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.

As long as my children (or grandchildren one day as mine are now past reception stage) have the opportunity to hear stories from the wonderful collection of children's literature that now exists for them to enjoy I won't mind too much if there's some non-pressurised teaching of phonics at a developmentally appropriate level.

• Actually I'm quite a fan of "a, a, ants on my arm" etc

It's just it all gets a bit mad for me after that stage

mrz

So for a period between about 1978 when I completed the reading scheme and 2008 when DS started school, some children were taught to read without learning letter sounds?

Well blow me down with a feather.

The idea that it can overcome the horrible home life of many unfortunate children and present them with an escape is a worthy one but tragically life is not that simple.

But it is, math. I've seen it. We don't accept excuses for not teaching children to read.

Juggling, I'm with you! Listening to stories is so important. I would prefer YR to spend that twenty minutes listening to something amazing and enriching.

Children are at school 6 hours a day - plenty of time for both.

Well in my experience the teaching of phonics is squeezing out the sharing of really good stories with children.

Is it the teaching of phonics that is doing that, or the teaching of other things which are actually unnecessary?

Yes, and then they have to go through it all again because the youngest 4 year olds didn't get it the first time...apart from those who could already read before they started school .

In my experience pretty much everything that is taught in primary school is taught again and again and again....

This is really interesting. I can tell you that as a non phonics user when I encounter words with which I am unfamiliar (non English names spring to mind) it is absolutely essential that I SEE the word written down to establish the physical shape of the word.

Telling me and sounding it out is useless. I need to see it in writing to learn it.

I don't see the physical shape of a word - it's a collection of letters in a particular order that I see, not a brand new shape, and the order of the letters dictates how I say it.

What on EARTH do other people mean by seeing the "shape" of a word? Wouldn't that make reading other peoples' handwriting absolutely impossible, because the "shape" of a word could change beyond recogntion, depending on the style of handwriting?

Not to mention the fact that hundreds of words have the same shape! How do you tell the difference between sock, sack, sick and suck? Come and Came? The same word with a capital letter and without, Photo and photo?

edam Wed 11-Jul-12 22:26:23

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.

But those words all have different shapes, maizie. Surely blending inevitably gives way to shape recognition as we become more experienced readers, otherwise it would take forever to read anything substantial. Most people must revert to phonic decoding when faced with unfamiliar words, but I'm sure I rely on shape more than anything in normal circumstances.

Someone somewhere must have done research on this - tracking readers' eye movement or something.

I see all of the letters in the words as I'm reading, although I don't really take the time to register them, and I'm a fast reader. I recognise words, but I know which words they are because of the letters in them.

Not to mention the fact that hundreds of words have the same shape! How do you tell the difference between sock, sack, sick and suck? Come and Came? The same word with a capital letter and without, Photo and photo?

By shape, I don't think we mean silhouette, exactly, more of a pattern. And yes, using a capital, or all capitals, would change the shape. Your example isn't a great one because capital and lower case 'p' are almost the same. A better example might be Apple and apple.

Well, yes quite muddling , the shape of a word is only made up of a particular combination of letters after all.

Perhaps the question is: do you read each word left to right or rather bounce from one word, or group of words, to the next. I think I do the latter, only stopping to read unfamiliar words left to right (and then only in chunks really).

However, none of this has any bearing on whether synthetic phonics are a good idea for teaching children to read. I think they are, personally, although I'm a bit sceptical about the idea that children can learn to spell by using their phonic knowledge. In Italian maybe...

You generally only see a few letters in each word as you read if you are reading fluently. You don't read each word from left to right unless consciously trying to decode, for instance trying to read the ingredients of shampoo. There is a point of fixation at which the reader will glean all s/he needs in order to recognise and process the word.

Some background on eye movements and fixation.

Study showing that letters in words are read simultaneously and not from left to right.

'Some Current Controversies' in eye movement research, including whether readers can process information from more than one word at a time.

There has been a huge amount of research into eye movement and processing.

'The idea that it can overcome the horrible home life of many unfortunate children and present them with an escape is a worthy one but tragically life is not that simple.
But it is, math. I've seen it. We don't accept excuses for not teaching children to read.'

Teaching them to read is not the same thing as helping them to succeed in the education system, Feenie. Sadly.

What ever happened to balance? Must the pendulum be swung only one or the other way? Children need a balanced approach and certainly do need explicit teaching of specific skills.
What we do need is preservice teaching courses to teach soundly the foundations of oral language development and its link to literacy - and by language I mean ALL aspects (syntax, semantics, uses of, phonological awareness etc...)
Language is the tool of instruction - without good oral language skills to begin with, literacy cannot be taught successfully. We need to focus on which skills students need, teach these systematically and make it interesting at the same time!

Assuming that there really are children who are taught with a very strict whole word technique, and know no letter sounds, how do they write? Do they only ever write words that have occurred in a spelling test?

I think the problem with phonics as it is proposed to be taught is that many children are not ready to sound words out at 4, 5 or even 6. Some of these children will pick up sight words along the way, and have a rough sight word method of reading despite being mystified by phonics. Many of these children will pick up phonic rules at a later point (as rabbitstew says, things taught in primary school are taught again and again, and if you learn a foreign language you learn phonetic rules for that language and how they differ to English, and presumably spelling rules are still taught through primary school).

However, to assume every child can be taught to read with phonics at the pace specified by Gove, and to label children who don't as 'poor readers' is I think misguided and I don't think will give us Finnish reading rates. (Although I reckon smaller class sizes, later formal learning and well paid, respected teachers would).

If it is really assumed that 20% of children can't read because of teachers wilfully using a failing whole word technique for no other reason than prejudice, then frankly, I think we should all home educate.

No one is labelling any child who "fails" the phonics check as a poor reader. The check is to identify gaps in a child's knowledge?skills because these are the children at risk of being failed

No one is labelling any child who "fails" the phonics check as a poor reader

Tell that to the child who is sitting mystified in a classroom, while everybody else seems to magically pick up a skill that passes them by. Tell that to the mothers who obsessively decode the 'tables system' at school and attribute a pecking order to the various phonics groups based on their opinion of the members.

But none of this would matter if children were honestly allowed to learn at the own pace, because they were in a smaller classroom (12.5 at this point in Finland), and learnt at a pace set by their teacher (and it would be great if we all trusted her to teach and not wilfully derail 1 in 5 children's chances of learning to read).

I would be happy to do that merrymouse.
If a child is sat there mystified surely it is better that the teacher knows than they continue to sit there unrecognised and unhappy. As a parent I wish this check had been carried out when my son was in Y1 rather than him get to Y8 before anyone thought to do it!
The fact is we don't live in Finland and our society is very different from that of Finland ... we are already trying to follow their models of education even though their experts are telling us they will fail.