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...).

I don't think learnandsay is talking absolute nonsense. In fact she is making a lot of sense to me. mrz do you think you could find a more mature way of interacting with people you disagree with. Insulting learnandsay is not helpful and does not make you look more intelligent or educated or convince anyone that your opinion is more valid. And it's simply not very nice.

Sofia- I don't actually understand learnandsay's point. Could you try and explain it to me? Because it looks like nonsense to me too.

zebedee - it's unlikely that someone who can read will read going the same boing.
because they'll know the word.
(obviously this assumes that a child who has heard of the word boing and the verb tense going will hear them before they read them)

I am guessing the reason Mrz has responded in that way is due to the fact that learnandsay comes on every phonics thread and says the same thing, she has commented that she will not want her daughter taught in this way when she starts school as does not seem to believe that phonics actually helps children to read! I think everyone has just heard it all before TBH!

I and I am sure most people on here appreciate the fact that everyone has their own opinion but if there is a thread that pops up frequently I don't agree with I wouldn't just bombard people with my negative opinion over and over again especially if I was in the huge minority! In fact often if I think about certain things I can understand where people are coming from and see things from more than one angle - surely thats normal?!

Then I'm afraid SofiaAmes you are as ill informed about what happens in schools as learnandsay who hasn't even got a child in school yet.

learnandsay Thu 05-Jul-12 13:48:53

Children are being trained to ignore context

absolute claptrap

God, not again, learnandsay.

Sofia, what can you say about a comment like Children are being trained to ignore context that's polite? It's scaremongering GARBAGE.

Seeker, some teachers are actually coaching their children in the reading of nonsense. It's great if children can read Lewis Carroll's nonsense. But it doesn't matter if they can't. But it does matter if they can't read their homework.

Learnandsay, the technique for teaching children to read ANYTHING, nonsense or otherwise, is exactly the same. How on EARTH can a teacher teach a child to read, but make sure they can only read nonsense words,not real ones? You've really gone this time. Think about what you are saying.

OMG, teachers over on TES are coaching their children to READ! The bastards.

"If children are going to be continually given pseudo words to decode": surely it's stretching it a bit to describe a one-off screening test which lasts less than 10 minutes and which occurs once in only one year out of an entire school career as continual?

Most of the children in my ds2's year met the required standard in the phonics check, yet none of them appear to be reading nonsense words all day.... And I am impressed by the number of children in that year already reading with great fluency and expression and their ability to talk to me about the story so far when I come in as a volunteer reader (I do like to know what a book's about, rather than have someone launch into the middle of it!). Funnily enough, the school does not teach nothing but phonics, it does work a lot on speaking and listening and comprehension (and writing, and maths, etc, etc, etc)....

Can someone explain to me how you teach a child to read nonsense words only?

No one teaches nothing but phonics - it takes 20 minutes a day, alongside teaching the many other aspects of reading, writing and speaking and listening.

You can't seeker it's impossible.

learnandsay
what do you fear the unintended consequences of the Phonics Check will be?

Reading nonsense isn't reading any more than speaking nonsense is speaking. Language has to make sense otherwise it isn't language; it's babble.

(If anybody thinks babble has its uses then that's a separate issue. But it isn't language, neither written nor spoken.)

Without sense you can not have context.

Look, this phonics check is not supposed to be a test of understanding. I'm sure they do one of this too. It is simply a test of a mechanical knowledge of phonics. If s child is shown the word flood for example, and reads it accurately, you can't be absolutely sure whether they read it or they knew it already and had a memory of how it looked. But if a child reads flod accurately, you know they are a reader, not just a memoriser.

Sure, but we seem to be arguing about context now.

Sorry, don't understand.

In what way is being able (or not) to read "flod" a question of context?

This thread seems to have taken a turn in the direction of the phonics adherents denying my claim that some teachers have now started drilling their children in the reading of nonsense words, (in order to do well in the phonics test) and because of this are teaching their children to "read" out of context. (Because nonsense words cannot have context) (Because in order to have context you must first have meaning, and nonsense has no meaning.)

So anyway, the argument in that sense has shifted away from the test and onto the behaviour of any teachers who might be drilling children in the pronunciation of nonsensical words, (and whether or not doing that is valuable regardless of its lack of sense.) I think that it isn't.

Learnandsay- it seems to me that you are saying that there is a different skill set for reading nonsense words than for reading real words. Is that what you are saying?

Indeed yes. Because pronouncing a word is only part of reading it. I can pronounce the phrase

I lakka on a woold with a big belly flop.

But I can't read it because it doesn't make any sense. In order to read it (a) it would have to make sense (b) I would have to understand what it meant.

You can pronounce a meaningful sentence and still not understand it. So you have not read it. You have read the parts of it that you understand.

A good example would be a legal document or a computer program. You could claim to have beautifully pronounced all of the words in it. But could you carry out its instructions? No. Why? Because although you have looked at it, you didn't understand it. Reading something involves lots more knowledge than just how to pronounce the words.

"It is simply a test of a mechanical knowledge of phonics. "

No it isn't, because you have to use your knowledge of words for the 'real' word section, just using phonics may or may not get you the mark.

That is from the government -supplied video guidelines - they say that the real words MUST be correctly read, a phonetically-plausible but wrong reading is not marked right.

Which is nonsense if it is a phonics screening check.

Name calling and mudslinging when someone disagrees with you is no better than playground bullying. I hope the OP got what she needs from this thread. I was hoping to learn something about education and phonics, but really have only just learned that adults can be as immature and poorly behaved as children.

You've led a very sheltered life Sofia if you think pointing out that what some says is nonsense and illinformed is bullying.