Advice from phonics experts please

[phonicsgovernor]

I am a school governor with a (second) child in reception. Over the past couple of weeks we have had ORT books home that were not fully decodable. They are still in the single letter sound stages of teaching phonics but the books included the words bike, look and dinosaur.

Now, my child is fine - I can access other materials for him. But the school serves quite a deprived area, with higher levels of FSM, SEN, EAL and MENA children. And I'm wondering if there will be children who are not fine.

I spoke to the head of KS1, who is excellent and lovely, and she couldn't see the problem with the odd word not being decodable. So - is it a problem, and if it is, how should I tackle it?

Nobody attempts to remember a million words by sight, (unless they're very stupid.) Most people attempt only to remember the words that they find useful.

Really unsure as to why marsha is quoting Diane McGuinness. And calling her a 'widely respected phonics expert' when she is decrying people who have learned from Diane as 'phonics evangelists'.

I'm not really sure we should be expecting Masha to make sense maizie. It would be a bit of a shock to the system if she started now.

Sorry, Paper, I somehow missed your post earlier. If it helps at all, plenty of the schools I know that send home lists of HFW to learn do very little teaching of them in school. This might work to your advantage. You could try teaching her the 'tricky' part of the words and how to blend them rather than as sight words. This should help to dilute the schools mixed methods a bit.

OK columngollum try memorising 40000 words (average number needed by an educated adult)

Mrz:
try memorising 40000 words (average number needed by an educated adult)

That figure includes a vast number of derivatives and compounds like 'backpack'.
Without derivates, even a very highly educated adult knows only around 25K words.

When i tried to compile a definitive list of commonly used English words for my analysis of English spelling, i consulted several collections, including several spelling books for GCSE pupils, like OUP's "Spell it Yourself" which claimed to include 8,000, but has several overlaps too.
I found it impossible to make my list longer than 7,000, despite ending up including several hundred not exactly very common words.

For reading, only around 2,000 common words contain tricky letters, and in most cases just one. So there is no need whatsoever to memorise even those completely as sight words. U ar forever, Mrz, accusing other teachers who are not exactly on the same page as u of doing things very differently from u. Yet u hav often said to parents on here that some words just needs lots of patient going over, again and again and again....

That is entirely due to the tricky spellings of some words. In the end it's the repeated going over them that makes a difference – whatever the teaching method.

McGuinness:
Our reading problems are largely a product of our opaque alphabet code and the way it is taught ,"

And even the best teaching in the world cannot make theopaque alphabet code any better.
That's why parents, and many teachers too, often end up wondering why phonics, which is supposed to be the latest complete miracle cure for all literacy ills, does not prevent all children going through some really tricky patches.

I am not against phonics or lots of literacy teaching. I am merely explaining why in English u need such humungous amounts of it - why becoming literate is so difficult and time-consuming.

No masha that figure does NOT include a vast number of derivatives [sigh]

No masha I am not accusing teachers of anything please stop making up falsehoods.

Diane McGuinness is indeed one of the foremost phonics experts and I think she would be startled to find you quoting her in support of your contention that English reading and spelling is very difficult to learn. The pertinent phrase in the sentence you have quoted is not 'our opaque alphabet code', it is 'the way it has been taught'. Which, in the past, and even now, has been very badly.

Thanks to Diane's analysis of reading research and her production of a 'prototype' for an effective programme we are able to identify the elements of teaching reading which research has found to be the most effective and to incorporate them into instructional programmes. All the best SP/LP phonics programmes being used in the UK today fit her 'prototype' very closely and are, indeed, very effective and far less difficult for children to learn from than the outdated 'methods' which appear to be the only ones that marsha knows about.

Really, marsha, most of the 'tricky spellings' exist only in your head.

That's why parents, and many teachers too, often end up wondering why phonics, which is supposed to be the latest complete miracle cure for all literacy ills, does not prevent all children going through some really tricky patches

Considering that the OP's problem is that her child is not getting proper phonics teaching your above statement contributes nothing to this thread.

So where does the figure of 40,000 come from? Of course we're not just plucking numbers out of the air here, are we.

No columngollum we aren't picking numbers out of the air try searching for PIRLS

Oh dear!

Oh. My. God.

They've managed to hit every phonics myth in the book there. And then some.

I think I tried to PM you the other day, Paper but I don't think my message poster thing is working properly. Will try again at some point.

The school aren't interested in what is and what isn't statutory they should be statutory means it is a legal obligation ... not to means they are breaking the law

Papermover - is your dc's school my ds's too? It is if they don't even teach phonics daily (timetabling issues, apparently). 40% didn't pass the check - although I did helpfully predict that for them when they told me their 'middle' group was still on Phase 3, in March, in Year 1.

The letter accompanying the check was laughable and so defensive it was ridiculous - it contained pretty much everything you said in your post.

I may attach it to the next Ofsted parents' questionnaire.

Still here!

I'm sorry you had such a rubbish meeting. Can't believe they wouldn't accede to your very reasonable request for phonic books for your daughter! (Since my first email to school, all of DS's books have been phonic. So they get points for that anyway.)

What is the school like the rest of the time?

And what bad habits is your DD picking up? You've got a thread full of experts here to help!

PaperMover
What is your impression of the school overall?
What are the schools results like?
The responses u got seem very sensible to me.

Even phonics evangelists acknowledge that
Our reading problems are largely a product of our opaque alphabet code AND the way it is taught
but believe that better teaching olone, which in their opinion is nothing but phonics, can overcome all the problems of our opague alphabet.

The jury is still very much out on this, although clearly not among phonics evangelists.
But perhaps u should not swallow their doctrine hook, line and sinker quite as readily as u seem to be?

The responses u got seem very sensible to me.

And you wonder why we get snippy with you! This is a perfect example of BAD TEACHING

That is absolutely appalling, papermover. Do keep the phonics up at home, it will pay off as she gets further through school and can't use pictures and guessing when the amount of text per page increases.

feenie

How do you cope with actually teaching good phonics yourself and seeing your child's school do it so badly?

Phonicsgovernor and PaperMover, your heads are in for a shock. At a recent conference, Gill Jones, senior HMI for Ofsted, and Gordon Askew, literacy and phonics adviser to the DfE, were unequivocal: when teachers ask their children to read, they expect them to be given decodable books that are commensurate with the phonics programme they are being taught. That isn't to say that the teacher shouldn't be using texts that are, at a certain stage in their reading, too difficult for children to decode on their own. They most certainly should! But, these texts should be used to enhance children's cultural capital, expose them to the structures of written language, build vocabulary and, importantly, provide them with enjoyment. The point here is that teachers need to know what purpose they have in mind when providing children with written text. Is it to improve fluency, or to develop broader linguistic skills and knowledge, or both?
Let there be no doubt, the inspectorate made explicit that the 'Searchlights' model (multicueing) is OUT! And phonics should be the strategy for word recognition and it should be the prime strategy - Askew's words not mine. Gill Jones also made clear that schools producing poor results on the phonics screening will be inspected and failed if their teaching isn't up to Ofsted's new standards.
As for the ORT, depending on the particular book, their idea of simple to complex is judged by how many words and lines of text there are on the page. The words presented are ones that contain no recognisable sound-spelling patterns and many words contain less frequently encountered sound-spelling correspondences that children are unlikely to be able to decode for themselves until they have had a lot of good quality phonics teaching. 'Dinosaur' is a good example. Children must, therefore, resort to visual cues. It is precisely this approach that the Ofsted inspectorate will be looking out for.
Sadly, PaperMover, your head doesn't understand how the writing system relates to the sounds of the language, how writings systems come about and what they are for, and is unlikely to be moved by any of this . I would let natural selection take its course .

I took my complaints as far as I could and got nowhere. So I used our own decodable books and Reading Chest (which ds loved because they came in a big envelope addressed to him ).

Their phonics results are still appalling a year on, as I can see from the LEA data disk - it's heartening to see that this should trigger an Ofsted inspection in the future. The school also refuse to report individual scores, despite the fact that I have shown then evidence both in the ARA and in an email to me from the DfE that states it is statutory to do so.

Relations are not great!

There's been a lot of publicity about the huge improvement in London primaries. London generally uses very good synthetic/linguistic phonics programmes, mainly ReadWriteInc and Jolly Phonics and also Sounds~Write and Sound Reading System; these undoubtedly play a large part in the improvement. However the one London Borough that did poorly ' letting down over 9,000 children' is Barking and Dagenham. Their senior literacy adviser, David Reedy, is anti phonics (unless part of a mix) and also President of an organisation, UK Literacy Association(UKLA) originally part of the Whole Language movement. UKLA now reluctantly allows a smidgeon of phonics as long as it's part of the mixed methods approach PaperMovers head approves of.

These are the very people who complacently watched as reading levels plummeted. I wonder how much responsibility David Reedy and UKLA are prepared to take for the 9000 children who have failed?
Let's hope for natural selection!!

Sounds - to be fair, our school isn't in the same league as Paper's or Feenie's. We were above national in the phonics screening, with almost all those who failed the previous year passing on the second go (although I'm going to pursue the data on the made-up words). The children are taught phonics in class and we have bought a lot of phonics books. But we're still using some older ones too.

I have a meeting with the Literacy Head and the head of KS1 next week. So I will see what the Literacy Head has to say.