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?

The actual research based on Rawlinson's thesis does refer to the speed it takes to read the jumbled words zebedee

"I did try to publish the main findings, but the papers were turned down, by reviewers who perhaps had theories of their own to defend?

Science is an interesting process, easy enough to get wrong, easy enough to go off in a direction which is a false trail, and sometimes easy enough to cheat. In the end, I hope, we all get wiser.

Wishing all those who were interested in scrambled words, a happy life!"

Dr Graham Rawlinson

Also from Rawlinson, quote in Matt Davis's article on the 'Cambridge Research'

I've found a www page that tracked down the original demonstration of the effect of letter randomisation to Graham Rawlinson. Graham wrote a letter to New Scientist in 1999 (in response to a paper by Saberi & Perrot (Nature, 1999) on the effect of reversing short chunks of speech). You can read the letter here, or in a link to New Scientist, here. In it Graham says:

This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text.

Note that Rawlinson is talking about SKILLED readers. The biggest mistake in reading instruction was made when 'educationalists' extrapolated from SKILLED reading behaviour a theory that we process words as 'wholes' when reading. It has been proved comprehensively to be mistaken. Any idiot who thinks that this piece of nonsense adds anything to the theory of initial reading instruction is just that, an idiot.

All these jumbled words passages tell us is that SKILLED readers are very good at rapid mental anagrams and some prediction of words from context, nothing to do with their shape.
Matt Davis also notes that 'reading' jumbled words gets difficult or impossible when several syllables are involved.

Also in the meme almost half (31 out of 69) the words are correctly spelled. The words that are unchanged are also often "function words," — the, you, me, but, and — which help keep the grammar of the sentences basically unchanged. It also transposes adjacent letters, which makes the words easier to read. For example, "thing" is written as "tihng," not "tnihg"; "problem" is written as "porbelm," not "pbleorm."

Keith Rayner and his colleagues did an experiment in which they asked college students at the University of Durham to read 80 sentences with transposed letters. The letter transposition in the words resulted in lower reading speeds for most participants (12% decrease)

Glad you have found it helpful