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.

Mrz, most children are hyper-aware of where others are placed to sit, even at the tender age of four. They know when they are sitting in the wrong group.

Eye movement research since 1984 suggests that not only do fluent readers not read left to right through words, they skip words and fixate only on a few letters in words on which their eye rests for the millisecond it takes to recognise and process them. Additionally our eye takes in the next word in a hazy way before we get to it; sometimes we can skip it because even this parafoveal glance allows us to accurately assume what it is. In order for this sort of physical approach to work there is a lot of word anticipation from context and from the interplay of other elements in the text, such as cadence, syntax, punctuation and grammar, which fluent readers have internalised. Our working memory allows the phonological representation of text to proceed fluently. We can therefore accurately read and accurately understand the words bow and bow, permit and permit, console and console, record and record, contest and contest -- heteronyms in general. We can also infer the correct sense from words that could be either nouns or verbs (for instance, 'processes' in the sentence: 'For the currently fixated word, lexical identification processes access memory stores that supply any missing phonological information to ?fill in? the elaborated phonological representation if needed.')

A very interesting paper on mechanisms involved in reading. (Highly readable).
Conclusion:
'Whereas the teaching of phonological awareness and letter?sound correspondences are widely recognised as important factors in reading development (Ashby & Rayner, 2005; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky & Seidenberg, 2001), our research suggests that skilled readers do more than activate a series of phonological segments. Readers also appear to activate a prosodic structure. Therefore, it is possible that teaching simple letter?sound correspondences is not always sufficient for skilled reading development. Developing prosodic sensitivity in young readers may prove to be an important piece of reading instruction, as our studies suggest that the ability to form elaborated, prosodic representations is a characteristic of skilled adult reading.'

The role of prosodic sensitivity suggests that people who are not exposed to a large and rich vocabulary and complex sentence structure in spoken English will find it difficult to read optimally as reading material becomes more complex.

I tend to agree with Mrz. I don't think Reception class children are generally aware or bothered about who is "good" at phonics/reading. My Mum asked my DS if all the children in his class could read, meaning at the level he can (but of course she didn't say that). He said "oh yes, they can all read" and went on to draw her a diagram (very DS ). Which is true of course...they can all read c-a-t (at least I think they can). He doesn't differentiate and why should he?

Because that's the starting point. Without knowing what it says, then what's the point of guessing what it means?

If you were Welsh you would understand Welsh.

The key thing would have been to not let all those people invade England, or to wait until we had a commonly agreed spelling system before everybody started writing words down.

Now the rot has set in I think Welsh can be the only answer. I am sure Gove would be up for it.

Isn't that the whole point of communication? I then ask an elder what it means and he/she explains it to me. Now I know what it means (for as long as I can remember it. When I forget the elder will explain it to me again.) After a period of tuition I can remember on my own what it means, and in turn then I can explain to a youngster. This is the process which goes on when parents naturally teach their children to read, without theoretical baggage.

It's just we all guess the words that might follow in a sentence to aid our fluency with both reading and writing, don't we maizie?

Speak for yourself. I certainly don't. I don't need to. I was taught to read words, not guess them.

(Actually, if you were Welsh you might not understand Welsh what with the English stopping people from speaking Welsh, but obviously if it works one way it can work the other.)

Yes you do, Maizie. If you don't then you are an anomaly.

I don't think it matters particularly if you can understand Welsh or not.

If the message is of particular importance, (like it's a will and your inheritance is spelled out in Welsh, you'll soon find someone who can read it. And you'll get them to explain the important bits to you so that you can point them out to people in the future.) That's what communication is all about.

It's no bloody use being able to beautifully pronounce greats chunks of the will without having the vaguest clue what they mean.

I think you are misunderstanding the importance of my idea which is that we could solve the whole phonics/irregular English spelling problem if we all just spoke Welsh which has a regular spelling system!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nobody else seems to have spotted how genius my idea is, but that is OK as that just gives me more confidence that Gove will go for it! We just have to get the Lib Dems on board, which is a bit tricky because they are probably supportive of Esperanto, however I think it can be done.

Nos da!

Math, I'm always a bit of reading strategies that leap straight from 'fluent readers do this or that' to 'this or that must be good for helping children to learn to read'. Whatever fluent readers do now that they are fluent is kind of interesting but not necessarily relevant to teaching people to read right now (although it's important to me, as a journalist - e.g. people scan the shapes of words so best to avoid setting large chunks of copy in block caps, harder to read white-on-black reversed out copy, and so son).

ruddy new computer, posts before I'm ready to hit the button - hence the extra 's' in that post!

dioch yn vawr, merry (I hope I've got the spelling right).

No, I saw what you did! But I'm just against this whole if you can pronounce then you can understand formula. I can pronounce lots of things that I can't understand.

Iechyd da!

Iechyd da pob Cymraeg pwll dyn bob cys (IIRC - blame my Father if I've got that wrong)

edam - Try "Diolch yn fawr". There is no V in the Welsh alphabet. A single F represents the V sound.

Sorry to disagree with several on here but although Biff, Chip and Kipper may drive parents round the bend, both my daughters LOVE them. My pre-school 4 year old can read already (she just wanted to learn) and actively chooses Biff and Chip books over the many many other books ('reading' and normal) that she owns. So she certainly reads them for pleasure.

I think everyone should stop arguing over phonics. Anyone in education knows that you HAVE to use a variety of methods to learn to read. Learn-say alone means you can never read a new word, and phonics means you can never read an un-phonetic word. You have to do both to properly be able to read and any school/teacher will know this.
All my children have had a deep love of books from babyhood, well before they were even thinking about learning to read, and that comes from parents.
The only worrying thing in this country which should be addressed is the number of parents don't read to their children or buy them books.

Are you implying, learnandsay, that a child can't understand "Floppy ate the bone" when you have pronounced it correctly? I think most people can understand what they are saying when they pronounce that correctly. If I read it as, "The dog played with the stick" I wouldn't actually be anywhere near reading it, would I, even if the picture could be interpreted that way?

mathanxiety - yes, my eyes do fixate on letters - the letters that are in the wrong place in words because they have been misspelt. If a word appears to be in the wrong place, I will check it out phonically and conclude either that the writer was a careless idiot, or that this is a new word I wasn't expecting. So I do instantly focus in on less familiar words. A poor reader doesn't find many words familiar at all, so to skim through what they are reading is not possible - they are reading from left to right and should on no accounts make the same assumptions and intelligent guesses that an experienced reader makes.

As an aside (especially to Maizie as I think this would count as guessing not actually reading)... Have you ever 'read' that piece of writing where all the vowels are removed? It's actually not that hard to read. I assume by heavily using context (there's no pics!) and matching the consonant sounds with what you think should fit. I read it as fluently as I would read anything after the first sentence.

Anyone in education knows that you HAVE to use a variety of methods to learn to read.

NO THEY DON'T. If they did, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

True, Edam, but many individual children can progress quickly from relatively slow decoding to rapid reading, maybe depending on the size of the word and language banks in their heads, maybe depending on whatever other reading exposure they get in the course of their lives in their families. I don't think all the various different levels of phonics material are necessary for everyone.

I also don't think phonics can make the claims of success in teaching reading that it does unless children are being brought up in written-word vacuums and only exposed to the written word and the SP strategy of tackling it in school. The reality is that most children arrive at reading through mixed methods even if their schools do nothing but SP.

Merry Marigold. I think that would count as a word puzzle. The sort of thing that the Rupert Annuals of my youth would have in them. Along with anagrams and rebuses. Nothing to do with learning to read, or the reading process. Just a bit of a brainteaser for children.

Whatever reading scheme is used, phonic or otherwise, the books always start out so unbelievably easy to understand that you would look a right numpty to check the child understood them. It isn't until a child is reasonably fluent at saying the words written in front of them that the text tends to get complicated enough that there is very much to check on the understanding front. Prior to that, you check a child's understanding by talking about stories that you are reading to them, not stories that they are reading to you - I would have thought.

'The only worrying thing in this country which should be addressed is the number of parents don't read to their children or buy them books.'

I agree and I think for those children the benefits of even SP will be short lived.

MerryMarigold, there is also the paragraph showing that people can read fluently even if letters within a word are jumbled, as long as the first and last letters are in the right place:

'I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt! See if yuor fdreins can raed tihs too.'
(There was no study -- the paragraph was just a thing that started floating around the internet)