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.

How do you account for the disproportionate failure rate of boys?

Boys don't fail with SP. See the Clackmannanshire study.

and here:

www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=106&n_issueNumber=50

www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=117&n_issueNumber=51

exoticfruits
Skilled readers use whatever they need -which is how I got the opening lines.

But you weren't reading anything, unless x has suddenly come to stand for every grapheme in written English. It was a puzzle, an amusement, a five minute brain teaser. It was any number of things but it wasn't reading.

mathanxiety,

You and I are speaking completely different languages. It is completely pointless to respond to you.

mathanxiety "even the neurobiological problems those 20% of children may have"

Yes - I think that will be a factor for many. I think we all have slightly different brains and ways of thinking. My DD (now 13 and reading well) has her own fab unique thinking style combined with mild dyslexia and a gift for art amongst other things. She didn't follow the slightly boring average child reading trajectory through primary school. But she loves reading now - and that counts for so much more I'm sure you'd all agree ! Finding key authors she loved seemed a very important step to me - starting with Lauren Child, through Unfortunate Events ... She found phonics difficult because in English there are so many variations or exceptions (and she is very logical) Possibly modern teaching of phonics may have helped her more if it covers all variations of sounds - but I have yet to be convinced.

I call bullshit to those that claim reading muddled up words is as fast as reading proper ones. I can't skim read that at all. I stop when the words are consistently mixed up pull them apart and reconstruct them. Especially the ones that don't actually have the right letters in them - ie there are two typos/spelling mistakes in that Cambridge piece. Likewise the stuff with all the 'x's I didn't feel inclined to work that out at all, whilst the * to me always translates to swear words, so I'm afraid I read 'Once upon a time there was a little bitch who lived all alone in an old house' - wasn't it supposed to be a pig anyway?

However I probably feel this way after years of decyphering poor ds's writing which was as muddled as you could possibly make it and it was very hard work (I admired his teachers who not only could read it but add encouraging comments about how interesting the content was). Reading dd's work was in comparison a piece of cake. Wrong words really stand out to me and they are very distracting.

The other thing I would like to dispute is the idea that children with very large spoken vocabularies find phonetics less useful. For my ds I think it was actually worse because when it came to guessing from context (his major 'reading' technique prior to SP) the range of words he could guess from was comparatively large meaning that the sentences he read often bore very little resemblance to the words on the page (which were mostly of incredibly little interest in any case). Of course once he could actually read it was very useful.

I was just talking to him about how he felt when he went to his first tutoring session, and he said it was very odd to see the writing stop swirling around and actually mean something.

I find the just learn the words off by heart and you'll be fine thinking very odd to be honest. In what other learning would a teacher suggest this? I've done a few professional exams which require a huge amount of rote learning and swotting in order to pass tests. I can do this very effectively but if I'm not using the learning routinely afterwards it disappears as fast as I learned it. Learning principles on the other hand stick once they make intuitive sense and I can apply them to many situations. Learning the rules of reading is surely a much more efficient use of 'head space' than rote learning large numbers of words? The rules mean all words are readable. The rote learning simply means that a few words might be recalled.

I don't think we are talking different languages MaizieD. I am sorry you have decided not to engage with ideas that do not fall into line with yours.

It is hard to have any sort of exchange of ideas with someone who constantly presents hypotheses as axioms. The most significant hypothesis you present as axiomatic is the conclusions of the NRP 2000 (but not all the conclusions of the NRP, because the explicit teaching of sight words was endorsed therein) which formed the basis of the Clackmannanshire programme.

We are still basically poking in the dark when it comes to improving outcomes for deprived students and especially for white British deprived boys.

Current research suggests that social and emotional support and above all engagement with families to increase educational aspiration are vital. No single approach such as SP used alone can hope to be successful --
'Across the studies we reviewed, parental involvement in school, and their aspirations for their children, emerged as some of the most important factors associated with lower educational achievement, even controlling for family background (Blanden 2006; Goodman and Gregg 2010; Sodha and Margo 2010; Strand 2007). This is particularly relevant to children from low-income families as parental aspirations and attitudes towards education vary significantly according to socio-economic status (Goodman and Gregg 2010; Sodha and Margo 2010). Ethnicity also plays a role here, with parental aspirations of white British children significantly lower than those in minority ethnic groups (Sodha and Margo 2010; Strand 2007).
Case studies and observations from schools with a high proportion of white working-class pupils support these findings, reporting that ?white working-class families are the hardest to engage within the life of the school and their child?s learning? (Demie and Lewis 2010 p 44; DCSF 2008).
Breaking cycles of low aspiration and disenfranchisement with education is therefore seen as a key strategy for closing attainment gaps for these groups.'
Interestingly, Pause, Prompt, Praise and Reading Recovery were methods of approaching family reading that showed great promise.

(SPOKES programme

'The other thing I would like to dispute is the idea that children with very large spoken vocabularies find phonetics less useful.'

I don't think that was claimed. The point about larger vocabulary was that it provides a much better point of reference for children when faced with unfamiliar words; working memory is more of an adjunct for them than it is for readers with poor vocab. Phonics may well be just as useful but a passing familiarity with the word, even if the meaning is not known, aids recognition. And sometimes the meaning can be inferred from the context. It's not an either/or proposition.

Nooka, that's a weird post! Based heavily on your own experience

I call bullshit to those that claim reading muddled up words is as fast as reading proper ones. Well, I did! Honest guv. I am terrible with anagrams that are truly muddled, but I read a lot, so seeing the first/ letter and using context was enough for me. I find that very interesting, and different from a puzzle, maizied, as I am really not very good at anagrams.

I've done a few professional exams which require a huge amount of rote learning and swotting in order to pass tests. I can do this very effectively but if I'm not using the learning routinely afterwards it disappears as fast as I learned it. The rote learning is generally applied to high frequency words, which means they are constantly being used as you read (was, said, he, she etc.).

Learning the rules of reading is surely a much more efficient use of 'head space' than rote learning large numbers of words? The rules mean all words are readable. I don't think anyone on this thread has said phonics is a waste of space. Some people think a complete focus on a phonics (Synthetic phonics) as a cure-all to reading difficulties and others think using mixed methods is a better approach as certain children learn differently.

I think learning phonics is brilliant. I don't agree with the SP approach, based on my own son's issues, and conversations I have had with many teacher friends.

If you can't translate the letters into anything meaningful in your mind it really doesn't matter that you actually know the word you are looking at though does it?

I agree with you on aspirations by the way. I just don't understand why you appear to think that using a very good way to learn to read instead of a confusing mix of not very good ways to learn to read is in some way in conflict with helping disadvantaged children to succeed.

If a word is completely unfamiliar to you, then your chances of having any notion of its meaning are slim when you decode it and even when you decode it you may not pronounce it correctly in your head or aloud. If you have heard it somewhere before, your chances improve slightly. The more you may have heard a word, even if you're not able to come up with a specific meaning, the more likely you are to decode it quickly and also guess accurately at its meaning when you run across it written down.

Without the massive 'whole life' interventions, all you do is teach children to decode. They can't succeed without much more in place than just the ability to decode. They may not even want to succeed. Enthusiastic support from home is vital. Without it, ability to decode and interest in books may even wither or become a source of embarrassment no matter how a child arrives at it -- and not all children will learn using SP. SP plus sight words (for instance a programme like SIPPS) increases speed of access to the written word. It's just another effective method in a vacuum unless the whole context of the child's life is addressed.

Sorry MerryMarigold but present and present are the same here and neither of your pronounciations ...

Prez ent
No schwa same stress .

I didn't agree with nooka that it was bullshit, I read it just as quickly.

When you learn to read you need the phonics as the building blocks, the tools to help you decode the unfamiliar.
The person who gets stuck on the phonics is never going to read for pleasure because it is hard work. My dyslexic DS can now read - because of very intensive work with phonics- but he doesn't love reading and possibly never will because it is still hard work.
Those who enjoy reading are the ones that move on and don't have to give the mechanics a thought. If I am reading to myself I am terrifically lazy and if I come across an unknown word I don't even bother to pronounce it and the sentence will give me the meaning. Those days I tend to look them up in a dictionary because it is quite rare, as a child they just flowed over me.

The asterisks or crosses were a puzzle, but so are words to a child who doesn't know what they mean. They need the key to unlock and the key is phonics.
I could read the crosses because I used previous knowledge. I can't read Chinese, that is merely a puzzle to me, but I could learn to read it if someone gave me the key to do it.

If you read the link that mrz put up earlier you can see that that text did not originate from Cambridge (or at least not from Cambridge academia) and that it is heavily skewed so that it is relatively easy to read.

From the same link try:

1. A vheclie epxledod at a plocie cehckipont near the UN haduqertares in Bagahdd on Mnoday kilinlg the bmober and an Irqai polcie offceir

2. Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs

3. A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur

All examples of jumbled up word sentences. How easily did you figure out the meaning? Was it as quickly as a properly ordered word sentence?

There is also research showing that there is about an 11% slowing affect from jumbling (references are in the link)

Of course my experience is personal. How could it be otherwise? I'm not a teacher or a researcher so I can only talk about my own reading experience and that of my children. For us mixed method teaching utterly screwed up my son so I'm hardly likely to say it's great. He couldn't learn the high frequency words so he couldn't read them. Repeatedly looking at something that made no sense was utterly unhelpful, even if occasionally he got them right in a test. Like many dyslexics it was the little words that he had the biggest problems with.

I've never seen any research that suggests mixed methods are the way to go, whereas I have seen plenty about phonics and synthetic phonics. Intuitively it just makes much more sense to me to learn the code to translate from written word to sound than to encourage 'guess the word' type concepts. My ds guessed repeatedly wrong, and then he refused to engage. I think I would have done the same.

exotic I asked ds to think back as to how he felt about reading a few years ago and how he feels now, and he told me that he usually takes a bit of time to warm up as it were and then after a while the words swim about again (I was trying to get him to tell me how he approached new words, but obviously didn't express myself very well). He now reads extensively for pleasure. We are going on a no electronics holiday in a week and I'll need to allow for at least a book a day probably more (luckily ds, dd and I have very similar taste in books so we can all read the same set). He doesn't read above his age as I did at his age, but then I was a very precocious reader (and didn't have much of a social life).

Dyslexia runs very strongly in my family, with all but one boy having fairly severe dyslexia in the last two generations. Interestingly we haven't found any history of reading difficulties going further back (in a very academic family) and I can't help but wonder if it corresponds with the change in teaching methods. Certainly ds now reads with much greater ease and enjoyment than his cousins or uncles who all had reading interventions too (in fact they were all sent to schools who claimed to provide support).

1 and 2 were just as fast but 3 I found difficult.

If your son is dyslexic, he is probably like mine and needs structure. My DS only learned to read when I did it myself and went right back to basics with phonics.
The other 2 are not dyslexic so they didn't have any problems - they still need phonics as the key to decode.
My problem with teaching the dyslexic one was keeping his younger brother away while we did it because it was demoralising to have the 7 year old struggling and his 5 yr old brother reading it upside down across the table.

MerryMarigold can i ask what is the SP approach? I'm not trying to be funny it's a genuine question.

It is great that he reads for pleasure. When I said that my dyslexic DS doesn't read for pleasure it wasn't entirely true, but he was very picky e.g he read Anthony Horowitz. He will read on holiday as a adult but he doesn't read like me, I finish one book and start the next.

^Perhaps if she'd put up
'xx xxx xxx xxxx xx xxxxx, xx xxx xxx xxxxx xx xxxxx'

Or
'xx xx x xxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx, xxxx x xxxxxx xxx xx xxxxxxxxx xx x xxxx xxxxxxx, xxxx xx xx xxxx xx x xxxx'^

You might have found it a bit more difficult. Two very well known opening sentences. Adult literature.^

No, those were easy peasy; I am getting the hang of this now. They are perhaps the 2 most famous opening lines in English literature though.

Firstly, if the school was teaching phonics properly they would not give the child books to read which contain phonic 'knowledge' which hasn't yet been taught! That's what decodable reading schemes are for; pracice and consolidation of what has been learned so far.

In terms of using context, I wasn't really thinking of very young children just beginning their reading journey, but more for intermediate readers, reading books that don't have such carefully controlled vocabulary.

Of course, a child could well encounter this situation in their out of school reading. In which case the person reading with them needs to say something like "In this word the 'ear' spells and /air/ sound. You haven't learned about this yet at school, but you will." Then ask the child to sound out and blend the word with the /air/ instead of /eer/. This sort of incidental teaching might be enough for the child to remember in future that 'ear' can spell 2 sounds and to try both when the word isn't immediately apparent. Even more so if they have already been introduced to 'alternative' sounds for discrete graphemes. Even if they don't remember this has helped to advance their understanding of how the English alphabetic code works and the identification of new words is still firmly related to sounding out and blending.

I think you have replaced using context here, with person reading with them. In which case the person is helping them reach the correct word and they do not need to use context. Whilst I am all for people listening to children read and using opportunities for incidental teaching, there will come a time when they will be on their own.

(Perhaps my use of the bear example led you to think I was talking about very young readers - it was just in my mind because of a thread on AIBU, where a supply teachers could not convince a Y2 group that bear said bear; they were adamant it said beer.)

If the child is directed to guess the word from a picture or context they have not advanced their learning one tiny bit. Or, they have 'learned' that phonic knowledge is unreliable and that guessing does just as well. They may even start to be discouraged at this point because the letters didn't do the job they have been taught that they do and nobody seems to be able to explain why.

G

In terms of using context, I wasn't really thinking of very young children just beginning their reading journey, but more for intermediate readers, reading books that don't have such carefully controlled vocabulary.

I'm really very confused by this. Firstly I'm not sure what you mean by intermediate readers and I'm also confused by the idea that schools control the vocabulary in books for children, who are readers, read. Sorry perhaps you can explain??

Mrz, are you in wales?!

SP (Synthetic phonics) approach to me (with my vast experience of one school which has changed its policy over the past year, and of course mumsnet!) is where you use only phonics and nothing else to learn how to read. It is very strict, in terms of reading only books with the sounds you have learned. Mixed methods is where you use phonics (even with a heavy focus, say 80%) but as well as other methods, such as learning High Frequency Words and using context.

If the child is directed to guess the word from a picture or context they have not advanced their learning one tiny bit. Or, they have 'learned' that phonic knowledge is unreliable and that guessing does just as well. They may even start to be discouraged at this point because the letters didn't do the job they have been taught that they do and nobody seems to be able to explain why.

I am really not recommending guessing, or even using context for very new readers. But there will come a time when they will neither be reading controlled texts nor reading to an adult. They will still be encountering words that they have not read before - words that (given the nature of English spelling) could be pronounced in different ways - this is where the use of context comes into play.

'Lucy told a nice story when mummy soaked peas'

Well done for coming up with that, exotic.

No MerryMarigold I'm in England.

and I'm afraid I'm still confused (sorry I've not slept properly for nearly a week and functioning accordingly ).

I teach phonics - no mixed methods, no using pictures to work out what a word says- no learning words by sight. I don't expect children to independently read words that are beyond their current skills/knowledge levels.
But that doesn't mean they don't read other books/texts with adult support or that they don't share lots of stories everyday to develop language and vocabulary.

They will still be encountering words that they have not read before - words that (given the nature of English spelling) could be pronounced in different ways - this is where the use of context comes into play.

I think that's exactly what I said early on in this thread