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...).

sorry just read your responce to that already mrz

Bonsoir you clearly haven't seen it so I'm not sure how you can judge how useful or otherwise it is. As someone who administered the check and has analysed the information I can now direct staff how to support children (including those who passed) more effectively. We have used similar checks for years for this purpose and it is effective and easy.

seeker I tried it on the whole family and I'm pleased to report that none of them read storm for strom and managed 40/40

learnandsayThe whole point of reading words out of context is to get confused! Words are supposed to be in context. That's what language is for!

Can you explain please? You've got me very confused:)

It's usefulness lies in forcing schools to teach phonics (good), not in the information it gives about a child's decoding ability. That's all it is: a political tool.

Well as a SENCO and literacy coordinator I find the information it gives me about individual children extremely useful Bonsoir.

It may become a political tool in the future when/if results are published but for this year they won't be.

How can it not be good to know a child's undestanding of phonics?

It's great to know a child's understanding of phonics. The test does not measure a child's understanding of phonics well, however.

I would have to disagree, Bonsoir - we do a similar termly assessment like this, and it tells us everything we need to know about a child's understanding of phonics. Ours would cover more of the Phase 5 graphemes, admittedly. But apart from that, this Y1 test did a good job.

Amelia, the whole point of language is to convey meaning.

Bonsoir how have your reached that conclusion given you haven't seen the test or analysed any results?

and if you can't decode the written words you can't extract meaning ....

Because I have, in the context of another activity, reviewed all sorts of phonics tests this year for English, French and German (all the ones we could find in our review group). There are much better ones than this!

Have you seen this check?

So, what is better about the other tests? What have they done differently and why is that superior? Are they more lengthy and detailed? Are they used at a different stage in the child's learning? Or at regular intervals?

What we have is a short, simple screening check to make sure that all pupils have grasped fundamental phonics skills and to see that nobody slips through the net.
Most good schools will do their own detailed phonics assessments but I think this one does what it says on the bottle

Words aren't encoded they're written. In order to encode them you'd need to have a corresponding cipher and a key. This decoding nonsense is just mumbo-jumbo using bits of real disciplines such as encryption.

There is a corresponding cypher it's called phonics

Phonics isn't a cipher it's a half-thought out description of a number of English words.

"Writing in English consists of making marks on paper, called letters. It is these letters that represent the sounds of our speech written in the same order as they are spoken." that is the code learnandsay !

A bit of background to begin with: I have been teaching in primary schools for over 20 years; I have raised 3 readers of my own; and over the past 2 years I have had the privilege of being able to concentrate solely on early literacy teaching and learning, as I have delivered the Reading Recovery Programme to 5-6 year olds in a one-to-one setting.

I am in total agreement that good phonics teaching and learning is VITAL to reading development. The Y1 screening seems as good a device as any to give a snapshot of a child's current phonic knowledge.

However I still harbour real concerns (no worries, of course, because I am refusing to ) about the Y1 phonics check.

My biggest concern is that it seems to strongly advocate a one-size-fits-all approach to reading, which contradicts my teaching experience. Admittedly, most children learn to read following whatever is taught in their schools (some 'because of', some 'in spite of'!), but there will always be the exceptions who need an alternative route into reading.

Phonics is a vital ingredient, but not the only ingredient to successful reading.

Phonics isn't only for reading RefuseToWorry.

The requirement was to test phonics knowledge in plurilingual children such that they systematically and correctly applied their phonics knowledge of language A when reading language A, and their phonics knowledge of language B when reading language B (and of language C when reading language C etc).

Pseudo words were a non-starter (they confuse plurilingual children, even very able phonics decoders) and any word that existed in the same written form in more than one language was also a non-starter. Given just how many DCs have EAL, the same findings ought to be applicable when establishing a reliable test of phonics ability in the UK.

Polysyllabic words with straightforward GPCs correlated very well with DCs' reading fluency.

Thank-you, mrz. I stand corrected.
'... and writing.'

All children need phonics. Some fortunate individuals work it out for themselves others need explicit teaching. Phonics isn't taught in a vacuum but in the context of words, sentences, text and alongside teaching a child to decode words they are taught to understand text and new words are added to their vocabulary. What they aren't taught is to use pictures to "work out" what a word might be or to use the first letter to "guess" what the word might be. Of course context comes to play when faced with homophones and to help to understand what we are reading but using context to "divine" what a word might be leads to mistakes and inaccurate reading.

I found that able children who I know knew the specific phonemes, made silly mistakes, ie not blending it perfectly enough or hesitating on the nonsense words and then saying the word wrong, having tried it a few times and said it correctly in the first place, whihc we then had to mark wrong!!!Grrrrrrrr.... Also I had one pupil who is reading at
level 2 but only scored in the high twenties.
It was a very frustrating test for me. These children can read brilliantly when a word is contextualised, stuff the pictures, if they are reading something real then the meaning of the sentence will still be one of their biggest cues.