The new Y1 phonics screening check

[SoundsWrite]

The government's new phonics screening check is to be launched in England in June.
The results of the test will be given to the parents of each individual child but each individual school's results will not be made public.
What is the view on Mumsnet? Do you think the results should be made public or not? Either way, why or why not?
You can find out more about this test by going to the DfE site: www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/pedagogy/a00198207/faqs-year-1-phonics-screening-check

Cross posted with Feenie's far more succinct post!

Some of the remarks I have explained are not in any way aimed at you.

The rest are in no way taunting or belittling. I think you feel uncomfortable because several people disagree with you - there is an element of 'how dare teachers disagree with me regarding my own ds' here. There is a huge lack of respect for teachers hereand several points have been very patiently explained again and again - but no one is getting upset about it.

As I asked in the (much) earlier post, the thing I was wondering, Lily, if you were able to attempt to read is "meiyou gongchangdan, jiu meiyou xin Zhongguo". I am still wondering about this, as it may indicate if you indeed use phonic knowledge to underpin your reading.

Or the second or third or fourth. Children are perfectly well able to retain a string of GPCs. The fact is that, when children are taught to read in English, there is a certain amount of slightly artificial focus on short (one and two syllable) words in the early phase of synthetic phonics teaching for two reasons: one, that English allows it (in a way that other alphabetic languages don't, because basic words have more syllables) and two, because the number of GPCs for children to learn in English is particularly great and focusing on single syllable words makes the initial learning of GPCs easier. But if a child really masters decoding, he/she will find it very easy indeed to decode a multi-syllable word whose GPCs are all familiar and whose spoken form is familiar (or even unfamiliar) to him/her, even if its written form is not usually encountered in children's books.

singersgirl - "I don't understand what all the fuss about nonsense words is. Children need to learn to read words they've never heard before, whether they are English words or words from other languages."

Projecting the GPCs of English onto written words in other languages before being taught the sounds and GPCs of the other languages is a massive problem for learners of foreign languages. It is exceedingly poor practice (though sadly very widespread) to allow children to do this.

You know that "jound" could never be pronounced "joined" in English because you have decades of experience of speaking and reading English behind you. But for a child who has only a couple of years of reading English behind him, even with very thorough synthetic phonics teaching and decoding skills, the number and variety of alternative graphemes for a single phoneme is such that it is a rational attempt at fitting a known oral word to a written form, not a wild guess.

I wrote a reply and the computer ate it.

In short, I felt belittled. Posts I wrote were twisted around.

I don't feel upset because people disagree with me. But I don't think you are always arguing with what I'm saying, but what you think I'm saying. And on some things we clearly disagree.

In terms of teachers, I'm always the first to stick up for teachers, I think they do get a rough deal in terms of how people think of them. I am in fact a teacher! Please don't suggest I disrespect teachers!

Edith - I'm puzzled by what you're trying to illustrate with your Chinese example, because of course the correspondence between letter (letter combinations) and phonemes is different for pinyin (Latin alphabet transliteration of Chinese) and English - thus "zh" at the start of "zhongguo" would be pronounced (by a native English speaker) as something like "z" at the start of zebra, unless they knew (from prior study) that it was meant to sound like the "j" at the start of "John" (just as, for a French speaker, the phoneme corresponding to "j" at the start of the French man's name "Jean" is quite different from the phoneme corresponding to "j" at the start of the English woman's name "Jean"). Not to mention the further complication that different languages have different phonemes - they all seem to have round about the 40 mark, but precisely which ones is up for grabs (Chinese speakers find the difference between "l" and "r" in English notoriously difficult, English speakers are going to struggle with the clicks in Xhosa, etc.).

I guess in short what I'm trying to say is that decoding Latin alphabet representations of phonemes is language specific. English is particularly troublesome in that there isn't a one-one correspondence (one phoneme can have multiple representations in letters, and a given combination of letters can stand for multiple phonemes depending on the word it's embedded in). It's further complicated by regional and national dialects and accents (something the "simplify spelling"brigade never take into account). Some one from the south-east of England might want to spell "brother" as "bruvver", someone with an RP accent will spell "independent" correctly, but in many accents, it will be pronounced "independant" (sic.) with related problems spelling the word for people with non-RP accents.

LilyBolero, if you feel that you have been 'taunted', then that breaches the MN talk guidelines and you should report.

They may not, however, agree with you.

Absolutely, LurcioLovesFrankie - grapheme-phoneme correspondences are language specific.

Take a word that is spelled the same way in English and French, "pin". In English, it consists of three GPCs; in French, of two. The /p/ sound is very similar in English and French; the /i/ and /n/ are very different indeed to the French /in/.

Lurcio: Lily said she could read some words, not because she was sounding them out, but because she made sight connexions. I chose some language (could have been novel words, I suppose) to see if she were genuinely unable to even attempt to read them, or if she did perhaps really rely on phonic knowledge more than she was consciously aware of.

The rendition may not have been "correct", and that doesn't matter as language specific orthography is not my point, what I was trying to find out was whether she was able (or indeed now, given absence of reply, willing) to make an attempt.

OK, I get where you're coming from now, Edith. Though there is still the interesting question about how the transition between "sounding out" (beginners and hesitant adult readers) and "mostly whole word recognition" takes place (and I gather even experts who agree about phonics as the best method for raising literacy standards agree that this is an interesting research question).

On the whole from what I've read, I think synthetic phonics is a better method for teaching reading to beginners, when taught by a well-trained and imaginative teacher. But the issue of comprehension is still an interesting one. I remember a stage (probably round about the age of 8) where I was deeply puzzled by the number of objects which appeared to have two similar but not quite identical words for them - the spoken word "yoh-t" and the written word "yah-cht" (yacht), "jail" and "gay-ol" (gaol), "kee-side" and "kway-side" (quayside). I'd correctly deciphered the meanings of all the written words from their context, but was clearly messing up interpreting the graphemes sufficiently well to connect them with the correct phonemes. And without large chunks of surrounding text and comprehension skills, I wouldn't have managed to read them at all. So it seems that in my early reading career, both phonetic and whole-sentence issues were in play (note, I'm not talking about the first couple of years of learning here, but later in primary school). Admittedly, I've no idea of how I was taught (at a guess, some form of phonics early on in my very traditional Scottish primary school, followed by some sort of look-say method when I moved to England).

I think the discussion on different sound-symbol correspondences in different languages is interesting, but off topic. I certainly wasn't suggesting that we tell children that all languages follow the same code - merely using it as a way of explaining to a 5 or 6 year old why they might not know the meaning of a word they were reading. Perhaps that was ill-advised and I should have stuck to 'nonsense words'.

But surely the point is still that a 5 year old may not know the words 'hoist' or 'haul' or 'toil' or even that they are real words, but they should be able to read them. Their understanding of sound-symbol correspondences should be strong enough to be automatic. 'Jound' (the example quoted earlier) is no different from any other word a child doesn't yet know.

Of course I've got years of experience. But you don't need to have years of experience to read a word you've never come across before.

But I'm still intrigued by the issue of the lack of 1:1 correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in English. Out of curiosity, how do those of you who are teachers handle simple and common word collections like "though", "through" and "thorough"? It still seems to me that phonics will get you 90%, 95% of the way there, but there are still going to be tricky words (not necessarily obscure ones, either) where the difference has to be learned by rote). Or is there some subtle rule of phonics that I never got taught at school that would let me decipher these correctly first time?

PS interest is not driven by trolling or teacher-bashing - I have a 4 year old who will start school in September, I'm happy that phonics is the way to go, the school at the top of my list uses phonics, and I want to be in a position to help with his reading at home.

Lurcio - your starting point in your post below is a list of words with a common grapheme ("word collection"). The way I have seen phonics taught, in both English and French, is by using the phoneme as starting point and then teaching all the grapheme correspondences to that phoneme.

I agree with bonsoir: those three words belong to three different groups phonically - ow as in mow, oo as in moon, uh as in mud.

Learning that the same sound can be written different ways is an important part of a phonics approach, and is an interval part of how it is taught. There are oodles of others eg f and ph, or ore and aw, ai, ay and a_e. Or the other way round: read to rhyme with red, or reed. "Listening" to what you are reading, and narrowing down possibilities if you have more than one is a learnable skill.

To go back to lily's test example, for an isolated novel word "jound" would be marked as correct whether pronounced in the test as rhyming with "wound" (and injury) or "wound" (past tense of wind) as both are phonically correct.

singersgirl - I think that's where I differ from the teachers on this thread. I don't see why any child "should" be able to decode nonsense words. Decoding is only useful (and it is very useful) inasmuch as it enables the understanding and reproduction of real language in print.

Another example of teachers and the educational establishment becoming so enamored of a teaching technique that they lost sight of the wood for the trees was New Math (Modern Mathematics). It is worth remembering before Y3 children are tested on their decoding skills with a nonsense A4 page of print...

I'm so pleased that's cleared up and I haven't upset you Lily. You are correct I can only make judgements based on the information you have posted which I think I pointed out at the time.

Lurcio, I suggest you start a new thread on the subject of phonics and whole word recognition. It's sure to be as controversial as this one. :)

Bonsoir, I understand the test like this.

Let's say I am a child trying to decode the word "donkey" within a story. I know from the context of the sentence that it is an animal I can ride. I would sound out "don" (quite easy) and then have a choice of "key" to rhyme with hey or to rhyme with key. Only one of these makes a recognisable word and luckily it is an animal you can ride, so I know I have the right choice.

However, if I have not heard of donkeys, and there are pronunciation alternatives, then I will not know which to pick. Equally, if I am quite skilled at guessing by context or at memorising words and have met "donkey" before, then I might read donkey using other skills - which would not always be obvious to teacher or parent.

So by testing words they know, words they don't know, and nonsense words, they make a complete check.

I think children meet "nonsense words" all the time, onomatopoeia in poems and so on. I don't see a problem with it.

Read the thread, LondonMumsie, because I don't any of us want to start again!

singersgirl - I think that's where I differ from the teachers on this thread. I don't see why any child "should" be able to decode nonsense words. Decoding is only useful (and it is very useful) inasmuch as it enables the understanding and reproduction of real language in print.

This is where I think that some of you aren't listening to what the teachers on this thread are saying.

The great strength of learning letter/sound correspondences is that it enables a child to attempt to independently work out any unfamiliar word that they encounter. They may need to be told which 'sound' alternative of a particular grapheme is appropriate in a particular word if they do not have that word in their receptive or expressive vocabulary, but that is a spoken language problem. but they can confidently have a go at anything they encounter.

If the word is not in their receptive or expressive vocabulary then it is, to all intents and purposes, as much a nonsense word as are the nonsense words in the screening check because it does not convey any meaning to them.

With the best will in the world, there is no way that a 5 or 6 y old, however advanced their reading and vocabulary skills may be, will know the meanings of all the words in the English lexicon. To give them the impression that every word they encounter is a word that they 'know' is, at this stage of their reading and vocabulary development, illogical, and can lead to children trying to make an unknown word into a word that they know. I encounter a great many children at KS3 who try to do precisely that. It makes what they are reading incomprehensible to them and prevents them from acquiring new vocabulary (they never try to find out what unfamiliar words mean because they have made the 'unfamiliar' into familiar and don't even recognise that it is a word that is new to them).

Someone,much earlier in the thread, posted the words of a nonsense word poem. How do these parents who strongly believe that children shouldn't be given nonsense words to read cope with nonsense words encountered in reading poems such as this? Or do they steer clear because the poem has no 'meaning?

bonsoir thinks that the check should comprise longer and longer words. Why? Most children at that age aren't expected to be able to decode complex words. Reading long words tell us nothing more about their knowledge of letter/sound correspondences and decoding and blending than short words do. It 'tests' a different skill, that of being able to decode and blend longer words.

All that the Phonics Check is intended to do is to check that children have been taught the correspondences which they are supposed to know by that stage in Y1 and have been taught how to decode and blend to produce a word. It is intended to check that basic skills are in place, not advanced ones.

P.S. It wasn't '1 minute's googling', it took forever to track them all down...

Yes, phonics enables children to read unfamiliar real words via decoding, but the chances are that children will have encountered those words even if they are not part of their receptive or expressive vocabularies and they are part of their unconscious linguistic environment because that is the nature of language acquisition - we need to hear a word many times (especially as a child) before it is registered even in our receptive vocabulary.

Nonsense words are not part of that unconscious linguistic environment that helps a child read an unfamiliar word (asking himself "does that sound like a real word"? as a child decodes). We all use that strategy, even as adults. My DD decoded a word with which she was not familiar, "Trafalgar", this morning putting emphasis on the third syllable. She hesitated, because it didn't sound "right" to her ears, even though it was phonologically plausible. Take a word like "jound". I can well imagine a child decoding "jound" in his head and then self-correcting to "joined" because joined "sounds right" because it is a real word.

Asking children to decode nonsense is asking them to suspend their knowledge of how real language sounds. It is a big ask for a fluent reader - much less of an ask for a hesitant decoder who doesn't yet automatically make the association (which will in due course happen in his brain) between the decoded word and meaning based in real language.

I can well imagine a child decoding "jound" in his head and then self-correcting to "joined" because joined "sounds right" because it is a real word.

That's where someone needs to step in and help, because trying to mould any unfamiliar word into a real word may stop a child from learning any new words at all.