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...).

SofiaAmes: I is a great pity that your objections to the tone of a post have outweighed the huge amount of authoritative commentary and useful links on this thread, from which one can learn a great deal.

learnandsay: I'm not sure where you're going with that example. It concerns the semiotics and semantics of the language, neither of which are tested at this stage. I can read that sentence as I have no difficulty with decoding either of the novel words (though can make variants of either), can recognise the parts of speech within them etc. I can also read "colourless green ideas sleep furiously". Neither example tests my ability to decode, but I could discuss other linguistic features of it ad nauseam.

It seems that learnandsay's own approach with her own DC is phonic "I am a supporter of sounding out". I am beginning to suspect that she is in denial, disliking for some reason the label, but actually using the important- ie the sounds-based approach in RL.

Leardandsay, what would you do if you were reading aloud and came across an unfamiliar word? Say you were reading a lesson in church with no time to prepare, and in the next sentence was one of those names?

As an adult you constantly have to use phonics if you are reading aloud. As a supply teacher I often had to continue a book that a teacher was reading. If it was something like a South African name, I would have a go and then say 'is that how mrs X pronounced it?' Had I started the book I would have done it my way. You don't get prior warning when you read aloud- you have to decode and remain fluent. It is an important part of reading.
I went to a degree ceremony recently, we all agreed that the person reading the names did a great job and must have practised beforehand.

If I am reading to myself I am very lazy and don't bother to pronounce.

learnandsay - are you arguing that you cannot break the skill of reading down into its component parts and check that a person is competent in each of them, whether that be decoding, or reading for meaning, or reading out loud with expression, or building vocabulary???? Surely if you attempt to test the whole lot at once, you will never work out which of the component parts is the real cause of any reading problem?

And aren't you confusing teaching with experience? Yes, of course parents should provide as much reading experience as possible for their children and ensure that reading is a fun and positive experience and should encourage their children, support their children, answer their children's questions to the best of their abilities, but I would hope my children's teachers would have a slightly more structured approach for a whole class of children, rather than doing a poor imitation of what I was already doing at home. I would also hope that more would be done in the school day than teaching children to decode, since my children could already read fluently and would have passed the phonics test before they started school. Luckily, more is done in the school day, so I really don't understand why you are getting so worked up by it all, unless your fear is that teachers are heading back in the direction of the 1970s and 1980s, when parents were told to stop interfering and leave it all to the experts, which I don't think is the case at the moment (or maybe I'm thick skinned! I've certainly never let anything happening in school stop me from telling my children things in the way I want to.... My general assumption is that my children are plenty clever and adaptable enough to understand any concept in more than one way).

I'm always pleased when parents make the effort to read (or other things) with their child. It should be a partnership after all children are in school for a tiny part of each year.

Can the teachers on this thread address the point I made please, about the children having to get the correct pronunciation of the 'real words', with a phonetically plausible answer being marked wrong? How is this a phonics check? And if it isn't a phonics check, but a reading test, then what is the point of the alien words?

I just can't marry these two aspects together - either the alien words are there to prove the child is using phonic skills, or they have to use their knowledge of reading to read the words, in which case the alien words are superfluous. Not both.

This might answer you question Lily
The check administers guide says ...

Alternative pronunciations must be considered when deciding whether a response is correct. For real words, inappropriate grapheme-phoneme correspondences should be marked incorrect (for example, reading ?blow? to rhyme with ?cow? would be incorrect). However, alternative pronunciations of graphemes will be allowed in pseudo-words.

The real and pseudo words serve different purposes and "test" different skills. The pseudo words check basic letter to sound knowledge and the ability to blend through a word left to right in order. The real words check is that children who will have been taught to try alternatives before deciding which is correct are using this important phonics skill.

O if it's a word the child would be expected to know, theynlike they need to read it correctly. If it is a word that they can't know, and that they know they can't know, a phonetically feasible stab is correct. Just like in ordinary reading.

i see - so they could go "bl-ow or blow, well, i've never heard of bl-ow, so it must be blow"

No parent should worry about phonics if their child is making good progress with reading by another method - phonics is not essential to literacy. I learnt to read by the whole word recognition method, and never learnt to sound out letters and phonemes at all (due to missing the first year of school when phonics was being taught). That didn't handicap me at all, I very quickly learnt to read fluently. Different children learn differently - I don't know why that should be a surprise to anyone.