Teaching your children to read - your job or the teachers?

[clarlce]

Apparently, according to Ms Frost, 33% of parents NEVER read to their children.

What lengths should parents go in supporting their children in learning to read?

I volunteer as a reading assistant in my local primary school and the variation in the level of ability, in one year group, is significant and would certainly make it extremely difficult for a teacher to accommodate all those differing abilities.

From my point of view i cannot understand why any parent would want to hold their child back, especially as the benefit of a one-to-one session with mum or dad can have about the same impact as weeks of school.

I am not just talking about reading to your children before bed etc. but actively, imaginatively teaching them how to read as a teacher might.
Is it a parents responsibility to make the teachers and, of course, the child's life easier?

I am not blaming the English language for anything, only its rotten spelling system.

And I am totally baffled why anyone would want to deny that learning to read and write with the mere 38 totally consistent spellings of Finnish is bound to be much easier than with the 205 inconsistent English spellings, of which 69 even have variable pronunciations.

Learning to write French is similarly harder than Spanish or Italian, because French also uses quite a few unpredictable spellings which have to be learned word by word. But in no other European language is learning to read and write as difficult as in English.

No other Latin-based language abuses the alphabetic principle to the extent that English does, by tolerating not only far more spellings for identical sounds than any other - ?tea, see, me, ski, key, quay, siege, seize, people, police?, but allowing identical letters to spell different sounds as well, such as the in ?on, once, only, other, tomb, woman, women?.

U may be totally opposed to doing anything about it, but why anyone should want to close their eyes to what makes English literacy acquisition exceptionally difficult puzzles me.

Maybe learning to read and write English makes us cleverer than those poor sods who can only read and write an easy language

Maybe the Chinese are extra, extra clever because they don't have a phonetic written system at all

OMG - all those poor illiterate Chinese people. :( Who have never been to school :( Maybe they should change to a phonetic language as well. (Although as Chinese is tonal god knows what it would look like)

Must be why Chinese students do so badly.......

masha no one is arguing that it isn't easier only that it being easy doesn't prevent literacy difficulties as you seem to be asserting

No other Latin-based language abuses the alphabetic principle to the extent that English does Could it be that English isn't a Latin based language it is Germanic?

Sorry, Mrz. I should have said no other language with a Latin-based spelling system.

But research in 1963-4 with i.t.a. proved that English speaking children can learn to read and write much faster, and with less failure, when English is spelt more consistently. I don't think u can get any clearer evidence that when literacy learning is easier u get less failure.

In 1953 the House of Commons passed all three stages of a private member's Spelling Reform Bill. But without government support, the Bill had no chance of being passed by the House of Lords. Its success in the Commons did however persuade the then Secretary of State for Education, Miss Florence Horsbrugh, to fund research to establish if traditional spelling really did impede children's progress with learning to read and write. The London Institute of Education and the National Foundation for Educational Research were entrusted with the project. It took them several years to prepare the requisite new teaching materials and persuade enough head teachers to take part in the experiment, but in 1963-64 the carefully designed one-year study was eventually carried out. It compared the literacy learning and general educational progress of 873 children who learned to read and write with traditional English spelling and an equal number who were taught with the more regular spellings of the Initial Teaching Alphabet www.omniglot.com/writing/i.t.a..htm.

The study proved very clearly that traditional spelling impedes children's literacy progress, when compared with the use of a more consistent spelling system. It left no doubt that if English spelling were to be improved, we would reduce the literacy problems which so many children exhibit now.

Children using i.t.a. learned to read far more easily and much faster. They also read more fluently, made fewer errors and gained higher comprehension scores. None matched the very poor progress made by several children learning with traditional spelling.

The writing of children on i.t.a. was also superior. Their compositions were longer and contained a much wider vocabulary. They also showed more enthusiasm for learning, not just of reading and writing, but all subjects.
So why are these research findings not better known?
After the study, many schools continued to use i.t.a. - in the hope of obviating the need for spelling reform. This was due largely to Sir James Pitman?s powers of persuasion.

Pitman was aware that learning to read and write English was harder than other languages, but he was not keen on spelling reform and thought that he had found a means of circumventing it. He had become convinced that a temporary use of the more regular i.t.a. spelling system would give children a sure grasp of the alphabetic principle, and that this foundation would enable them to cope more easily with the many irregular English letter-to-sound relationships, when they eventually met them.

It didn?t. Learning to understand how alphabets are generally used, with the temporary use of i.t.a., did not help children to cope with English spelling irregularities any better than my understanding of the alphabetic principle, grasped from the regular letter-to-sound relationships of Lithuanian and Russian, helped me cope with English inconsistencies on meeting them at the age of 14. The ablest pupils suffered little harm from the interim use of i.t.a., but slower ones regressed severely on switching to normal English spelling.

Unfortunately, once schools had embarked on this experiment, they tended to persevere with it for many years, despite growing evidence that it did not help to improve literacy standards. Teachers became embroiled in disputes about the implementation of i.t.a., how long it should be used and how the switch to normal spelling was best managed.

They found it hard to believe that Sir James Pitman had been wrong, along with some other prominent individuals. Sir Allan Bullock who in 1975 produced a government-commissioned report on reading and writing standards in the UK, had also recommended that school should try i.t.a.. On 2 June 2001 a whole-page spread in the Daily Telegraph rightly described the use of i.t.a. as "a cleer case of educashunal lunacie". But sadly, it made no reference to the 1953 Spelling Reform Bill or the 1963-4 research which proved beyond a shadow of doubt that improvements to English spelling would make learning to read and write much faster and easier.

Yes English uses the Latin alphabet which is the problem - 26 letters to represent 44 phonemes ... perhaps we should start a campaign for a new alphabet

Mrz
English uses the Latin alphabet which is the problem - 26 letters to represent 44 phonemes
That isn't the problem at all. It's not even using 91 main spellings for its 44 phonemes. If they were used consistently, learning to read and write English would be a little harder than other languages, but not much.

Its reading and writing difficulties are caused by having 114 unpredictable spellings, in addition to the basic 91, such as
Cat - plait meringue
plate - wait weight straight great vein reign table dahlia champagne fete
and all the rest which u can see at
englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2009/12/rules-and-exceptions-of-english.html

but they aren't unpredictable masha they are related to etymology and the meaning of the words. Changing the spelling of words would cause confusion with understanding.

I agree that parents have some responsibility in helping children learn to read as there is no way children can reach their full potential through school alone. However, there is a regular lament that children can be taught incorrectly not using phonics which will later hold children back. IMO the parents need to instill the love of books and shared stories, teachers teach phonics, parents read with the child and comment on areas of success and difficulty i.e. words not understood explained, getting them to sound out etc and the teacher assesses the level or the parent if they understand the criteria and how to assess.

I have regularly written in dds contact book that x was read fluently and have asked for her level to be evaluated ? move up now? This has been very successful and now at 5.7y she is on orange officially although able to read harder texts at home since the holidays began. I chose not to teach dd to read before school and worried that I would do it wrong , however, DH and I are committed to enhancing her learning and she is expected to read for at least 10 mins per night

captain just to pick up on you saying that your dd is able to read harder text at home,my dd(5.2) is exactly the same as i think many dc are,however this does bother me as i genuinely feel school are holding dd back(school have a ridiculous system where the whole reading group are on the same band and last time they all even moved to the next band on the same day).
She did get turned off reading last year as a result and also lost her confidence somewhat.
So what we have done is lots of library trips in the holidays and also joined reading chest which we will do alongside the school reading scheme,dd's confidence has soared and she has regained her love of reading,quite often she will be reading in bed in the morning if she wakes up too early and the other morning i caught her reading a copy of The magicians nephew,although the jury is out regarding comprehension on that one

I think it has to be a balance regarding the level because just because a child decodes words well doesn't mean they are not on the right level i.e. comprehension and speed of reading have to match. DD1 decodes well and her comprehension is amazing but she hasn't got the stamina for chapter books yet and gets sick of reading after a few pages. So orange is the right level although she is capable of more . If she went onto more words she would probably lose interest and confidence iyswim.

PS Mrsshears we are lucky in that because of my job the teachers tend to listen to my judgement and dd moves up if I suggest she is able

I see it quite simply. Kids have more contact with parents than teachers. Early years reading is not rocket science for literate parents so there is no esxcuse not to help. In saying that I think teachers have an important role in selecting things as they understand child reading skills better.

Netherlee, Early years reading is not rocket science. Indeed. It is a long and slow process which requires quite a lot of patience, but for most children it is a matter of
learning the main sounds for English letters and letter strings with regularly spelt words and phonic readers only to begin with (or proper phonics). This stage involves mainly words such as
englishspellingproblems.co.uk/html/learning_to_read.html

After that children need to be helped to learn more and more of the words which have tricky bits in them (one, two, said). This is much more difficult and was not called 'phonics' before, but 'whole word' teaching. But synthetic phonics includes the teaching of tricky words as well.

By changin the meaning of 'phonics' SP advocates have left parents much more confused about what teaching children to read involves.

^ it is a matter of
learning the main sounds for English letters and letter strings^

This is where you keep getting it wrong. masha. Children are NOT taught 'sounds for letters'; they are taught (or reminded of, because, unconsciously, most of them know them) the 44ish sounds of English and how they are represented by a letter or group of letters.

This may seem the 'same' to you but I can assure you that the two approaches are completely different. Sadly, your approach has led you to believe that learning to read and write is some sort of elocution lesson. The sounds don't fit the letters; the letters fit the sounds. That is why people all over the world, with completely different ways of pronouncing English words, can all read and understand the same written English words.

Mashabell Sun 21-Aug-11 08:25:47

Netherlee, Early years reading is not rocket science. Indeed

So why do you keep telling anyone who will listen that learning to read English is too difficult for most children?

But it isn't a long slow process masha most children have mastered it by the age of 7

''it isn't a long slow process masha most children have mastered it by the age of 7''

That's right, if children are taught with fidelity by well trained teachers using a top class synthetic or linguistic phonics programme.

At St Thomas Aquinas school, at the end of three years of Sounds-Write, of fifty children who started YR and finished Y2, 98% had spelling ages in excess of their chronological ages. Of those children, 64% had a spelling age of 9.6 or above. www.sounds-write.co.uk

Sigh.

Oh, if only it were that easy.....

It's a lot flipping easier than masha makes out

I think there lies the truth of the matter - whoever teaches has to have patience! If a parent can't be patient they should leave well alone because it will be more damaging for the child to think they get everything wrong and that they can't do it, then they lose confidence which takes time to rebuild. If you're going to help be patient and encouraging, not critical and judgemental

Apologies as I haven't read the whole thread, but I just wanted to throw in an idea.

I have 3 DC. They have all taught themselves to read in English. They go to a Welsh medium school and so are taught to read in Welsh, with English only introduced from Year 3. Yes we read them stories in English as well as Welsh, but nobody has ever taught them to read in English. DS1 could read Roald Dahl etc by the time he started Year 3, DS2 was reading Harry Potter in English aged 6. DD is 5 and can read basic sentences in English. Their reading in Welsh is better than their reading in English, but their reading in English isn't far behind.

Now much as I'd love to believe that my children are incredible geniuses, I am quite sure that they are not. Welsh is different to English in many ways, including different phonics and different letters, so they can't really have picked up reading in English from learning to read in Welsh (apart from sentence structure, punctuation etc). So they have taught themselves. Also as we are in Wales the curriculum doesn't push reading at an early age, it is common to not start reading in any language until Year 1.

So, if we left children to it, but surrounded them with books and stories, would they eventually teach themselves to read?

I think some children would if it interested them, but not necessarily all iyswim . Mine could do basics before going to school but like you its not because of me, more their love of books ......but then like you I surrounded mine with books and instilled a love of them

It's not my job to teach my child to read, but the teachers ds has had so far haven't got a friggin clue, so I have had to.