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...).

www.pearsonassessments.com/NR/rdonlyres/7BA232FF-D030-4975-83AD-09E0E2CEA6C1/0/EarlyReadandERDA2.pdf

www.pearsonassessments.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-us/Productdetail.htm?Pid=015-8984-609 (one of the most common assessments used by Educational Psychologists)

Yes, all children do need phonics, mrz. I could be wrong, but you seem to imply that phonics is the only strategy and children (fortunate or not) need to work out the meaning and sense parts without explicit teaching.

Have you never met a child who approaches text by sounding out every word, blending each word slowly and painfully, paying no attention to other cues which could assist them in the process?

Surely it is our job as teachers to equip them with every helpful strategy available to them. In Reading Recovery we are trained to teach the children to check the information sources against each other in order to independently find and fix the problem (whether that problem has arisen as a result of ignoring visual information, sentence structure or meaning).

(PS The Reading Recovery Programme approach uses reading and writing activities because of their reciprocal nature.)

"THE most common remedial reading program used in Australian schools is failing the students who most need help and some studies suggest the gains produced are lost in the following two years or so."

education.qld.gov.au/literacy/docs/reading-recovery20.pdf

forgive me if I don't get excite over RR

Sarahken
Thanks for the words.
Ive grouped them by vowels:
chab, jazz, splaw, farm, sarps, scrap, baim, waiting, portrait, fair,
crept, desh, elt, thend, queep,

pib, stin, chip, kigh, girst, index, shine,

flods, stop, yop, strom, lords, thorn, proom,

goat, stroke, groiks, poil,

jump, shrubs, truck, vus, turnip, flute, yune.

I think this shows more clearly what a pathetic, but hugely expensive, pointless test this was.
The idea that it might tell any teacher or parent something about their pupils' grasp of phonics is laughable.
It could certainly have been done just as well with real words, and would have been far less confusing for good readers who have moved past the decoding stage and are expecting words to have meaning.

The way you've grouped them tells me lots about your grasp of phonics masha

Jeez, Masha, that makes no sense whatsoever!

mrz, I'm not asking you to get excited about RR. I'm excited enough for both of us, especially after seeing first hand how effective the approach can be.

I hope the holidays come quickly for you.

I've just had to read my Mum's list of prescription drugs from the hospital. I'm still not beyond the decoding stage - does this make me a poor reader - or just not a pharmacist?

Actually RefuseToWorry RR worries me but thanks for the flowers

I'm with RefuseToWorry.

Thromdimbulator how did you decode the names of the drugs?

I'm reading Greek myths and using phonics to decode names

As always well meaning but misguided folk like Masha are confused.
Semantic knowledge is of course important when learning to read and could be considered possibly as a subsection of Reading Comprehension, one ofthe five key pillars of effective reading as cited by the National Reading Panel, namely

Phonemic Awareness
Phonics
Vocabulary development
Fluency
Reading Comprehension

National Reading Panel

The whole multilingual thing cited by Bonsoir is a bit of a red herring.Most of the world is bilingual with many peopel merrily working their way to mastery of both pictographic and orthographic systems. Only Europeans seem to get quite so precious about it. I think back to the Bengali medical students I knew in Moscow who learnt Russian (whilst working fulltime as waiters) before even beginning their medical studies.

My own children and my extended family (all multilingual) have worked all of these issues out relatively painlessly as have most of the children I come across in my work as an s/lt and reading/language acquisition researcher.

"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 !

This isn't actually true. We have words which you can sound out into either letters or groups of letters. And we have some words like Wymondham which have almost no correspondence between how they're written and how they are pronounced and then we have several sounds which are written in various different ways. So what you have is a partial description of how several of our words can be broken up into components, but no guarantee that having been broken up into components they can be accurately recreated if you call out the sounds and ask the hearer to recreate the word.

What you have is a partial description, not a code. Codes are created to correspond when decrypted to the original message, the sounds of the English language only correspond to some version of the message.

(If you rigidly standardised English spelling to correspond to the sounds of our language and introduced symbols to alter letter sounds, as German does, you could create such a code.)

In addition, most people have no idea what either Phonics or Phonemic Awareness really means. (I won't even get you started on Phonetic Awareness which is a whole other layer.)

No learnandsay just because a letter or group of letters can represent different sounds and the same sound can be represented by different letters doesn't alter the truth of the statement.

Not one child out of 91 year 1 pupils in my school had a problem regarding non real words. Every child understood what was being asked and knew not to try and make real words from them.

Masha - why did you group them by vowels? Why not their phonics sound?

chab - checks the child knows ch
jazz - zz
farm - ar
waiting - ai, ng
portrait - or, ai
fair - air
crept, elt - blend
queep - qu, ee
kigh - igh
flute, yune - split digraph (magic e in old terms)
Etc

mrz, it's not a code. That's why your assertion isn't correct. I have explained above why your partial description of several of our English words is merely that, a partial description.

Yep, it's not a science, I'll give you that learnandsay. There are too many variables. It's a good starting point for most though. .

It is a code.
A code in which letters represent sounds.
Sometimes the relation is straightoforward and sometimes it isn't, for a variety of reasons.

The lack of knowledge about how to use the IPA hampers most people from being able to separate these two things.

As for Wymondham a good examples of the schwa in action
interestingly Wymondham in Leicestershire is pronounced differently from the one in Norfolk

mrz, I'm not asking you to get excited about RR. I'm excited enough for both of us, especially after seeing first hand how effective the approach can be.

Can be? Because it doesn't help the bottom 20%, does it? The 20% that are already confused by mixed methods and often rely heavily on picture or context clues instead of reading, tripping them up later on.

Is that what you mean by 'can'?

Linguistics is the science of language and phonics as an aspect of written language is part of linguistic science.

learnandsay - do you not recognise any patterns in the spelling of English words????? Do you deny the existence of patterns and/or think the teaching to children of such patterns is harmful in some way? Or is your real problem a paranoia that all teachers will now kill the enjoyment of reading and prevent any child from progressing in reading to the point of being given books that they find remotely interesting until they can prove they have learnt all their phonic sounds off by heart?

Can I ask a question about this test? My boy failed it (well, in the terms of the letter he is "still working towards...") - and in his report it says "he is below the standard expected in phonics for his age".

Do they mean his actual age, or do they mean his year group?

He is at the end of year 1, but he's not six until the end of August. Is this taken into account at all?