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?

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

A few probably would but it's not exactly a reliable method for ensuring that all children learn to read

Although you can see a difference between Welsh and English the teaching principles remain the same (or should do). Once these are understood it would be easier to self teach reading another language.

BUt there are a great many parents around who have discovered that immersing their dcs in books has not contributed one iota to their learning to read...

I believe most would learn to read if read to and surrounded by an environment where people read and books are fun, we learn to talk and that takes time and practice . It would take that bit longer (TV, computers) now. Spelling would be lots slower.

Unfortunately unlike speech, reading and writing are not natural processes. Some children will naturally learn the code we use from exposure, the majority won't. Having said that children who share books with an adult do have an advantage

Iggly - you believe wrong. If your child picked up Reading quickly you were lucky. That's all. Lucky.

Do you equally think all kids will pick up maths if we surround them with numbers and show them that maths is fun? Or science?

Why do we need to teach kids at all? Why do we send them to school?

I think interest is highly likely to be there in most children at the right time for them. If people are constantly refering to signs and reading them out and reading in front of child and reading to a child. I do think most would learn to read especially by having their parents slaves say what it says. Phonics teaching was not invented at the same time as the written word. There will be cases where they will need more structured help (dyslexia and other special needs). Is speech really that unlike reading and writing we are now far beyond rudimentary communication eg tenses used (I know I have to correct Ds on grammar, sentence structure and pronounciation), on a daily basis though I agree we have far more exposure to the spoken word. A teaching routine at school will certain speed up the learning for most.

Historically very few people have learnt to read with no formal teaching.

Almost everyone learns to read by being taught. Whether they're taught using phonics or some other method.

The majority of people learn to read because they're taught.

Some people are taught and never learn to read. The majority of people in the US and the UK who can't read have been to school, been taught to read, and were still not able to learn how to read.

A very small minority never go to school, are never taught to read, and still learn to read. Very small minority.

Sorry iggly but phonics has been around since writing began

We are far more exposed to the written word now though. Printing presses (cheap books), signs everywhere, instructions on games, computer websites... In the past communication was very visual and verbal (stories passed down by word of mouth, stained glass windows in churches). Guess we would need a section of society to for go formal teaching to assess the impact, did they not try to do that with maths teaching somewhere?

It was tried with reading iggly and turned out hundreds of children who couldn't read

I said "phonics teaching" they may have tried whole word first! Though there was probably not a definite way of spelling a word.

When was it done, where abouts, what numbers, were parents well educated themselves, what kind of environment, I am very interested ?

Phonics teaching was not invented at the same time as the written word.

I rather think that it was! As the written word (in most languages) is based on the allocation of a symbol to a discrete sound (phoneme) 'phonics' is the most obvious way to teach this to the uninitiated and would have followed on very closely from the 'invention' of writing! I don't think our forebears would have messed about with wacky theories of 'whole word' teaching, they just got on and did the job in the most obvious way.

When was it done, where abouts, what numbers, were parents well educated themselves, what kind of environment, I am very interested ?

From what I have read, 'whole word' theories seem to have emerged in the 19th century and were based on teaching deaf children to read. Before that everyone used good old 'phonics'.

The practically wholescale adoption of 'whole word' teaching took hold in the UK after WW2 (imported from the modern, lively, forward thinking USA). It had lots of enthusiastic and charismatic adherents who brainwashed generations of young teachers. Cognitive psychologists researching reading began to prove whole word theorists wrong in their assumptions from the 1970s onwards, particularly as methods of research benefited from improved technology which could capture the physical processes involved, such as eye movements, more accurately. And now, of course, we have brain scans and fMR imaging.

Sadly, instead of taking note of research and adjusting teaching methods accordingly, the profession seemed to collectively stick their fingers in their ears and sing 'La, la, la' very loudly. Most people educated in the past 4 decades in the UK have suffered from whole word teaching. Some came through unscathed, some can read but not spell and a very significant 20% can't really do either to any degree of competence. What is more, a large proportion of that 20% is needlessly labelled as thick or SEN.

I'm from a science background so probably more nosy curious than average so happy to teach myself something if only to find out what everyone is on about. I guess my family are too.

The Comprehension Hypothesis claims that we learn to read by reading (Goodman, 1982; Smith, 1994a), and that other aspects of literacy competence are the result of meaningful reading. Reading, it is claimed, is the source of much of our vocabulary knowledge, writing style, advanced grammatical competence, and spelling.

You will find the results in
Chall, J.S. 1983. Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Second Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Adams, M.J. 1990. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, Massachussetts: the MIT Press.

(see maizie I hunted out my Frank Smith )

Thanks Mrz

There is lots of research coming out of the US about the failure of whole language (for most children).

My son is hyperlexic related to ASD so read at a really young age with no instruction but that is very unusual and his sister with the same "immersion" didn't read until she started school.

Was it a good laugh, mrz?

I bought a very cheap copy of his 'Understanding Reading' about a year ago (cheap from amazon.uk, the identical book costs squillions second hand amazon.com; it is obviously still considered to be a key text in the US), my first reading of a complete work by him. It was just as bizarre as the extracts I have frequently seen quoted.

It was very odd re reading it after 20+ years (confess I skimmed) ...frightening!

Mrz, Even if most children reach their age-appropriate reading level by age 7, it takes them 120 weeks to do so. This is 10 times slower than in Finnish, Italian or Spanish.

You are assuming it takes until the age of 7 which isn't the case.
My reception class children are reading at their age appropriate level so are the Y1 children so are the Y2 ... (in fact they are exceeding the expected levels) so your point is ?

Mrz
The Comprehension Hypothesis claims that we learn to read by reading. In English this is certainly true to some extent, because children have to move up through reading levels, and the amount they read makes a big difference to their ability to read. (In other alphabetically written languages they can read anything once they have learned to read.)

The Literacy Trust has just published another survey about children's attitudes to reading and attainment www.literacytrust.org.uk/assets/0001/0336/Omnibus_reading_2010.pdf One of their findings was
^a greater proportion of those who agree with the statements that they prefer
watching TV to reading, that they do not read as well as other pupils in their class, that they
read only when they have to, that they cannot find anything to read that interests them, that
they would be embarrassed if their friends saw them read and that reading is more for girls than
boys read below the level expected for their age compared with those who disagree with those statements^.

A somewhat convoluted way of saying that those who like reading and read a lot become better readers than those who don't.

masha it really would help if you read what has been posted

Haven't been on Mumsnet for a while - interesting thread. I've heard it said that teachers don't want children taught to read before as well but I wouldn't take any notice. I agree that the best thing we can do as parents is model and encourage reading for pleasure.