How bad would it be if I taught my daughter to read...

[JeanBodel]

---using whole word recognition rather than phonics?

She's 3, she loves books, she wants to read them herself. She's an autumn birth so she won't go to school for another two years. I don't think either of us can wait that long for her to start reading independently.

I've got a whole set of Peter and Jane's (yes, the very set I learnt with 30 years ago). I really don't want to spend lots of money on Jolly Phonics when I know I can teach her with the books I already own.

I just dread getting into trouble with the reception teacher. I don't mean to criticise teachers or phonics in any way. I can see how annoying it would be to have a kid in your class who's shouting out the word without segmenting it.

All advice gratefully received.

Tinuviel actually many schools still aren't teaching phonics and some of those who claim to be teaching phonics are still using mixed methods as the recent phonics test trials have demonstrated (something like 75%)

But I learnt with Jane and Peter too, and we certainly "spelled words out" as it was called in those days. How else would you teach that there's a relationship between sound and orthography? And why would you need to buy a set of special books to teach that c-a-t are spoken together as cat?

umf you don't need to buy any books to teach that. A set of magnetic letters or letters written on pieces of paper you can move around to make new words is all you need.

peter and jane v. ORT:
i think, possibly, the reason why ort has lasted longer is the fact that money was swilling around from the mid nineties onwards when ort first saw the light of day and oup cleverly joined itself to the government' hip.Also, books were much cheaper to print, globalisation meant that quarter of a million upwards could be printed for a few pence a copy. Mark-ups were/'are huge meaning that there was masses of money for marketing/ advertising and so on...
peter and jane were around in a time of austerity - their great merit was - as far as I can remember - that there were only 12 x 2 books ie 1a to 12b whereas I understand that ORT goes on for eternity - well reading 300+ books about biff and chip must seem an eternity. Are there really more than 300 of them?
The other merit of peter and jane was that they clearly demonstrated what a sexist world exxisted, even in the 1970s. Peter climbed trees, Jane did the washing up!

I have to say, though, it's one of my worries about phonics-only that it does often seem to carry with it this insistence that everything else is wrong.

What do you class as 'everything else'? The only thing I have said is that teaching words as wholes has the potential to be damaging.

I have also said that if you teach phonics you don't need to teach anything else. That is not 'you mustn't teach anything else' particulary, it is just that once you start teaching phonics you find that you don't need to teach any other word recognition strategies because the phonics does it all. But, if you've never taught phonics exclusively you will never make that discovery.

I must also make it clear that phonics is for teaching word recognition and spelling. It is most emphatically not for 'comprehension'. Comprehension is a language skill. If a child understands a word when spoken it will understand it when it is read.

As to statistics in the past, it is hard to pin anything down, but in 1990 an Educational Psychologist called Martin Turner noted that the reading ages which were regularly reported from LAs (because they were collected and reported in those days) showed a decline. He wrote a pamphlet about this, called 'Sponsored Reading Failure', linking the decline to the rise of whole word and 'look & say' teaching. He was promptly sacked from his LA job and LAs ceased reporting reading ages.

The National Literacy Strategy was introduced in 1998 in an effort to improve literacy standards (you see, govt did know that something was wrong). KS2 English SATs results did improve initially (though Professor Tymms of durham University demonstrated that the 'improvement' came from children who hadn't actually been taught to read with the NLS as they'd started school before its introduction, so things must have been improving slightly), but they hit a ceiling of 80% at L4 early in the 2000s and have barely moved since. Yet individual schools with poor catchment areas and a huge number of children with English as a Second Language (not nice leafy suburb MC faith schools) consistently mangaged to get 90%+ L4s. So a higher percentage than 80% is clearly do-able. Mind you, these schools taught good systematic synthetic phonics..

If you want to look at it another way, the NLS itself was like a massive 'research project' and the data we have from it shows that children stuck at 80% L4 for English when taught with the mixed methods 'Searchlights' (which teachers were bullied into teaching by LA Consultants and Advisors). That is 1 child in 5 functionally illiterate. And if anyone tries to tell me that a L3 at the end of Y6 represents 'functional literacy' then they should come and listen to my L3 Y7s reading.

Although systematic synthetic phonics has been Govt guidance since 2007 it is clear, as msz pointed out, that it will not show much effect as the evaluation of the Y1 Phonics Check pilot found that 74% of the 300 schools involved still taught 'other strategies' for word recognition. I think we can fairly safely say that the 'sample' was large enough to be able to extrapolate that figure to English schools. And if that weren't enough, all the reading threads on here demonstrate that many, many schools are still not teaching phonics properly.

'If a child understands a word when spoken it will understand it when it is read.'

I'm not disputing, just wondering if you can offer me a perspective here: what do you think is going wrong when someone can read something aloud and yet not seem to understand it? Is it that they're concentrating so hard on the process of saying the word that they don't have the mental space to remember it? (I know you didn't say reading aloud specifically so that may tbe the answer, that it's different, I'm just curious).

I know a child should understand a word when it is read if they can understand it spoken; I'm trying to work out what the problem is when that doesn't appear to happen.

So what phonc based reading schemes are there? (ds is loving Biff and Kipper et al and don't want to deprive him)

There are numerous reading schemes available to schools

Such as?

Seems so bizarre to me that kids wouldn't start to learn to read before school age. They learn shapes, colours, speech ect before school generaly, so seems odd that learning to read is very much school-led.

Surely if a child attends school as a free-reader, during the Literacy part o the day, said child could read a book, rather than have to a-a-a-ant etc?

Someone who researches education told me that, on average (and no matter what culture or language you're in), children learn to read around age 6.

3 or 4 must be pretty unusual no matter what you do, and people do mention it as unusual when their children learn at that age, don't they?

I'm kind of tired and on my way to bed, but I'd just like to reiterate my concerns (which I don't think you've really addressed) about the ways in which phonics-only systems are themselves damaging. I think we have to remember that we're trying to create readers, not decoders, and that reading is a wide ranging, emotionally complex phenomenon that draws on a whole variety of skills and experiences. My main worry is that by focusing so tightly on effectively disparate phonic units, the wider context, the reasons for reading and the reasons for loving it are lost.

That's actually partly the root of my suspicion of the research results, or at least of the way in which they are presented. The thing we know most clearly of all from research is that the most important predisposing factor for developing reading is a home environment which models a positive relationship with reading. So how can you analyse the reasons for changing literacy levels without including at least an attempt to incorporate an understanding of the contribution of factors external to the reading scheme used? How can you ascribe changing literacy levels simply to teaching methods without also trying to evaluate the effects of other things like (off the top of my head) increasing numbers of tellies in the home/use of computer games/family breakdown/social deprivation etc?

I think you also need to be very clear about the difference between what's best for the majority and what's best for the individual. I'm sure you can gather statistics to show that in poor catchment/ESL areas the use of phonics has a massively positive effect - but aren't those likely to be exactly the kinds of contexts where the enriched wider context is least likely to be present, so the differential across the group is obviously going to be greater?

But that's very different from saying that for kids who've grown up with books and family reading all around them, are very verbally and literarily aware, and are already engaging with the form and meaning of written words, one should deliberately restrain their enthusiasm and interest in order to stop them from accessing words except through a prescribed system and order. That seems to me to be a deeply damaging and counter intuitive proposition.

Is it that they're concentrating so hard on the process of saying the word that they don't have the mental space to remember it?

It might be. Is this a problem your child has? Have you tried getting them to re-read the sentence once they have decoded the words in it? Do they recognise the word when you say it?

It might be that what they hear when they say the word isn't what they hear when it is spoken around them. So it might be the sign of a auditory processing problem (but I am not an expert on these matters).

I do know someone on another forum who has done some research on children not appearing to understand a word they have read (but he never gives any details, so can't point you at anything...) I believe he uses a device which the child speaks into and which relays their voice to them as what is heard by other people (because apparently, what you hear when you speak isn't what other people hear). As I have never had the real details of this it is hard to explain...

Can the child read 'silently', do they understand the word when they read silently?

You are right, it is interesting, but it is uncommon...

It's actually a problem I have!

I can read silently fine. I don't think there is an auditory problem - could be wrong.

Sorry, I just wondered about it reading your post, if you'd know tthe answer.

I was wondering if it was to do with how I was taught, I was wondering how I could avoid passing it on, you know? Is it a sort of 'complication' of any of the teaching methods discussed here?

I'd just like to reiterate my concerns (which I don't think you've really addressed) about the ways in which phonics-only systems are themselves damaging.

I would be very interested to know where you are coming from in this. Are you a teacher/ex-teacher or a parent who has read a book?

All I can say is that your 'concerns' are straw men and you sound very much as though you are quoting from a book. Phonics teaching does none of the things which you claim for it and the notion that there should be one way of teaching for the privileged and one way for the 'deprived' is really absurd.

It has been interesting to look at your use of language in this discussion. Your protrayal of phonics teaching has been consistently negative in tone. If it weren't late and I'm on my way to bed, too, I'd find some examples. It is a negativity that echoes everything I have read that has been written by the mixed methods advocates.

(My pumpkin soup is very boring (first time I've made it) any suggestions on how to pep it up?)

Melted cheese? Toasted cumin seeds? Crunchy bacon bits?

Woah! This thread got nasty in places.

Thanks for an interesting debate, and all the advice I have been given.

I am going to use a common sense approach. Read into that what you will. :)

Anon
apparently it is very common for children to be diagnosed with unspotted problems if they begin to learn a language with a different alphabet

Paulesu found that dyslexic Italians tend not to know that they are dyslexic until they start to learn English. Because Italian spelling is much more regular, even people with the dyslexic brain-wiring manage to learn to read and write easily.

The main reason for the endless disagreements/debates about how best to teach children to read and write English is because of English spelling. If u want to know more about this, look at my EnglishSpellingProblems blog. (It?s against MN rules to give links to your own stuff.)

But if u look at just the 100 most used English words, or numbers 1-10 or the days of the week, u can see that many words do not have entirely phonic spellings.
59 out of the 100 are easily decodable:
a, and, as, at, had, has, that, an, back, can,
in, is, it, if, did, him, his, with, big, little, this, will, first,

get, them, then, well, went, her
not, on, from, off, so, go, no, or, for,
but, much, must, up, just,
been, here, see, came, made, make, I, like,
our, out, about,

new, over, old, they, their.

The other 41 are much TRICKIER:
hE, oF, thE, tO, wAS,
All, bE, OnE, sAId, wE, yOU, bY, mY, cAll, cOmE, cOUld, dO, dOWn, intO, lOOk, mE, nOW, Only, Other, rIGTt, shE, sOmE, thErE, tWO, wHen, wAnt, wHAt, wHErE, wHich, wHO, your
arE, havE, beforE, morE, werE.
(he, of, the, to, was, all, be, one, said, we, you, by, my, call, come, could, do, down, into, look, me, now, only, other, rigtt, she, some, there, two, when, want, what, where, which, who, your
are, have, before, more, were)

It does not matter a jot how children learn to read, as long as they become fluent fairly quickly.

Nothing puts children off reading more than having to spend a long time learning to do so. Any parent who has a child who is keen to learn, and is able to help him or her learn quickly and painlessly, should go for it, using the method which works best for them.

And regardless by what means children learn to read, they all have to use phonics for learning to write, although with inconsistencies like ?men ? mAny, bed ? sAId, end ? frIEnd?, even that needs more than just phonics, in the sense of simple linking of sounds to letters.
Masha Bell

All I can say is that your 'concerns' are straw men and you sound very much as though you are quoting from a book. Phonics teaching does none of the things which you claim for it and the notion that there should be one way of teaching for the privileged and one way for the 'deprived' is really absurd.

Now look, this is spectacularly condescending, and disingenuous. To mis-represent my wondering about where some of the statistical bumps are coming from as some kind of reading-scheme social discrimination is just dishonest.

And you can't just say phonics 'doesn't do these things' without actually engaging with the specifics at any level. Some of them may have got lost in he discussion, so I think it might help if I set my concerns (about the phonics-only method, NOT about phonics as part of a range of reading and early literacy skills: these are shared both by other people on this thread and by professionals) out very clearly: I'd be genuinely interested in seeing your specific responses to them.

• the system takes no account of the need to develop a whole reader
• it decreases emphasis on the 'literacy-rich' environment which has been proven to be the single most important factor in any child's literacy acquisition
• it doesn't actually reflect the reality of most children's experience of words in their environment, so you're asking them and their families to engage in an artificial delaying exercise

- restricting children's experience to decontextualised sounds and chunks is demotivating - a 'sound a day' means that the length of time a child is 'preparing to read' rather than actually reading is hugely elongated - again, demotivating

• the emotional content and context of reading, which is one of the key issues in developing independent readers, is left out.
• long-term (and this one's just something I wonder sometimes, after anecdotal reports, not sure how you could measure it) it seems to inhibit the development of the ability to read quickly and 'skimming' as a skill.

I'm not a professional in the way you suggest - but reading's an interest of mine. I genuinely have no axe to grind, though - my suspicions are drawn from my own experience, not from any party line. That being said, I don't think you can dismiss the fact that the teachers unions aren't favourable to phonics-only just as them being dinosaurs who don't want to admit that what they've been doing for years is wrong - that's pretty insulting to their professionalism and their experience.

Can I make (politely, I hope) a conjecture of my own? If you're working professionally with kids who are already struggling and need help, your perspective's going to be very different from those of us whose kids have a positive relationship with reading, and whose primary concern is to develop happy and independent readers.

My experiences of being taught to read in the seventies do match what has been said here about the lack of good phonics reading...and I have exactly what Feministdragon describes in that I read very well in my head but find translating new written words to sounds very hard indeed and I rely on hearing others say the word first (I have the same difficulties with sight reading music and learning foreign languages). Its a problem that runs in the family but is less of an issue as time goes on as fewer words are entirely new to me!

The difficult in decoding became a major problem for me at middle school who used the dreading reading test to judge not only my reading age but also my intelligence and I was labelled remedial. So I understand exactly what Indigo was trying to say about the dangers, even if unintended, of linking intelligence and reading ability.

Ironically, I think my experiences have made me a much better teacher as I am very clear that understanding can be demonstrated in many different ways.

My DD is now learning to read and not finding it the easiest of things. But I do enjoy seeing how phonics teaching works because it is making me really think about how words sound sare constructed and how decent decoding works.

moonstorm 4 Nov 11, 10:56:01 PM Such as?

Songbirds (pub OUP)
Big Cat Phonics (pub Collins)
Phonics Bugs (Pub Pearsons)
Floppy Phonics (pub OUP)
Sounds & Letters (pub OUP)
Rigby Star Phonics (pub Rigby)
Rag Tag Rhymes (yellow door)
Dandelion readers
Project X phonics (OUP)
Jelly & Bean (Follifoot Farm?)
RWI (OUP)

to mention a few

My personal opinion/experience is that ALL children benefit from a solid phonics foundation and very few fail to grasp phonics but many are failed by whole word learning. I'm speaking as the mother whose son has never grasped phonics but is an excellent reader and a teacher who has successfully taught hundreds of young children to read. If I could turn back the clock for my son (HFA) I would have put far more effort into teaching phonics and not been fooled into believing the EP who told me he didn't have a problem because his reading age was so far ahead of his chronological age when clearly he had a major gap in his learning.

But nobody's suggesting that phonics isn't important! It's whether or not to exclude everything else that's at issue.