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?

At the risk of derailing the thread - mrz, your link seems to be suggesting that nobody would need to be diagnosed with dyslexia if everyone were taught to read using phonic methods. Is that a can of worms I want to be opening? It sounds very controversial, but also pretty revolutionary.

''£500m was spent on the National Literacy Strategy [mixed methods] with almost no impact on reading levels''
Tymms &Merrell (2007) Standards and Quality in English Primary Schools Over Time: the national evidence
image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Education/documents/2007/11/01/overtime.pdf

The three cueing system in reading: will it ever go away?
nifdi.org/news-latest-2/blog-hempenstall/402-the-three-cueing-system-in-reading-will-it-ever-go-away

HTH

I don't know what proportion of the books are non-phonic

No book is entirely non-phonic, because apart from the word 'quay', I can't think of any words that have entirely non-phonic spellings. Only roughly 1/4 words have one or more letters with more than one sound, such as 'treat, great, threat'. So children can use their phonic knowledge even for reading books which contain some of the trickier words. - For children who get help with decoding/accessing them at home, they can help to speed up overall reading progress enormously.

I appreciate your concern for the children who don't get any help at home. Sadly, they will struggle with reading when they begin to meet texts which are not entirely simple, even if they are exposed mainly just to phonically simple ones to start with. The best thing that schools can do for them is try to provide, as much as they can, of the sort of one-to-one help that most parents provide for free - helping them to decode the tricky words they stumble over.

They simply find it harder than most to cope with letters having different sounds (to so do), even if they are taught that they do. They are simply less able to cope with the inconsistencies of English spelling.

There is no clear evidence yet that the much greater use of phonics since 2006 has made a substantial difference to them. U have to remember that most teachers and parents found the ORT books absolutely wonderful after 'Jane and John'.

Don't get too hung up on the 'nothing but phonics' doctrine. It can't overcome the rotteness of English spelling nearly as well as its evangelists claim.

maverick - thanks, will look at those

For anyone who wants information about about phonically decodable books:

www.dyslexics.org.uk/decodable_books.htm

I appreciate the 'cannot afford to replace books' argment but one does have to wonder why they didn't take advantage of the match funding scheme, which ran for 2 years.

there is not, to my knowledge, any specific piece of research which looks at the effects of 'mixed methods' but one could point to the fact that the old National Literacy Strategy failed to raise KS2 English attainment any higher than 80% achieving L4+. Yet schools like Ruth Miskin's Kobi Nazrul achieved well over 90% L4s with the majority of their pupils being EAL.

no real harm is being done by the odd non-phonic word.

Apart from the fact that there are no 'non-phonic' words' it isn't 'just the odd one' is it? These old 'Look & Say' readers are full of graphemes that are beyond the phonic knowledge of begining readers in the early stages. You can see from threads like this that some children find it deeply demoralising.
When it comes down to it shouldn't the school be asking itself 1)whether to carry on as usual because most of the pupils are OK or2) whether the current 'failures' really deserve better treatment. When you look at the long term effect of reading failure surely the second statement should apply?

Reading failure is not inevitable; I retired at the end of the Summer Term after having spent many years working with struggling KS3 readers. Most of them would have learned to read with no trouble if they had been given good phonics instruction from the start *with no other 'strategies' thrown in.

maizie - apologies! "Words that are not decodable through current phonics knowledge" doesn't slip so easily off the keyboard ;)

The school did spend about £5k on new books a couple of years ago, and I assume took advantage of match funding to do so. I don't know how much it would be expected to cost to provide enough pure phonics books for a two form entry.

As to "the odd one" - so far, in the books I've seen, it is just the odd word. We've only had half a dozen books so far though. So it might be that they've ditched the worst offenders. I don't know, and will try to find out.

And I agree that reading is key to accessing education and so we need to make sure we use the best methods. But there are so many competing demands on the budget - an investment in more books to help say 10 children in Foundation could well mean fewer enrichment activities and trips for the whole school, for example. So I need to take account of that too.

I agree completely that
that reading is key to accessing education.

That's why i regard it as unforgivable to hang on to a spelling system which is very clearly the main reason why many children fail to learn to read proficiently in just a few months, as they do in Finland.

If English spelling was tidied up a bit, if just a few hundred of the words that keep causing the biggest reading difficulties, had their spellings corrected,
any children's book would be suitable for teaching reading just as well as any other
and all disagreements about how best to teach reading would stop
and children would learn to read largely by themselves, without fuss or bother and without help from anyone, especially not parents.

There, is for example, no need to keep decorating the letter e in words with a short /e/ sound with confusing, surplus letters:
Bread/bred, breadth, breast, breath, dead, deaf, dealt, death, dread, dreamt, head, health, lead(x2), leant, leapt, meant, read(x2), ream, spread, sweat, thread, threat, wealth. Breakfast, cleanliness, cleanse, endeavour, feather, heather, heaven, heavy, instead, leather, measure, stealthy, treacherous, treadmill, treasure, weather. Friend, every, Wednesday. Jeopardy, leopard. Jealous, meadow, peasant, pheasant, pleasant, ready, (already), steady, weapon, zealous.
Heifer. Leisure.
Or to spell them with clearly wrong letters:
Berry/bury. Any, many. said, says.

What u probably don't know is that they were deliberately made more difficult by court scribes around 1430, when they were obliged to switch from French to English. Chaucer had spelt them with just e.

The Chancery clerks got rid of Chaucer's consistent use of e-e for long /e/ too (speke, seke, beleve) and replaced it with the irregular spellings which survive to this day. The fact that they used ea for some words with the long /e/ sound as well as short (treat, threat) has made matters far worse than they need be or should be.

Masha, I appreciate your posts, but I'm trying to change the things that I can change, and standardising English spellings isn't one of them. If you want to discuss that, could you please start your own thread?

The idea that Masha would even bother to click on a title asking for phonics experts is laughable, never mind post.

Masha, your posts over the last couple of days have been really off the wall, even for you. Are you sure you are feeling ok?

Paper - that would be great. We'll change the world together!

I have been harping on very gently about phonics for a while now at the school where I am a governor (I have responsibility for numeracy so can't go on too much!). Mainly in a very encouraging type way of things they were already doing, what a difference it seemed to be making to my DSs who were lower down in the school, compared to DS1 who hadn't had phonics. The results that the school has seen from introducing phonics lessons right through the school (including KS2) were very positive. The school has gradually become more and more pro phonics, and the staff are now all very enthusiastic about them, as well as seeing areas that still need improving. It has been a longish journey, and I am not in any way taking any credit for it, and the journey certainly isn't over, but it is making a big difference for our pupils.

Reading Recovery is a 10 week 1-1 intervention used in Year 1

You might be interested in the research from New Zealand birth place of RR

www.massey.ac.nz/massey/about-massey/news/article.cfm?mnarticle_uuid=F287725F-9E6F-011D-BE0E-F34366B8376A

RR is stupidly expensive for what it is. They select children on a very narrow criteria (not necessarily the ones that need most help) a provide an intervention that in, my experience provides short term gain but leaves children still needing support in the long term.

It was used widely in the US when I was there 10 years ago. With 8 classes in 1st grade it was hugely expensive and every teacher knew that the children being taken out for RR were still going to be the ones being taken out for extra help in 3rd, 4th, 5th grade.

There are almost certainly much better ways to spend the £24,000 that will help more than 8 children.

Don't forget the Tower Hamlets school that came top of the schools mentioned in Reading by six: how the best schools do it in KS1 reading results with 97% Level 2 or above, used Read Write Inc and had two Reading Recovery teachers. Whereas another London (Hackney) RWI school (whose head is a high profile phonic first, first only supporter) also featured in the document had only 88% Level 2 or above.

Too many variables there to compare so starkly - what about the quality of teaching, parental involvement, training, cohort, new arrivals, etc, etc. Even Ofsted aren't daft enough to use data from only one year.

The same reading results as my school without any RR teachers or RWI your point zebedeee?