Yr 1 Phonics test - what if your child can already read?

[MayaAngelCool]

Can we have them exempted from the test? From what I gather, such a child is likely to fail the test as it includes lots of 'fake' words written phonetically. Children who can read well are thought to be likely to try to guess what real word these words are similar to, rather than saying what they actually are, and thus fail the test.

The Pearson Phonic Test information conveniently avoids saying anything about this problem. Anyone know?

If they are on a high reading level then presumably they have a good understanding and comprehension etc. IMO this should also mean they are probably able to follow a simple instruction - ie read these words as you see them etc.

At the end of the day, like mentioned up thread somewhere, all new words are nonsense words to a child, my DS has a very high reading age so often comes across words he has not seen before so uses his phonics knowledge to attempt to read them, this is all the test does.

It's not a reading test, it's a phonic decoding check. There is a big difference.

singersgirl I agree completely, the thread title has been annoying me for days - I can read, and I have no problem reading nonsense words, so a child 'who can read' should equally have no problem. A child who is struggling with reading, or more correctly, phonics, should be identified. It would be different if they were told all the words were real, but they aren't they are told they are nonsense.

learnandsay DS2 (5) was reading nonsense words the other day no problem at all - things like zebrapotamus, decoding them fluently as he went along. They were part of a story about strange animals. His school give a good grounding in phonics and it really shows. He knew the words were nonsense and therefore he had no problem reading them. The words in the tested are marked as nonsense, so a child shouldn't be sat there trying to work out how to make those letters fit a real word.

I was taught look and say (and read very well at a very young age) - never did any phonics - learnt them as I have taught my DCs to read. Makes me laugh the idea that "leaning hundreds of words" is an oddity - every word I know (over 10,000 I would expect) has been memorised. When we're actually reading fluently we're not decoding as we go along, we're just pulling up the stored memory of the word. With my dyslexic DC he actually makes progress when he no longer has to decode a word but can say it on sight - in other words it's been committed to his long term store of words.

''Makes me laugh the idea that "leaning hundreds of words" is an oddity''

Makes me sad when people mistake anecdote for data and think we can memorise every word 'by sight'.

Some people might need phonics to get there, but ultimately maverick we can and we do

No we don't. 2000-2,500 is 'the absolute limit (lifetime learning limit) of a human's ability remember which abstract symbol (or sequence of symbols) stands for which word'.

The whole word method leads some children to believe that they must memorize each word as a random string of letters. This makes learning to read exactly like trying to memorise the telephone directory. 'Like printed letter strings, telephone numbers contain a small set of symbols ? Unless all numbers are dialled correctly and in the right order the connection will fail ? Unfortunately, there are no systematic or predictable relationships between these strings and their corresponding entries; so each of the many thousands of such associations must be painstakingly committed to memory. There may exist a few rare individuals who are capable of memorizing entire telephone directories, but for the average child about to learn to read, the absurdity of this task should be obvious' (Share. Cognition 55/2.1995. quoted in Goswami)

I am not advocating the whole word / look and say learning method. I know very well that it is an impossible way to teach (at least certain) people to read - my DS would know about 10 words in total if the whole word approach had been persisted with (his disastrous first school). But I also absolutely refute the idea that most people aren't using their memory to read once they can do it (and some people can learn that way).

"When we're actually reading fluently we're not decoding as we go along"

Actually brain research using MRI suggests that is exactly what we do when we are reading only we aren't aware we are doing it because it takes just milliseconds.

maverick: I think that limit is rather on the low side, or it cannot include those who read Chinese.

There are roughly 80000 characters unlike English which has over 1 million words. Estimates suggest you only need to know 3500 characters to read fluently and a highly educated citizen will know 6000 characters

I agree, and the 6,000-8,000 characters typical of a well educated person, or the 3,500 for adequate literacy are way more than the "absolute limit" suggested above. And although there are some 'clues' within some characters (eg in the radical) they are too few and too unreliable to short cut this much. And then you need to learn how all these symbols combine into other lexical items.

BTW: I'm not defending look and see for alphabetic languages!

Nonsense mrz - there are less than 200,000 words in the OED which are in common use! 1 million! Talk about over-statement to support your case! And 80,000 characters (if that's right) is 40 times more than the limit maverick reckons we have! A load of tosh

Nonsense mrz - there are less than 200,000 words in the OED which are in common use!

Well, that's odd because I have a dictionary at school which states on the cover that it contains 1 million words.

Depends how you count them, actually - do you only count words once - what if they have two meanings? Do you count those separately? What about inflections/derivatives,etc,etc?

This Oxford Dictionaries article suggests that the figure is close to three quarters of a million, again depending on how you count.

The complete Chinese writing system consists of from 40,000-70,000 characters (accurate estimates are difficult) each representing a one-syllable word. Modern dictionaries contain only up to about 8500 characters, 7000 characters are a typical set for a newspaper font, and a reader who knows 3000 characters is 'literate'. Although 1500 characters can be too few for functional literacy, this may be too many for ordinary folk to learn. In order to reach the masses, Mao Tsedung deliberately used only 3000 character types, and only 750 types made up about 95% of the text of his vast writings (Taylor &Taylor, 1983: 35,).

home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writchin.htm

So what happens I you have a child that is reading purple and using other strategies. Will they get the help if they fail?

They must have additional phonics help provided, yes.

I think the test has been administered this week and we've been told he needs to practice his sounds at home. Gives us 6 weeks to help him. I'm so annoyed as I raised this as a problem 6 weeks ago grrrrr

That would have been a practice - the check must be done during the week beginning June 18th. Sounds like your school is panicking a bit - they won't be the only school worried by now about their quality of phonics teaching.

Does anyone know whether we'll get to see a breakdown of results by education authority?

It would help if they actually moved away from biff and chip and got some decent more up to date books. I'm guessing that's down to funding.

No, the school results must be reported centrally, but they won't be made public. Parents will have individual results reported.

Up to £3000 has been made available as match funding for phonics materials this year - so whatever the school spends, the government will match.

yy stopthinking - I spent ages recently trying to explain the punchline of an ORT Biff Chip et al book to DD, that had as its punchline Chip showing Dad her photos of the Land of the Dinosaurs, only to find there was no film in the camera......