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.

Let's think of the 'ure' sound which kids have to learn. How many words use this?

• Manure hmmmm...not really very common usage amongst 6 year olds
• Sure...hmmmm...then we have to figure out the 's' is a 'sh' in this word. How many other words start with 's' which makes 'sh'?
• Pure...ok, give you that one
• Picture...hmmmm...who actually says 'Pick - t- your'
• Lure hmmmm...again, not many 6 year olds gonna be using that one

Is it really worth teaching this as a sound? Isn't it actually just easier to learn these 4 words? (Since you will have to learn 'sure' independently anyway).

I much prefer to teach this as u_e. Which is used in many, many, many words.

I regularly use words I have read, understood, but have absolutely no idea how to pronounce. I tend to try them put on DH first - he laughs his head off. I was caught out with my pronunciation of "taupe" at the weekend. Very embarrassing

It wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference unless you had been taught the 'au' sound as pronounced in taupe and taupe had been one of the example words given, and you had remembered it.

Feenie, u_e makes a 'you' sound, doesn't it? Like Jude or chute? It's not the same sound.

In picture, it's different - chuh. As in feature, future, nature, nurture, adventure, etc.

Yes, Merrymarigold - as in pure.

Yeah, 'chuh' makes sense with those others.

Pure is like manure and lure not Jude or chute. It's not pewer (unless a v regional accent).

Do you teach the whole of 'ture' as 'chuh' sound then? Not being facetious, genuine qu. as ds hasn't got hold of the 'ure' sound.

It is round here

Is that Liverpewl?!!

Phonics and the "one size fits all" thing is shite.

Phonics, you fucked up any pleasure my dyslexic son might have gotten from reading as a leisure activity, purely for the love of a story and the written word. This is something I and DS's Father adore. We read copiously for pleasure and would be the poorer without it. We want a love of reading for our sons.

One size fits all education, you ignored him, marginalised him and allowed him to struggle, so that we are now fighting to get him to see that giving up is not an easy long term option.

Thankfully, we cottoned on, and together with Dyslexia Action, are repairing the damage that phonics and one size fits all has done.

Freaky - I've just realised I do sometimes think about smells and touch and movement, too, as though it is possible to have an internal sense of what they would be like when they aren't present/being done at the time! Mostly, though, it's very noisy inside my head - I'm always talking out loud in there, with excellent pronunciation and expression, of course...

English is a nightmare as far as sounds are concerned anyway, think of the ough group, so many different ways to say it. With phonics reception are taught say OW is pronounced as in cow, they learn to say ow as in I've hurt myself, yet ow can be a simple o as in sow, low and mow. I say phonics is a decent started but shouldn't be the only weapon in their armoury.

Getting back to what is reading and why it's important to be able to decode in the first place, this comment from a reading forum gets to the core of the subect .

Comment: What I found impressive in the docs you have on your website is the

definition of reading. This is essentially the view expressed by
Elkonin. published in Russian in 1959 and in English in 1963. I doubt
that Walcott was aware of Elkonin, but it's mindboggling that the logic
has been virtually ignored.
Quote from Walcutt 1964:
"Nobody would deny that the purpose of reading is to get information of
some sort from the printed page. But since we get information in the
same way from spoken language, this purpose does not define reading in a
way that distinguishes it from talking. As soon as we grasp this point,
however, the problem resolves itself immediately. If we see that
meaning resides in language, then we can ask how writing (which we read)
is related to language (which we hear). If language, which is sound,
carries the meanings, what is writing? It seems obvious that writing is
a device, a code, for representing the sounds of language in visual
form. The written words are in fact artificial symbols of the spoken
words which are sounds. So reading must be the process of turning
these printed symbols into sounds. The moment we say this, however,
someone will say (and probably in the greatest anxiety), "But what
about meaning? Do you mean to define reading as mere word-calling
without regard for meaning?"
Yes we do. Reading is first of all, and essentially the mechanical
skill of decoding, of turning the printed symbols into the sounds,
which are language. Of course the reason we turn the print into sound
(that is, read) is to get at the meaning...."

'For example, the US National Reading Panel assessed the effectiveness of the different approaches used to teach children to read. For two years, until it reported in 2000, the panel held public meetings and analysed research into teaching reading. It concluded that systematic phonics instruction produced significant benefits, including for those pupils who had difficulty learning to read.'

The US research was done with children older than the age at which children are expected to learn to read in the UK; 5-6 is when children in the US are taught using phonics at the earliest, not 4 as in the UK. To take research done on a certain age group in one country and extrapolate from that that it can be done with a different age group in another is bad science and a poor foundation for the curriculum.

Phonics worked for me and DD. My DB and I started school in early 70s when phonics was still used. It was abandoned in 80s for whole word recognition, and absolute joke of a way to teach reading. If you don't know what. The sounds are how are you supposed to work out what the word says?? Is everyone supposed to memorise what each word in their vocab looks like?? This is not reading, this is a memory test!!
As for Michael Rosens argument, I would have thought that an author as renowned as he is would realise that meaning and context ie comprehension skills can only come once a child has learnt how to read. As for pleasure, I guess it depends on how hard a child has found it to learn how to read. I would have thought that a child who has struggled may well be put off reading. DD learnt quickly and we have always gone to the library so she loves to choose her own books and hand over her ticket.
DD is July born leaving class1. There are 3 free readers in the class, she is 1. Of the other 19 girls, less than half are at band 6 level or above. I was surprised by huge difference in ability, school is private and assessed girls at reception entry.

If you don't use phonics, but the word recognition method, how on earth do you attempt to decode an unfamiliar word with no contextual or picture clues?

"Good (natural) readers do not need to learn by decoding as they can easily recall new words by sight".
Mrz -- Except we know from brain research using MRI that good natural readers don't read words by sight.

--We know no such thing. The question of how exactly we get to the point where the letters disappear and we skim over words (fluency) is still being studied, with research on eye movement and various other factors involved uncovering more and more annually. The jury is still out. What we are slowly beginning to understand with all the research is how little we know about how children read, and indeed how adults read.

"My greatest frustration though is that children who are taught phonetically habitually sound out even the high frequency words that they should be able to read on sight eg w-a-s (which isn't decodeable anyway!)."
Mrz -- 'was' is fully decodable if you know the code.

--'Was' is an exception to the code, unless by 'code' you mean special categories with rules unto themselves consisting of one or two words. There is a point where teaching children to 'decode' words like 'was' is in fact teaching them to read the words by sight.

"Seeing that HF words make up a large proportion of the English language"
Mrz -- 'There are 300 HFW and approx 1 million words in the English language not a large proportion at all ...'

--The high frequency words make up 50%+ of all the words on any given page the average student will encounter. Learning them by sight speeds up reading astronomically and makes all sorts of texts accessible to readers at an early stage of reading, rendering the laborious progression through graded readers that is currently inflicted on children (and their parents) unnecessary. Of the million or so words in the English language, most university students will use about 17,000 as they go about their daily lives as students, which is obviously far less than the total estimated number of words in English.

'DD is July born leaving class1. There are 3 free readers in the class, she is 1. Of the other 19 girls, less than half are at band 6 level or above. I was surprised by huge difference in ability, school is private and assessed girls at reception entry.'

So obviously phonics has not been the rip-roaring success for other children that it has been for yours, CP?

Was is decodeable. DD learnt HF by decoding. Some words are called tricky words, and teacher said we just had to learn them. Eg the.

Math anxiety some children pick it up faster than others.
Also not every child reads at home with parents.
Or if they do it is just the scheme books sent home.
Some children are not read to every night.
Some children have no books at home.
Some children do not see their parents read.
Some children do not go to the library at least once a week.
All these factors play a part in how child perceives reading as well as learning to read. I put in loads of time listening to DD read. She reads every day in school holidays. DD now reading novels, and mostly silent reading to herself.
We are big readers, have loads of books fiction and non fiction. Dd sees me read a variety of books newspapers magazines.
I take it by your defensiveness over this topic that either you or Dc has not found reading easy/pleasurable?

But according to the phonics believers, none of those factors should matter, CP. Phonics is magic. It even teaches children to read if they have reading difficulties -- in the words of the minister, the US National Reading Panel 'concluded that systematic phonics instruction produced significant benefits, including for those pupils who had difficulty learning to read.'

I also wonder how anyone can ascribe a good reading result to phonics instruction in school when it is clear from your description of what parents of successful readers do with their children that the good result has come about because parents untrained in phonics have exposed the child to books and reading at home and essentially taught the child to read themselves?

'Was is decodeable. DD learnt HF by decoding. Some words are called tricky words, and teacher said we just had to learn them. Eg the.'
What is the difference between learning a 'tricky word' by sight and decoding it? If there is a specific 'rule' used to decode 'was' then why not just call it learning by sight?

I exposed my ds to reading every way I possibly could. I read to him copiously (from excellent books) from when he was tiny, I showed by example how enjoyable reading was by always having a book to hand for any passing moment of boredom, we had books on CDs in the car and when he needed quiet time, we had (and have) stacks and stacks of books in the house of every variety and when he struggled I went out and bought a whole load more. He had a huge spoken vocabulary and a thirst for knowledge, and we knew early on he was pretty bright.

But

He hated reading. Absolutely hated it, screamed and cried when the book came out of the book bag. Screamed and cried when I tried to persuade him to learn his spellings. Screamed and cried at school when it was reading time. It was awful, and had absolutely no idea how to help him as when I tried it made things much much worse.

So we took him to a synthetics phonics tutor who taught him the code he needed in order to be able to read. Over that summer (I think he only had four lessons, maybe six) he learned to read, and since then he has become as much of a bookworm as I, and we are frequently asked how we managed it. That he enjoyed stories and wanted to know things was irrelevant - before he managed the mechanics of reading he could hardly access a single book (nor did he want to).

If he'd been taught with phonics in the first place we would not have had those years of pain and anxiety and self hatred. Maybe if his vocabulary had been much smaller guessing woudl have worked, but if you have ever watched a child really guess at words you'd know that it is incredibly hard, emotionally draining and in the end just doesn't work.

"Reading one-to-one with a teacher is an activity children are familiar with and enjoy, and the children should not realise they are being assessed."

Perhaps if more children had the opportunity to be more familiar with reading 1 to 1 with a teacher, (small class sizes?, less government directives?) difficulties in reading could be picked up a little earlier?