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.

[Feenie]

Is phonics the best way to teach children to read?

Well, we are definitely a very long way away from the thread title, even letting Masha in close to the end with her spelling reform!

[mrz]

I predict masha will pop up mid August claiming team GB would have won more medals if the spelling system was reformed

[mathanxiety]

Kesstrel: 'You cannot legitimately take facts that have only been demonstrated to apply to two percent of the population, inflate them by a factor of 10 to arbitrarily claim that they actually apply to twenty percent, and then defend that claim as legitimate "generalisation".'

That is why I have not done that. I have already explained how you misread what I wrote upthread. You can go back and find where I spelled it all out to you as easily as I could if I could be arsed.

[Feenie]

No one can, Math. You've bored everyone into submission as usual.

[maizieD]

Two articles which may be of interest (though not to mathanxiety)

www.syntheticphonics.com/articles/Sound%20Sense.pdf

educationfortomorrow.org.uk/2008/98teaching.html

[kesstrel]

Feenie

Well, we are definitely a very long way away from the thread title,

Yes, I fear so. I just went and had a look at Math's latest slew of research links, thinking perhaps s/he had found something a bit more relevant/convincing than the first lot. As far as I can see, none of them even mentions reading, let along phonics....and as for data....?

[Feenie]

I lost whatever point Math was trying to make a long, long time ago.

[Feenie]

That second article was very interesting, Maizie.

This was most likely what was behind its promotion of the original Literacy and Numeracy strategies. Raise the bar a little, but don?t worry about the very bottom lot.

But teachers do not have to go along with this, to have low expectations, to believe that the bottom lot are unteachable, unreachable, due to poverty, due to their parents, due to their ?special needs."

[mathanxiety]

Kesstrel -- you seem determined to misread, misquote, mischaracterise, and generally tie yourself and everyone up in double negative knots here.

Write to the Committee if you want to see the actual figures used to compile the report in the easy to read format that seems to have presented so many problems for you.

'Furthermore, you cannot group together children who don?t have books in the home and children sleeping on mattresses in filthy corridors, etc with the vague words ?ranging from? in order to claim that their needs for family intervention are identical. You are still trying to confound the two percent with the twenty percent, in terms of socioeconomic class (something you previously wrongly used the All party report to try to support).'
Yes I can, and furthermore so can policy makers because there really are certain problems in the homes of the bottom 20%, the deprived who receive free school meals, and those problems really do range from lack of books due to poverty all the way to children living in atrocious conditions.

Read the Deprivation/Education report that I linked to. The cognitive abilities and social-emotional skills of deprived children, about 20% of the whole, make them unready for school and behind their peers right from the start. In particular, the cognitive skills gap is a predictor of the twenty percentage point gap that later emerges between the level 4 and up performers and those who fall below that benchmark. If you are a child in the bottom 20% you are statistically more likely to live in a home where poverty-related problems are going to affect you because the bottom 20% are by definition the poorest. Those problems include material deprivation, exhausted parents working two or three jobs to make ends meet or relying on insufficient welfare, stress that can influence the parent-child relationship and quality of interactions, low educational level of parents; low maternal educational attainment is especially important.

This paper using UK and US data teases out exactly the factors associated with living in the bottom 20% that contribute to socio-emotional and cognitive lags in deprived children and suggests ways of tackling it, with training parents to develop sensitive parenting salient among them. This paper is just one of many all pointing in the same direction, identifying the same cluster of factors in the homes of deprived children, and suggesting that tackling parenting practices has a measurable positive effect on both cognitive and socio-emotional skills.

'When Feenie said ?The 20% of children who fail to learn to read are not confined to deprived areas?, you responded: ?You couldn?t be more mistaken. Statistics do not lie.?, with specific reference to the All Party report.'

(Selective quoting aside...)

Feenie implied that I was talking about children who are living in deprived areas, whereas I was talking about children who are deprived as defined by factors such as receipt of FSMs no matter where they live. They don't all live in 'deprived areas'. Being categorised as deprived doesn't imply you live in a deprived area. Living in an area categorised as 'deprived' doesn't mean all individuals there are deprived.

There is a difference between children living in deprived areas and deprived children, simply put. I said 'deprived children'. Feenie's argument was based on the notion of 'children in deprived areas'. Not the same thing...

[Feenie]

Okay then, the children who fail to learn to read are not confined to deprived children.

There are many children, some on this very board, who have been exposed to books and literature since they were born - yet have failed to read using learn and say/mixed methods.

[mathanxiety]

Feenie, you would be a lot more credible as some sort of reading expert if you refrained from making snide remarks about posters who disagree with your pov and about what they post.

You come across as someone who has run out of arguments and has to resort to sticking out her tongue and waggling her fingers with her thumbs in her ears.

Just saying.

[mathanxiety]

'Okay then, the children who fail to learn to read are not confined to deprived children'.

If you are paraphrasing me there Feenie, that is not what I said.

For the purposes of correcting Kesstrel's and your misreading of what I said, I made a distinction between 'deprived children' and 'children living in deprived areas'.
There are deprived children living in relatively affluent areas.
There are children living in deprived areas who are relatively better off than the average child living there.

Overall, yes, there are very clearly children who don't learn to read well or at all among the top 80%. It is clear from the League Tables that just over a fifth of the top 81% in SES terms scores below level 4. It is explicitly stated in the League Tables that the bottom 19% in SES terms scores 58% above level 4, leaving 42% under level 4.

'There are many children, some on this very board, who have been exposed to books and literature since they were born - yet have failed to read using learn and say/mixed methods.'
They are individual children, with individual problems.
You cannot extrapolate from those individual anecdotes that all of the 22% of the top 81% of non-deprived children who scored below level 4 were poor readers because of mixed methods.
You cannot say that the 22% would have been more successful if they had been taught using phonics just because some children mentioned here did not learn using mixed methods.

[JugglingWithTangentialOranges]

I'm sceptical generally about there being a problem with "mixed methods"

As if only one way is right (especially where it's a new system that hasn't been explained to me / therefore something of a mystery to parents, something only the experts know about) It's like when they have new ways to do maths - but at least then there's more understanding that you could do any given problem in a variety of ways.

Basically I think all knowledge is good (on the whole) I think if people are responding to a child as an individual and responding to their queries, learning styles, interests, and strengths, then there should be no problem with using a variety of approaches. I don't really believe that one approach suits all.

(Though interested in argument on here that understanding letter sounds and matching these with letters is a basic building block in learning to read)

But I'd always like to include things about context and being involved in the story and guessing ahead as strategies in becoming a skilled reader too.

[mrz]

In 2009 we had 93% of children achieve level 4 or above (50% level 5) in English (slightly higher in reading than writing) and in the same year Ofsted reported "The percentage of pupils eligible for FSM is above average" so I would suggest FSM entitlements isn't a particularly reliable indicator

[mathanxiety]

You are talking about one school Mrz. FSM may not be a reliable indicator of reading attainment for your particular, individual, single, one school.

As you can see from the League Tables, your results have not been replicated elsewhere in 42% of FSM children. That percentage represents over 40,000 of FSM children

The Tables do not show the method used to teach the 42%. Nothing can be assumed about that therefore. You cannot say mixed methods let them down or that SP let them down.

[Feenie]

[mrz]

Or it may not be a reliable indicator in lots of schools math and there is some other factor responsible for poor results.

[Feenie]

Math, you still haven't told us how you are 'working for a radical change in parenting style that will affect parents' confidence, children's behaviour and academic performance'.

We have 33 posts left, and I'm interested.

[mrz]

Well the majority of our parents appear confident, the pupils behave well in school (not always so well in the home apparently) but academic performance is always interesting

[choccyp1g]

Mathanxiety, maybe the FSM % are not a reliable indicator for Mrz' school because of they way they teach in that school.

[mathanxiety]

Mrz, believe me, the correlation between school under performance and low income has been studied. The home factors associated with low income and their relationship with school performance have been studied. Improvement in school performance when parenting interventions have been piloted have been measured and found to be positive regardless of methods used to teach reading.

There are very few questions left to be answered, very little remaining room for your speculation about 'other factors'.

Whether the parents in your school 'appear confident' is neither here nor there. Your reports about your individual school are anecdotes. If what you report was found on a wide scale then you would have statistics that would be meaningful in a discussion of the best way to teach children to read.
But it isn't, and you don't.

Feenie -- I will not be answering your presumptuous question.
I do not owe you any personal information about myself, and I do not have to state what credentials or experience or education I may have in order to contribute to discussions on education, or any other topic on MN.

[mrz]

The problem is math ...I don't believe you when experience contradicts what you claim.

[Feenie]

Well no, you don't have to.

But it may lend some credibility to your arguments, and also offer something against the suggestion that while the rest of us battle to change the face of educating children and actually get up off our arses and do it, you just appear to sit there sourcing papers that prove we can't possibly do anything successful for an ever growing list of boring reasons.

[Feenie]

It is galling, to say the least, to have someone with no apparent credentials tell you that you aren't doing what you do, in fact, do every day, for no apparent reason other than they are fantastic at googling.

Not what I would call 'working' to change anything at all.

[mathanxiety]

If you bothered reading those papers you would see that they prove nothing of the sort, Feenie.