Phonics Test

[SnowieBear]

DS (6) came back yesterday from school with a slip of paper saying that after being tested against the government's phonic test, he had not reached the standard required and will be receiving additional support with his reading.

DS is a rather good reader and has progressed all the way to stage 9 ORT since the start of Y1. However, I am not surprised he didn't do well at the test, as he finds it difficult to decode words he cannot adscribe meaning to. In general, that's not a problem as he is a very wordy kid, but it was always going to be the spanner in the works for the phonics test.

Am I right to be utterly unconcerned about it? (Well, as utterly unconcerned as someone can be that then goes on to post under the primary education thread...).

If your child cannot decode words that he does not know the meaning of he is not a good reader.

If you and (as I suspect) his teacher continue to think that this is a perfectly OK then you run the risk of having a child who struggles with reading as texts become less predictable and unfamiliar words come thick and fast. Unless, of course, your child manages to intuit for himself (because it looks as though nobody is seriously going to teach him) how the alphabetic code works and teaches himself that decoding an unfamliar word comes first and understanding it comes second.

Sorry to sound harsh but there has been so much rubbish talked about this Phonics Check and 'reading for meaning'.

Yes, I would worry that he didn't reach the standard, and, that he has a mistaken view of how reading works...

Make sure that he a)gets plenty of decoding and blending practice with unfamiliar words and b) he understands that he is definitely NOT going to know the meaning of every word he reads.

maizieD, thanks for responding, don't apologise for sounding harsh, I'm grateful for your views and advice.

I'm truly stumped now. He can decode and blend, and does decode a blend very complicated, new words, even things he is not remotely familiar with. For example, last night, I asked him to tell me who made the tomato sauce he was liberally using. Answer came fast: Bramwells, not something he has heard before.

Both his school and I are "serious teaching him". I've read to him every day of his life and I listen to him read daily. He doesn't struggle with texts, what other reason may there be for him not doing well in his phonics test?

When he comes across an unfamiliar word he has to work at decoding, his process is akin to this:

sound/blend/decode
does it make sense?
yes - got it right, repeat confidently
no - sound/blend/decode again

Because if it doesn't make sense to him (i.e. he accepts it is A WORD, instead of nonsense) he sounds/blends/decodes again and again, this is where he may have gone wrong. He only makes allowances when he actually expects the words not to be what they should, like with Roahl Dahl books.

Am I making sense? Sorry!

However, I am not surprised he didn't do well at the test, as he finds it difficult to decode words he cannot adscribe meaning to.

Hah! Now you've got me thoroughly confused! This implied, for me, that he either was unable to decode and blend a word that he didn't recognise, or, that he tried to make unfamiliar words into familiar ones.

Yet you say:

He can decode and blend, and does decode a blend very complicated, new words, even things he is not remotely familiar with.

Which is, of course, absolutely as it should be

So I'd revise my comments to:

If it's the first scenario - worry
If the second - he sounds fine and was probably just a little 'off' on the day, or maybe the task wasn't clearly explained to him.

Or perhaps he expects words presented to him 'in school' to make sense (because maybe the teacher emphasises 'meaning' a lot) while words on the outside he knows will frequently be unfamiliar

Do you know what his score actually was? Was it close to the threshold or way off it?

SnowieBear,
I can see where you are coming from, but I'm not at all sure that we should be expecting 6 y olds to be able to judge if a word is 'nonsense' or not. I'd like them to just rise to the decoding and blending 'challenge' and find out afterwards what the word does (or doesn't) mean.

I thought in the test, the "Nonsense" words had pictures of aliens next to them, so that the children would use their phonics knowledge rather than trying to make them into real words.

Maybe the teacher didn't explain to him that some words were meant to be aliens names.

No reason to be concerned.

He has problems with phonics (demonstrated in the phonics check) - and school are going to give him extra help next year.

Does not sound like you need to be concerned.

Maybe the teacher hasn't got far enough in her phonics teaching to have covered all the things he needed to know to pass the test? Bramwells is actually an unbelievably easy word to decode with only the most basic of phonics knowledge, so he really ought to be able to decode that. But has he been taught and is he confident in, eg, words where there is a vowel then consonant and then an e (eg ie, ae etc) because I think those sorts of words were in the test and children not so strong at phonics may not be confident with ones like that, as yet, because it's harder to recognise the pattern/phonic sound when there's a random consonant in between, unless, of course, it's a word you know by sight.

unless, of course, it's a word you know by sight.

Well, strictly speaking, a child who has had good phonics teaching will have got split digraph words into 'sight memory' by decoding and blending them several times, therefore they should know the split diagraph and apply that knowledge to any word containing it that they encounter.

Did the school tell you what he actually scored in the check SnowieBear? or did they give any indication on what he found difficult?

OP, when I looked at the examples of words used, I did wonder how the very literally minded boys in dd's Reception class would cope with this test next year - I can really imagine some of them finding it hard to 'get' that they were really truly expected to read words that aren't real. As a result, I can imagine them guessing at the closest 'real' equivalent - and not actually doing what has been asked of them. Even if it has been asked well, and repeatedly. They just don't think that way.

I might be wrong, of course - it was just a thought I had. But I wonder, as your ds decodes and blends difficult words he doesn't already know, whether it could be something as simple as just not liking imaginary words, and refusing to sound them out!

It's a teaching strategy in phonics which should have been used from Reception though, so they should be used to it.

The use of pseudo words is a well established and reliable diagnostic tool used by Educational Psychologists and schools to identify dyslexia and other reading problems. Anecdotally the children who made errors with non words weren't the really good readers they were the children who make silly little errors in their everyday reading, the child who reads the for they or their ... because they aren't looking at what they read.

Mrz that is exactly my dd's issue and why she will probably fail next year as the school don't think it is an issue.

I think we are all guilty of this at times and sometimes it doesn't matter too much (reading that "novel" you picked up to read round the pool on holiday) but it can considerably alter the meaning of a sentence or text.

www.childrens-mathematics.net/taxonomy.pdf

oops

I wouldn't be worried in the least.

In a few years time when we've had the phonics test for a while, and teachers' whole careers are based on the test alone, then authors and teachers will start publishing books made up of complete nonsense words with titles like: Noof imo goof blada.

And our children won't be able to make head nor tail of them. When that happens I'll enrol my children in nonsense sounding classes (not reading classes, mind you.) Because I wouldn't want my children to be the only ones who couldn't babble pointlessly.

Well this type of check has been used for decades learnandsay so get in early I'm sure you could corner the market in nonsense texts

I thought Spike Milligan had already done so.....

Don't forget Shakespeare, Lear, Carroll, Dr Suess and Rosen ...

And Dahl.. (think BFG!)

and Daniel Defoe.....

Ricky Gervais's 'Flanimals'...

oh no!!! learnandsay you have competition

It might help to know that in the pilot for the phonics test only 30% of children passed the test. the nonsense words were the problem. A child who could read the word "portrait" could not read some of the nonsense words. If your daughter's school assessment is good, they should know whether your daughter just had an off day or actually does need additional help.