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?

KitKatGirl1Sat 19-May-12 16:43:18 asked:

"Would really like the input of phonics experts/advocates on the impact of phonics teaching on spelling. I understand all the research on reading and the 20% who don't learn properly with mixed methods and fully understand that phonics is the best method to teach most children to read (but also that it doesn't happen in a vacuum and that children who are read to/spoken to/understand context and have a large natural vocabulary surely make better overall progress) but how does a child armed with good phonics skills make an accurate choice on which is a correct spelling?"

I personally don't think we've even begun to explore how really well we can teach spelling in terms of the teaching profession as a whole.

The main official guidance for teaching spelling for Key Stage Two is 'Support for Spelling' but, like the government's 'Letters and Sounds' publication, there are no 'actual' teaching and learning resources.

Even some of my SP colleagues think the role of phonics teaching is nearly done by the end of Year One or Key Stage One!

I promote the continuation of phonics teaching for spelling throughout Key Stage Two - and I advocate that until we really have achieved solid spelling for all our pupils in Key Stage Two, that there should be spelling provision and the use of Alphabetic Code Charts in every classroom in the land. (I repeat, does your child's classroom have a large version of an Alphabetic Code Chart on display which illustrates all the units of sound and their spelling alternatives?.)

During training, I ask people whether they suppose that Key Stage Three pupils who received some 'phonics internvention' perceive that they are going off for phonics 'baby stuff' or phonics 'adult stuff'?

I suggest that 'phonics' is largely associated with infant teaching and special needs teaching and not given the kudos of being associated with the knowledge and skills of proficient, literate adults.

There is hardly any research on spelling that I know of. I think for a very long time people in English-speaking countries have virtually given up on the teaching of the alphabetic code and believe, pretty much like mashabell (TES forums) that spelling is about word-by-word learning and that you either can do it, or you can't. This is a defeatist attitude.

Until such time as we have a great deal more teacher-training and rigour for teaching and marking for spelling in our primary schools - and perhaps we do need national assessment for spelling too - that we are not truly discharging our duty.

I don't know just how well we can teach spelling in the English language as a professional body - but I do believe that we need to have these discussions both in the public domain and within the teaching profession to see if we can try a lot harder.

Because being able to speak, read, write and spell well is, literally, life chance stuff.

If a person applies for many kinds of jobs with weak spelling, handwriting, sentence construction, where do you think that application is most likely to end up?

"How does a child make an accurate choice on which is a correct spelling?"

With adult support, growing experience, being instructed, routinely, to notice which words are spelt which way when reading, being taught well about spellings, spelling alternatives, and that spelling instruction includes work on spelling word banks and noting unusual words and groups of words.

And very clear, visual display on main phonics reading and spelling walls.

How many schools do you go into where there is a dedicated, main, phonics reading and spelling wall? Can you see the progression throughout the school?

Can you see clear spelling word banks on the main display (if there is one)?

Do the children have their own folder which builds up their phonics vocabulary for reading and for spelling (and I include handwriting)?

How well are the schools working in clear partnership with parents?

How many parents are informed about the notion of 'Alphabetic Code Charts' which outline the alphabetic code comprehensively?

Do parents know that they can use these at home to supplement what is going on at school?

Do schools make clear statements of 'which' correspondences of the alphabetic code are taught formally at the school - is a copy of the alphabetic code in their reading policy?

Thanks for the advice a few pages back on helping with spelling. Often DS will write at school during Inside/Outside play (YR). He's quite creative, and it's great to see what he's been up to when I look in his book bag at the end of the day and come across these creations . It then seems a little pedantic to comment on any errors in spelling so I don't generally and just enjoy looking at whatever it is he's made. However, some of the words he does know the phonics for and could be getting right if he thought about it. Ho hum. I guess it's a balancing act like many parental things . It's easier to point things out when you are there with them at that moment rather than hours later.

Debbie, do you not think the (government induced, phonic scheme influenced) over emphasis of pseudo words will confuse things. There are often various ways to 'read' a pseudo word, but words have one way to read them (with some variance on pronunciation and accent e.g.. again, bath). And words have only one way to spell them, but a pseudo word could be spelt in a variety of ways.

You wrote earlier 'All words are the equivalent to non-words when children first encounter them.'. How then, can children decide whether a word is a word or a pseudo word? And if it is designed as a pseudo word they may have a choice in how to decode and say it, but they would not have that choice with a word.

Nonsense words that the children encounter in books are chosen to evoke a feeling or humour, they have been created by wordsmiths for pleasure rather as an exercise.

We need to aim for fearless and flexible readers.

The process of decoding a word is as much about the need to 'tweak' or 'modify' the pronunciation of a word when the target word produced is not a real word understood in oral vocabulary.

This may well be as simple as 'Try this sound first and if that doesn't make a real word, try the other sound'.

If the word being decoded is in the child's oral vocabulary (spoken language), then this hugely supports the decoding of the printed word. Nevertheless, children can become very adept at discerning a word from saying the sounds even when the word is a non-word or when the word is not in the oral vocabulary of the reader (consider how many children in our schools have English as an additional or new language - without phonics teaching, they would be considerably worse off in terms of teaching which contributes to their language development as an additional or new language).

What I am not particulary happy about is the proliferation of the use of non-words in general reading instruction. I don't think there is any need for it in that, as I said earlier, a cumulative bank of words provides a huge number of words for learners to read - and many of these will be obscure to the young learner or the learner for whom English is not the first language. Thus, these learners are getting plenty of sounding out and blending practice without the need for non-words.

However, not all SP programme writers or promoters agree with this point of view.

The proliferation of using non-words preceded the advent of the Year One phonics screening check with the inclusion in the government's 'Letters and Sounds' publication of a game called 'Treasure Chest'.

The non-words in the phonics screener have further promoted the use of non-words in the production of phonics material. There is also a lack of understanding about the dangers for some learners of seeing words written with what we call 'illegal' spelling patterns - that means strings of letters which are not normally seen in English spelling.

Using some non-words for 'assessment' is a good use of non-words. This will help the adult to appreciate whether the learner is able to decode new words. This is what we need our children to be able to do - even if it means there are different pronunciation alternatives.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are mumsnetters who have children of different age ranges whose youngest children are making much greater relative progress with their reading, spelling and writing than their older children - not withstanding that children are very different with different capacities to learn even when they are related.

'There is also a lack of understanding about the dangers for some learners of seeing words written with what we call 'illegal' spelling patterns - that means strings of letters which are not normally seen in English spelling.' I very much agree with this. Often when I am asking children to spell a word, I ask does it look right? I feel that if children are continually being asked to look at and sound out non words (in preparation for the phonics check), then they will lose the 'imprint' of how words work. (Even then, typing the word preparation, I typed it first as preperation, but it didn't look right so I knew to correct it.)

'What I am not particulary happy about is the proliferation of the use of non-words in general reading instruction.' How do you think this could be prevented? The government are endorsing through their match funding a variety of SP schemes, some of which are 'non-word' heavy. And of course teachers and scores will feel judged by the phonic check scores which will have to be reported to government, so may feel inclined to up the non-words. So something that might have a positive effect, results in being detrimental; over-medicated.

(and I'm not normally a spelling/grammar pedant when it comes to writing on a message board, but it is an example of something 'not looking right' - your typing of particularly in the bit I have quoted, caught my eye when I was skim reading my reply, 'cause it just 'didn't look right'.)

You also wrote 'the GOVERNMENT itself needs to be accountable for the methods and materials it is promoting and funding.' In my opinion there are some trite books and some unnecessary tat. In their match funding catalogue there is a picture of a page from a Phonics Bug book, illustrated with three cars and the questions 'What car is the fastest? What car is in Bond films? What car is Italian?' If the choice is between the three cars, the questions are grammatically incorrect. If the Government are aiming for higher standards it should also be in the materials they promote.

Not everything is perfect, Zebedeee, and I think it would be a waste of tax-payers money to have govenment line-by-line scrutiny of texts Once decoding is in place (and the non-word inclusion in the Phonics Check aids this process of checking) then the world of books is children's oyster . Two-dimensional and often robotic, readers are normally time-limited. Any crearive, intelligent, sensitive teacher will move children on once the foundations are laid. It's only the weakest of readers who need to stick to a regime of strictly limited decodable readers. But for them, these books are a blessing.

There will be materials in the Catalogue that are marginal at best, pedantic in the extreme, and also there are particularly effecive materials for beginning struggling reades which are conspicuous by their absence. But any focus on helping the 20% who aren't being helped at the moment should be applauded.

On the whole this government has to be saluted for its determination to get all children reading.

" There is also a lack of understanding about the dangers for some learners of seeing words written with what we call 'illegal' spelling patterns - that means strings of letters which are not normally seen in English spelling. "

Surely this could be rectified if ITT contained effective phonics instruction ... teachers (and publishers) would know which combination of letters are never seen in real words

I think it would be a far greater waste of Government money to match funding to literacy resources with inadequate grammar. And I do expect a Government nominee (need not be a civil servant) to read the material they are about to endorse. This is about competence in selection of what to fund from the public purse, ie which course/s; not about whether it is the right approach.

I am horrified that posters are saying there are teachers who are attempting to 'teach to the test' by practising non-words. Is 'how to teach phonics' really taught to teachers so badly? For I can't believe that teachers could do something like that deliberately.

Is there perhaps a niche even now in the market for CPD on phonics?

QueenEdith "how to teach phonics" isn't actually taught to all teachers it's still very hit and miss what input you get from your university. I had a final year student who had received no instruction from her university and since all her previous placements were in KS2 her only input was watching me

I have a friend who teaches phonics on a GTP course and is given 2 hours to provide student teachers with everything they need to know so they can teach children to read and an acquaintance who gets 2 afternoons on a 4 year BEd course and know a number of PGCE students who said their university gave them a selection of reading scheme books to look at ... and that was all they needed to teach children to read

:( :( :(

My head has invested a lot of time and money on phonics training over the years because most staff felt they had not been taught well at university and then I see staff who think their university taught phonics well teaching whole words (because you can't read was and said any other way )

In his article, 'The Education White Paper: a CPS Postnatum' (Nov. 2010), Tom Burkard wrote that, ''(T)eacher training was first identified as the major obstacle to the implementation of effective practices in the 1996 report, Reading Fever. In an unpublished CPS report that was sent to Nick Gibb just prior to the general election, we suggested that new arrangements were needed to train teachers to use synthetic phonics effectively. We included a survey of reading lists for 46 initial teacher training (ITT) courses, which revealed an overwhelming hostility to this method, and indeed a profound disagreement with the coalition?s overall vision of educational reform''.

www.rrf.org.uk/pdf/ITT%20reading%20lists%20Jan%2010.pdf
Burkard: 46 ITT reading lists.

''My uni was very anti the Rose report, and one of our assignments was to do a presentation about how poor the data were, and why the whole lot of it should be taken with a pinch of salt.'' (poster on Mumsnet Primary Education forum 2011)

Most teacher training is pretty poor...when I employ an NQT I train them from scratch to my (to my own ways!)

I spend thousands of pounds each year training all my staff (YR to Y6) in phonics and everyone gets a full refresher every second year. Termly observations of all staff incl. teaching assistants in house, and once a year with an external expert, to make sure we havent got into any bad habits.

Tis the only ways IMHO.

I mean teacher training with regard to phonics... It's not dire in every respect, but for teaching reading it def. is.

I think DS1 is very lucky at his school with regards to their phonics teaching judging by various MN comments and also experiences I have heard from family and friends.

His school seem to work really hard to ensure children know their phonics well, DS1 could read before going to school and had done so by knowing his phonics well so could blend words etc and has come on in leaps and bounds, he reading age is around double his true age. I have just shown him the words from that link posted earlier and he read all of them straight off without hesitation and said - some of these are nonsense words like we have to read at school.

Children of 5/6 years should be able to understand the instruction that they need to read the words as they see them and that some are alien words, if they are truly a good reader then they will read all of the words with ease.

I don't think DS has done the phonics test yet so I assume it will be some point soon.

The checks will be carried out the week beginning June 18th.

Don't think anyone answered... Do they do these in Wales or just England?

Just England

its a simple check on their knowledge of phonics, designed to ensure teachers are teaching phonics correctly. Its not a test of your child. dont stress or worry over it. Use jolly phonics and at school every single day your child will do half an hour practice so no need to do extra. It is a simple standard check and for any child who can 'read' fairly well they will be able to get a good score. x

Its not a test of the teachers! Although it will reveal those schools where ineffectual teaching takes place, it's purpose is to identify those children who may be struggling so they can be supported early.

Thanks mrz, think Wales has it easy when it comes to tests. No phonics test, no SATS tests, no key skills exams. :)