Is phonics the best way to teach kids to read? Nick Gibb and Michael Rosen debate

[ElenMumsnetBloggers]

Last month all year one children in England had to take a phonics screening check, and phonics is being rolled out across the country as the way to teach children to read. But is this too prescriptive? We asked children's author Michael Rosen and Education Minister Nick Gibb to debate phonics. Read their debate about phonics as a tool for children to learn to read here and have your say. Do you agree with Nick Gibb or Michael Rosen? Is phonics the most effective way to teach children to read? Should we use several ways of teaching reading, or concentrate on phonics? Join the debate.

You can't love a story if you can't read it whether you are an adult or a child

I think young children learn so much through play and should be spending more time playing, including with support from adults, and less time on phonics.

Less time than 20 minutes a day?

I think most children will learn to read by the time they leave primary school

80% - most, but not good enough.

www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/000000650.htm

I remember before I actually knew about phonics I thought it must lead to bad spelling and moaning with friends about it. However that is a total misapprehension. If you really have been taught through phonics- not mixed methods - you are likely to be much more aware how words can broken down into constituent parts. So when my daughter learns her spellings she scans the word automatically. She was learning the word 'rowing' for the Olympics today so what was key was that row was spelt with an ow, not oa or even owe. Compare this to the approach of a child taught with mixed methods and has not inferred these options without explicit teaching. Someone up thread illustrate the outcome with the word snow and each word is a jumble like 'nsow' - just a strong to be learnt.
Because it is standard in most reception and yr 1 classes to stress communication over spelling parents see all sorts of 'phonic' spelling that makes them want to shudder but that is unsurprising when the children are not being taught much spelling and not a problem created by phonics.

I think the govt is underestimating the importance of other factors (a child's feelings eg anxiety or panic/lack of confidence/family background/peer pressure etc) while concentrating on the mechanics of the process. These emotional and psychological factors can be responsible for some children never learning to read - it's not just the methods used by the teachers.

I think they are just excuses for children not learning to read. The best tool you can give a child with a difficult home life and/or emotional problems is the ability to read and a chance to escape.

Just a side note on what was said miles up thread about so many children leaving Primary/Junior school at 11 'functionally illiterate'. I've worked with quite a few of these children and what strikes me is that their problem isn't so much the original learn-to-read method used in R / year 1 and 2, but the fact that their progress stagnated when they moved into the Juniors (year3).

IME 'reading' per se wasn't taught specifically and more and the children were just assumed to be competent readers moving on to rest of the (crowded) curriculum. Also unless the individual teacher took an initiative in encouraging the enjoyment of books (teacher reading the whole class whole stories etc) then this fell by the wayside.

www.begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html

'how do you know which rule is the right one in every individual case without just memorising individual words?'

Mrz 'They learn that bough means a tree bough and bow is what you do at the end of a performance in exactly the same way as you would.'

Which is in effect sight reading...
How do you deal with a bow made with a ribbon?

mrz "You can't love a story if you can't read it whether you are an adult or a child"

Ah, but I think you can ...

You can be told a story, or have one read to you, or make one up and act it out with your friends, or memorise one like the three little pigs - and then go and make 3 little houses and run from one to the other as a big wolf chases you etc. etc ! Or watch one as a DVD ....

Now that phonics is the new state educational religion, it is highly likely that tests will test not reading but attainment of the phonics skills, which may be confusing to historians of the future.

No it isn't. Not at all likely, actually, as anyone working in education will tell you.

You can be told a story, or have one read to you, or make one up and act it out with your friends, or memorise one like the three little pigs - and then go and make 3 little houses and run from one to the other as a big wolf chases you etc. etc ! Or watch one as a DVD ....

All lovely and important steps in reading understanding, etc - but none of which will teach you how to actually read.

I am no expert at all so i read these debates with interest. I have a particular interest because my eldest attends a school that doesn't really bother with phonics very much at all as far as I can see and my ds, who has just finished Y2, seems to me to have learnt to read and spell like I did: initially by context / look and say and later by memory and list of spelling words. This has sometimes worried me as, as others have suggested, will he come a cropper later when he can't do all that graphemes stuff ( I don't understand ). All I can say is that at 7 he loves reading and, like me, will not go to sleep at night, no matter how tired, without reading, even if just for a few minutes.

What I conclude from this is that the best thing I have done for my dc is to make them think it is normal to read as they see me reading in bed every day and to make sure they've always had plenty of books around. You have to remember that many adults do not read for pleasure ( their father doesn't but reads them a bedtime story every night ) and presumably children from families that don't read have a very different experience. If you arrive at reception having never really been exposed to reading or books beforehand maybe you then need a more prescriptive rule based approach to start you off? So this makes me think one size fits all maybe is the problem with phonics?

My other observation is that my sons close friend (who he sees every week and who is of a very similar age and apparent ability level ) goes to a school that went all out on hardcore phonics in R and Y1. They read comics etc together now and do homework together and there seems, to us parents, to be no real difference in their reading/spelling abilities. This again makes me think that there are different ways to get to the same point?

But will teach you to "love a story" which is the point I was making and responding to

mrsZ that's depressing! How old is 4th grade?

And the opposing point was that loving a story isn't helpful on its own if you can never actually read it yourself!

I'm not sure how your equate knowing which spelling relates to meaning is sight reading Math.

or why you think dealing with homophones and homographs should be somehow different because the words are decoded /encoded using phonics.

Math could probably tell you SmellOfBurntWiggle but I think it is 9 or 10???

That phonics screening check was bizarre, according to the teachers at ds's school. It included some made up words that do not exist in English. So children who can read were puzzled and confused when confronted with 'words' that they knew made no sense, I gather.

"loving a story isn't helpful on it's own" - well, I think it probably is. I think that is actually the most important bit. Also loving stories is a massive incentive to wanting to learn to read, and once you can, for keeping on doing it, and exploring the world of literature for yourself !

'You can't love a story if you can't read it whether you are an adult or a child'

Most children love stories long before they can read them. That is how I came to know several of the stories of Beatrix Potter by heart. I read them on demand, several times a day for years, at the request of the DCs.

And contrary to Feenie's assertion that phonics is the only way to teach children to read, several of my Beatrix Potter fans skipped phonics altogether and read for themselves after spending three years being exposed to words they didn't understand ('soporific', etc.), presented to them in no particular order of difficulty...

I know it's an anecdote, but yes, there are definitely more ways of killing this particular cat...

Of course we can read and tell stories and contrary to Michael Rosen's belief phonics doesn't mean children don't share stories.

How do you 'decode' the word bow when you happen upon it in a sentence, Mrz?

Do you do it using context?

But are the other 80% best served by it? Can you point me to research which shows the relative reading abilities of say the top 20% (or 30% or 50% or whatever) taught by different methods and which categorically proves that those taught by phonics alone read as at leat as well, or preferably better, than those taught using any other method?

You'll have to define what you mean by 'reading ability', how you propose to show that 80% of the population read to a good standard (given that no-one tests the reading of the whole population and there is no definition of a good standard of reading) and how you account for purportedly 'mixed methods taught' people who have actually been taught phonics at home.

The 80% figure is only based on the percentage of children achieving L4 or above in English at the end of KS2 and we know that this is not a particularly reliable measure. For example, would you expect a child with a L4 to be able to confidently work out what unfamiliar words 'say'? If you did, you would be very short of the mark at the school I work in as a significant number of L4 children can't do this, neither do they have 'reading ages' commensurate with their chronological age. And they can't spell very well.

I would suspect that this is common to most secondary schools.

We could spend hours bandying figures around but the long and short of it is that phonics is the most efficient method we know at present for teaching the greatest number of children to read.

Teaching phonics does no harm to children who would have learned whatever the method while Whole Word and mixed methods does harm at least 1 in 5 children. It is estimated that some 3 -5% of children still struggle to learn to read with phonics, but this is a far fewer than the 20% who fail with whole Word and mixed methods. And, until the learning process is well under way there is no way of telling who these children will be, by which time the harm is done. (As I teach struggling KS3 readers I am pretty well aware of the damage it does to children)

If parents don't like this they have to option to HS.

I thought you were dismissing anecdotal evidence math?

ah but Edam the non-words have a little picture of an alien next to them so they know not to worry (so that's alright eh?!)

My DS sat it the other day and the school administered it well so the kids didn't realise and it fitted in with the phonics games and other methods they use. Just a slightly annoying waste of everyone's time in a school that picks up how well each child is learning to read anyway...