earliest years. It was recognised that 'disadvantage' meant less exposure to a wide vocabulary, less exposure to standard English, and less effort by parents to contribute much stimulation to their children's lives.

"I might have the US school system completely wrong, but from what I understand, schools have very little independence to choose reading programmes. And individual teachers have no say at all."
-- Individual schools are all part of a school district, except for parochial and other independent schools (Montessori for instance). The number of schools in a district varies. Most have just a few schools but there are huge city districts too. Decisions on curriculum are usually made at district level and are based on basic state mandates but are also made at school level where individual teachers get a say. It's not set in stone. Most school districts reflect the aspirations or lack of aspirations of the communities they serve. The state mandates are usually the very basic skills expected of children at each stage. A lot districts have curricula in place that require students to exceed those basic state requirements.

"The thought of completely uninformed parents having a say on the curriculum is very scary. It might work beautifully in nice middle class districts, but what about parents who aren't interested? It also seems to have the potential for all kinds of abuse..."
-- Yes, there are large swathes of the US, particularly deprived urban areas, where parents are completely uninformed and who often feel completely excluded from any say in their children's education. The result is schools where students fall far behind their peers elsewhere. Large districts have been targeted in the past by reforming superintendents who have indeed found all sorts of abuse, corruption, gross waste of money, schools plagued by horrible maintenance problems while administrators took home fat salaries...

You can lead horses to water but you can't make them drink. This is very true of education -- there are parents who couldn't care less, who are maybe overwhelmed by their own lives to such an extent that they have very little to offer their children (the charitable explanation).

A friend of mine taught at a school in a very deprived area when he first qualified. Students came to school without winter coats in the coldest of winters (in the northern midwest). The teachers bought hats and gloves for students but when these went home they never came back again. Second time round, they kept the hats and gloves in the classroom for use at lunchtime only. If books went home for students to practice reading with, they were never returned. In his first year of teaching, only one parent showed up for the parent/teacher meetings. The biggest secret in education, a truth that many teachers feel they dare not utter in the US anyway, is that there are parents who simply do not care and who have a giant chip on their shoulders about school in general. Their children arrive in school with a limited vocabulary, poorly socialised, having never been exposed to the richness of the spoken word that their middle class peers have. School is a convenient place for the parents to dump the children during the day. Schools can't assign homework with any expectation of seeing it done, as the parents will not co-operate in providing pencils, etc., for the students to write with. My friend found it incredibly frustrating.

For those parents who are interested, getting their children through school in a deprived area is an uphill struggle. The differences in performance and in expectations and in what different communities across the US are able to provide for students are enormous and very hard to tackle as long as people who are motivated to find better for their children can work really hard and leave for the burbs. You are right that the system simply does not work well without the full co-operation of everyone, but the elephant in the room is that there are parents who are not interested, and realistically it is only occasionally that the child of such parents succeeds in school.

Not sure if this is relevant but my school has started using Read Write Inc.
My dd2 was not getting on that well with kust phonics but in 4 months she has gone up 4 stages. Now we are reading magic key books and she really loves it.

I think they use more pure phonics but i could be talking rubbish. I did go to the meeting honest.

Can I say that if you dont like the English language dont teach it? Why try and change a language that, if I remember someones figures correctly, 80% of the population have no problems with? The other 20% will need more intensive help at the beginning of their reading lives.

Read Write is one of a few very good programmes - your daughter is lucky to have it.
You're quite right, Ronshar, about 20% needing more intensive help at the beginning (it becomes obvious after just a few weeks in Reception which children will need that help. Nothing to do with intelligence, feckless parents etc). Around 1%-2% need very specific phonic training for the first 2-3 years.

If all teachers were given a thorough grounding in synthetic phonics and were able to use'light-touch' instruction throughout Stage 2, the spelling problem would be virtually eliminated.

But, what would Masha do then? How much "simplur tooo spend bilyuns of pOWnds on reprinting all writun wurd mateereal in the English langwaj. Wot a brilyant idea.

Sorry AllChildren - Not all children learn to read, even with very specific phonic training for the first 2-3 years.

My DD has had that. She has been on Read, Write Inc for almost 3 years now and can't read at all.

The SpLD EP has observed her in Read, Write, Inc and has said that it is being delivered appropriately and is at the right level and she is engaged. He has said that school are doing absolutely everything right and he has no further recommendations as to what can be done to help her. (He has also said she has very high cognitive abilities)

So there is some (small) percentage that just can't learn to read in a reasonable time frame.

It's not helpful to claim that all children can learn to read with high quality teaching.

Although it is fine to claim that almost all children learn that way.

Oh dear!
The notion that 'all material' would need to be reprinted at the cost of billions is too silly to comment on.
It is even more incredible that a phonics guru like Debbie Hepplewhite does not appear to know the main English spelling rules. Nobody who does would come up with silly spellings like
"simplur tooo spend bilyuns of pOWnds on reprinting all writun wurd mateereal in the English langwaj".

The only tricky words in that sentence are:
to, written, English.
'to' - which has 2 different meanings and sounds (t'go too London) and louts the main spelling pattern 'so, no, go, solo, panto';
'written' has a useless 'w' and
'English' starts with the same sound as 'in India'- it obeys the German spelling system instead of the English one. ('Ingles' in Italian and Spanish.)

I'll remind u what the main English spelling patterns which readers have to learn to sound out are:
a, -able, a-e, ai, air, al, all, ar, are, -ary, -ate, au, augh, aw, -ay,

b, ca/o/ut, -ce, ch, -cial, -cious, -ck, -cy, d, -dge,

e, -e, ea, ear, ee, e-e, ei, eigh, eir, er, -er, ere, eu, ew, -ey,

f, g, ge/i, -ge, gn, h,

i, -ible, -ic, ie, i-e, -ie, igh, ir, is,

j, k, kn, l, le, m, mb, mn, n, ng,

o, -o, oa, oar, o-e, -oe, oi, ol, oo, -oor, or, -or, -ore, -ory,

ou, ough, -ought, oul, our, -our, ow, oy,

p, ph, qu, qua, quar, r, rh,

s, -scious, -se, sh, -sion, -ssion, -sure,

t, -tch, th, -tial, -tion, -tious, -ture,

u, u-e, -ue, ur, -ury, v, -ve, w, wa, war, wh, wo, wor, wr,

x, y-, -y, --y, y-e, z.