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.

Yes, schools try, and good for them. Many fail.

Engagement with parents is essential. It is not lazy or in any way a cop out to want parents to be involved or to acknowledge that they can play a central role in the education of their children. To state that is to acknowledge reality for the thousands and thousands of middle class children who succeed.

Any programme that improves behaviour and also engages parents will have a ripple effect on what can be achieved in the classroom. Turning your back on the wider context and insisting on going it alone within the four walls of the school, or shrugging and saying there is nothing else that can be done to engage parents is defeatist thinking. Drawing parents into the work of the school and helping them relate better to their children at home (programmes such as Spokes or HCA) as opposed to keeping on at something that has been done before and failed before, means teachers spend more time on instruction and less time in classroom management.

I suggest you look at the HCA and SPOKES programmes Mrz. They were piloted in Hackney and Plymouth.

Interestingly at a meeting last week other professional were reporting a decline in middle class involvement (children's language skills in particular) and social networking is seen as one of the prime causes.

I had read the HCA report when it was published and there are many similar programmes running nationally which we have been/are involved in.
I probably should make it clear we don't have a behavioural problem and our children achieve highly even without parental engagement.

IME good support from home is a massive boost a child's literacy development. I've sought to promote this in every way I can think of (probably making a proper nuisance of myself in the process - I recall regularly ringing a travelling family on their mobile to update them of their son's progress and encourage them to get involved). However, where attempts to engage parents/carers fail we, the school, have to compensate for the lack of input from home.

I think the importance of home involvement is the implication of the comments at Mrz's meeting. Parents who don't see it as a partnership are letting their children down badly.

I think home involvement is important but not everyone share the same values math ... I was talking to a parent tonight who explained he doesn't have time to hear his children read because they attend martial arts classes 4 nights a week and it doesn't leave time for "school stuff" and after all his children are in school 6hours a day ...

I teach at university level and many students have great difficulty reading. When I ask them to attempt a word what I find is that those who have no understanding of phonetics have no basic vocabulary with which to even begin a sense of pronunciation. Dictionary's also have phonetics in order to aid the pronunciation of words but many students have no idea what these "things are in the brackets". I am not suggesting that we should not embrace any system when reading but phonetics might give our children a greater foundation from which to begin to appreciate the written and spoken word. You never know, by the time they reach university education they might also have an idea of how to spell, that would be such a bonus.....personally I read to my little girl every day and she recognises words but I would still encourage phonetically spelling those words that she does not. I say we just need to promote reading at home.....

Forgive me for repeating this (I've already posted this 'blast from the past' on another thread) but the following sums up the whole phonics debate as far as I'm concerned:

"The complexity of the reading process needs to be appreciated so that an oversimplified view of the matching of sounds is prevented and the need for alternative pathways to meet individual requirements is understood."

Refusetoworry: where is quote from? I agree!

Refuse ToWorry,

I'd be interested to know where your quote comes from, too. (Sorry if I missed it on another thread.)

The quote is proof that what goes around comes around in the ever-revolving wheel of education in schools. It's from 'Making Language Work' by Diana M R Hutchcroft, published in 1981. It was a study text from my teacher training days which I found covered in dust high up on an old book shelf. It is making so much more sense to me now than it did back in the eighties!

mrz, are you raising an eyebrow at the concept of little being new in the world of education; or is it the thought of what a naive and inexperienced trainee teacher I once was; or my audacity at quoting from a 20 year old book; or my shockingly dusty bookshelves? Or do you just disagree with the quote?

If I didn't value your opinion, I wouldn't ask.

No RefuseToWorry I'm hmmming at the text which I remember from teacher training

120,000 families is the absolute bottom of the barrel. I suspect the stubborn 20% is made up of families with very similar problems or combinations of problems, with a few percentage points of children not learning because of other causes.

I agree with RefuseToWorry that there is nothing new in the world of education. Every single idea put forth today and in the last 50 years has been recycled, dressed up as new, for centuries. The constant that has led to the continuous failure of all methods to reach all children and the desperate recycling of ideas has been chaotic families. Focusing on the classroom as the means of changing society has never worked. And even for those who can be reached in school, one size fits all is a huge gamble to take.

I agree math ...phonics was the main method of reading instruction for over 400 years until we imported whole language from the US

andromedababelearning.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/learning-journey/

a close colleagues blog

The pendulum has swung back and forth several times from whole language to phonics over the last four hundred years.

Interestingly the advent of whole language model in the US can be traced as far back as the mid 1970s

Whole language methods (and phonics) can be traced back at least three centuries further, with theorists of the 19th century having the most impact since that was when children began attending school in large numbers.

Can you link references for that? For it was uncommon, in UK at least, pre-1960s.

I wonder if this is math's source?

www.zona-pellucida.com/wilson10.html#r1

*I suspect the stubborn 20% is made up of families with very similar problems or combinations of problems, with a few percentage points of children not learning because of other causes."

Do you mean the 20% that fail to read using mixed methods, math? Because if you do, you couldn't be further from the truth.

A potted history of reading.

Methods and theories are really only relevant when there are large numbers of children involved.

That's the same one I linked to, just on a different site (mine's prettier )