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.

ph - of course there's no v in Welsh! I know that really... (v. glad my Dad isn't on here).

maths MaizieD, All the research on eye movement suggests very strongly that reading each and every word left to right, taking cognisance of each letter, which you claim to do when you read, simply does not happen, except when readers are at a very basic stage of learning to read. Once reading aloud with correct intonation begins, this stage is left behind.

And any assessor or the phonics check should have realised this when their good readers tried to read 'portrait' phonetically.

Rabbitstew, reading that piece can be just as fast as reading a normal text. If you had several pages of it, you would be able to do it at probably the same speed as normal reading and you would even start to comprehend it as you went along. People can learn to read even using a non-Latin alphabet just as fast as reading text in a Latin one (though comprehension tends to be a function of vocab and grammar and syntax knowledge.) When you first start out reading it you get the same comprehension from it as you would if you were unfamiliar with the language it was written in. Sadly, that is the case with many readers from the underprivileged sections of society even when reading text in their native language.

A suggestion here that British people of different ages and classes use different vocabularies. Same goes for the US. In general, middle and upper class children have been exposed to far more actual words, which they have had a chance to absorb into their working memory than children from lower socio-economic levels, and by the time they have got to school the window of opportunity to effectively close this gap and prevent the repercussions is closing fast, leaving thousands of children hobbled when it comes to reading beyond children's lit of a simpler sort.

mathanxiety - I agree with all that you say about reading in general, but you yourself say that at the very beginning stages of learning to read, people do tend to read words from left to right. At that stage, I really don't see why jumping to encouraging the fluent reader's use of context and understanding of syntax and grammar to speed up and enhance the process of taking in what is written is particularly helpful, as it tends to result in some very silly guesses from amateur readers (and, at four years old, rather poor grammarians...), not intuitive and intelligent responses to the text. It is therefore, in my view, not a helpful way to encourage a child to read very basic reading books. Basically, you want children to be studying the individual words quite carefully at first, to speed up the process of memorisation, rather than to have them making guesses on the basis of the first letter and a picture. And surely if you can make connections between words and letter combinations within words, that can speed up the process of memorisation, rather than being given lists of apparently random words to memorise, since the brain is attracted to patterns (and apparent surprise breaks from a pattern are also more memorable than things which appear to be entirely randomly generated)?

Whilst I agree, therefore, as does everyone, that phonics is not the only way of teaching reading, particularly for children with a pre-existing rich vocabulary and understanding of the structure of the language; you cannot claim to be able to read fluently and with understanding just because you have a good understanding of phonics; and some children find it harder to understand phonics than others, it still makes sense to me that phonics will succeed with more children than other methods as the first step in the process of learning to read. All the other stages of learning to read seem to follow on quite naturally from phonics, rather than going against it in any way, and I suspect that the most natural and fluent readers of all are those who can utilise ALL of the techniques described in this thread - to be missing one or two from your lexicon is going to cause you issues, even if minor ones, like being far less likely to be able to read new words out loud in a way that won't cause others to titter at your ineptitude.

flexybex - surely the stage of reading from left to right is not entirely left behind? What about when you are asked to read a single word (ie no context) that you haven't seen before????.... Only a beginner reader who had forgotten a useful technique for this context would try to read any other way?

CecilyP. From way up thread. As I said before - yes of course my A level students' problems are caused by lack of practice and lack of vocabulary. I was offering an explanation of Why many lack that practice and vocabulary. As they tell me themselves- reading is hard work and so they don't want to do it! My point is that at least a third of most of my A level sets have students hoping mainly for As and Bs that find reading at length very hard work ( others of all abilities dont ) Poor literacy is a much bigger problem than the 80 per cnt figure suggests as this figure doesn't encompass any of my students.
One of the main arguments I read in favour of phonics and against encouraging the use of context is that the context strategy lets students down when they hit secondary school. They can decode but I get the impression they have to do it 'in manual' it's not automatic.

No, I agree with you there, and I do think SP is an excellent approach to teaching reading (I don't think it is the only one, and I think ability to read in and of itself will not change the outcome for the 20% or so of children who disengage from school and the written word by about the age of 11). The very basic reading material, in the SP schemes, do require careful sound by sound exercises and using any other method to tackle them would be crazy.

However, I also feel that the very regimented, step by step advance through graded reading material is not necessary for anyone except those who can genuinely not learn any other way, and ignoring the feedback or loop effect of learning by exposure to complex texts should not be eschewed in favour of the plodding, careful SP approach for all.

I think holding back children who are eager, no matter how many mistakes they make, can backfire and kill their enthusiasm. That is why the explicit teaching of sight words (which constitute a very high percentage of the words on any given page a child will encounter) is a good thing (as the National Reading Panel in the US found), as it can help a child to get better at reading through reading, by allowing access to more and more complex texts in a low risk environment (not one where testing is the order of the day), and not risking boring them silly or putting them off by endless tales of cats, mats, pats, rats, etc. The sight words as taught in US schools are not random. Those used most frequently are taught first, with less frequent words learned later. Allowing them access to complex texts does not necessarily guarantee misapprehension -- it provides practice in inferring meaning from context as well as decoding, which is a skill related to the innate ability to infer meaning in spoken language.

Again, the size of a child's vocabulary, and his or her intuitive grasp of meaning, without which children would not be able to learn and use an oral language, have prepared children in vastly different ways to see or hear patterns and rhyme, and to learn to read using any method, including SP. Those with the larger vocabularies who have spent their formative years in a word-rich environment have a huge advantage over those who do not. The following stages of learning to read, to read with comprehension, etc., stem from the quality of the word environment children have under their belts even before they enter school. The process by which recognition of patterns occurs is infinitely speeded up when a child has a large word bank to compare new words with.

I'm in my mid-60s and learned to read using phonics. I think this is far and away the best system, and I believe 'our' generation provided a larger number of literate (and well spoken) schoolchildren than are now leaving school. The fads of not needing to know the rules of grammar, and ..... "well never mind if their spelling is not correct" is not sensible. Sometimes, learning a system by rote (eg. learning our 'times tables') did actually work.

Many, many still failed ShirlR - they always have. My mother (went to school in 1930s) always says ' no one left school unable to read in my day' but it is untrue.

The effect of jumbled letters and position on reading speed and eye movement research carried out by Durham University

www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

When mine started school the Head started her talk on reading by putting up

* * *.

I felt a bit guilty because without thinking I read it , based on my knowledge of story telling. The second time I went to the same talk I just kept quiet. Anyone else ' read' it? Her point of course was that we were in the position of a 5 year old with it.

Sorry - ignore totally! I forgot that asterisks don't come out - I will try x.

Xxxx xxxx x xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxxx xxxx.

I feel a bit guilty because based upon my knowledge of story telling I can't read it exoticfruits

Must be just me then- the Head was a bit upset because she always used it for her talk and everyone was always baffled. I will leave it to see if anyone else gets it.

Cross posts I was trying to read

• • • * *.

Once upon a time there were three little pigs.

I don't know why asterisks don't come out the way you type them - it sprang out at me more than is does with crosses.

Correct! It shows the way I read. I would be no use as a proof reader, I scan very quickly what I expect to see. However there are times when you need the phonics as building blocks.

I guess it starts out as Once upon a time?.... but I'm not so sure after that - is it "Once upon a time there were three little pigs"?????? If it isn't, it still could be!

Wahay!

Yes the Once Upon A Time part was easy based on the knowledge that it was related to story telling but the three little pigs took more thought

We all have different sorts of brains-mine just gets sudden flashes and as she put it on the board, confident that no one would get it, I just glanced and said 'Once upon a time there were 3 little pigs'-I then felt a bit sorry because it rather lost her point!
Children are no different-they all approach things in a different way. I don't think that it matters in the least with most children how you approach it BUT it is vitally important to others. DH just picked it up before school, looking at the words while his parents read to him-no one knew until he could do it-they didn't teach it.
I am older than most on here and have seen it all! When I started teaching Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) was the 'in' thing. It failed because they eventually had to change over (around year3) and those who it was supposed to help the most were the ones to get most confused because they were the ones who were not ready to change over. Those who changed over easily didn't need it in the first place! We have worked all through 'real' books and back to phonics.
I used phonics with my dyslexic DS -I made games, word cards, wrote my own books and it worked-eventually. He was one that needed structure. I was a great fan of Toe byToe herewhich uses nonsense words and Mona McNee who wrote her own scheme to teacher her DS with Downs syndrome to read (the school had given up on him). She now gives it all for free here

Mona McKnee is terribly old fashioned but it works and I admire the way that she publishes it all for free instead of making money out of it.

One of the main arguments I read in favour of phonics and against encouraging the use of context is that the context strategy lets students down when they hit secondary school. They can decode but I get the impression they have to do it 'in manual' it's not automatic.

I do know what you mean, beezbum, but the fact that they are still overtly decoding, suggests that they are still encountering many new words for the first time - words that you would, perhaps, expect A level students to have read before. I don't know if an SP start would have really made a difference, but, in most cases, I suspect not. And being good at reading doesn't necessarily mean that reading is something that you will want to do a lot of. I feel the use of context is something that complete beginner readers should not be doing, but as pupils progress, they have to, not as an alternative to phonics, but to decide which of several phonically alternatives is the the actual word. Of course, younger readers will be reading new words already in their spoken vocabulary, so matching is easy. It becomes harder when reading words that you don't already know.

Once upon a time there were three little pigs.

How did you do that? It could have been anything?