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?

Phonics is a very good way to begin learning to read and write. Having good phonics teaching materials in Reception is essential. But beyond that, with English spelling being what it is, learning to read and write is more and more mainly a matter of learning by rote.

Please enlighten us as to the research and/or experience which leads you to these conclusions, Masha.

not holding my breath

There have been ongoing attempts to smear Ruth Miskin with something, anything at all really, so long as it casts doubts on her integrity, for the past 6 or more years; ever since the Rose Review came out in favour of the teaching of SSP.

What the smearers appear to be aware of was that she was on the panel of 'experts' who advised on the National Literacy Strategy, pre 1998 (on the strength of her stunning results at Kobi Nazrul), and at that point the her expertise could have been available at no cost to the Govt. However, as the NLS was a compromise between the govt, who genuinely wanted to reform the teaching of reading and the well established education 'establishment' who wholeheartedly endorsed Look & Say with minimal phonics, Ruth withdrew. If they's taken her advice all those years ago the teaching of reading in English schools might be much, much better by now!

I can see what sort of dilemma you are in, Paper Mover, but if possible go for what is right for your dd. And what is right isn't 'guessing from pictures'.

Sorry. 'Aware' should read 'unaware'

Feenie

Phonics is a very good way to begin learning to read and write. Having good phonics teaching materials in Reception is essential. But beyond that, with English spelling being what it is, learning to read and write is more and more mainly a matter of learning by rote.

Please enlighten us as to the research and/or experience which leads you to these conclusions, Masha

We live in the age of the internet, Feenie. So anyone genuinely interested can easily find out. Giving links to your own work is against MN rules, so can't do that.

This is a bit of a shame in my case, because I would be able to show the inconsistencies of English spelling far mroe clearly if I could. On here it is very fiddly to pick out individual letters in different formats and impossible with different colours.

I don't think Feenie was asking for links to your work masha rather she was looking for your "reliable" sources that allowed you to come to this conclusion.

I don't think anyone disagrees that English spelling does not have one-to-one correspondences.

That is not however particularly relevant when looking at approaches to teaching children to read the language as it exists right now.

Scaevola

The fact that English spelling does not have one-to-one correspondences to English sounds is hugely relevant to both teaching and learning to read and write now.

The regular correspondences, like 'ee' for the /ee/ sound, cause no difficulties for learning or teaching to read. Spellings with few exceptions, like 'cat, mat, sat', cause no spelling difficulties. The problems are all caused by

1. graphemes with variable sound, of which the main ones are ea, o, o-e, ou, oo, ow
2. sounds with many irregular spellings, of which the main ones are /ee/, long /o/, long and short oo, short /e/, short /u/, unstressed vowels (e.g. flatten, certain, abandon) and irregularly doubled consonants (very - merry).

So for teachers it is hugely important, and for parents helpful too, to know which parts of English spelling are simple or tricky for reading and which for spelling.

aaaaaaaaaaRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!

Aargh indeed!!!!

Blood pressure, ladies. Remember your blood pressure!

Do you think MNHQ would be amenable to adding a topic for 'Spelling Reform'? Then we could keep Masha there and she can post lists all day if she liked.

Making the forum as hard to use as TES have seems to have worked but that might be a bit of an extreme solution.

Good idea, ClayDavis, but I don't think she'd stay there! Especially now she has added 'phonics expert' to her CV

So, I'm having a bit of a wobble today, because having got really excited about the Songbirds book, I've now realised that some of the stories in the stage 1+ do actually include some trickier words. They've been using "the" and "is", and I hadn't really noticed because DS already knows them. And one of the stories includes "hole", which is only as hard as "bike", one of the ones I was concerned about in the earlier book. We've also had "better". It does say at the start of the book to say the word for your child if they can't sound it out, but that wouldn't help all our parents.

So, are there early reading books that only use words consistent with the children's developing phonic knowledge and don't need any parental input? Or am I asking the school to do the impossible?

Couldn't you fold some paper, staple it in the middle and write the story yourself?

I think cannot is okay - DS2 sounded it without trouble. Carrot I'm not sure, because the o is schwa, and I don't even know how you cover that in phonics. Similarly begin - I would pronounce the e as schwa

Thanks for the book list - how is DD getting on with the books?

It's encouraging that you have a meeting. I haven't heard anything since an initial terse email, so will have to chase soon. Your approach sounds really good - let us know how it goes.

I cannot grasp phonics. But I am good with words Are all schools using phonics?

The Rigby star phonics/bug club books might look a bit confusing if you only have 1 or 2. They're not really designed to be book banded as such but they do provide a chart equating them to bookbands. Theyfollow letters and sounds quite closely.

'Pink level' (sets 1 to 5) roughly equates to phase 2 in letters and sounds. Set 1-2 only use s, a, t, i, p, n,m , and no tricky words. Each set after that introduces 4-5 more graphemes and 1 or 2 tricky words to be blended.

'Red' level (sets 6-11) is roughly phase 3 and continues in the same way. You wouldn't give a child a book until you had taught the sounds in it so 'ng' wouldn't be a problem as it is a phase 3 grapheme and should have been introduced by then. Off the top of my head, I'm not surewhich book has 'ay' in it.

Phonics
I think cannot is okay - DS2 sounded it without trouble. Carrot I'm not sure, because the o is schwa, and I don't even know how you cover that in phonics. Similarly begin - I would pronounce the e as schwa confused.

If phonics was as simple as Mrz and co claim, nobody would have any trouble deciding which books can be included in early readers, nor would authors have to take great care to avoid troublesome words.

It's only because English spelling is so messy that many parents, and many young teachers too, are now so unsure about what phonics is and what it isn't. Because SP evangelists now call virtually all teaching of reading and writing phonics, they have made matters much worse than they used to be.

The worst of this is that they have made parents so unsure about how to help with reading, making them worry that they might be doing it wrong. On a one-to-one basis, there is very little that anyone can do wrong in helping a child with learning to read - apart from pushing too hard and getting angry when the child seems to be making little progress.

It's a matter of: sit and listen, encourage the use of decoding as the first approach with unfamiliar words, but just say the word if this is taking too long, keep things moving and keep your cool.

Give a bit more help with very common words that keep causing trouble (e.g. 'trouble). If u take a closer look at those, u will invariably see why they are troublesome - they contain letters with variable sounds (was - wag, swan - swam).

Whatever the phonics brigade claim, the following are very common, but tricky in various ways:
he, of, the, to, was, all, be, are, have, one, said, we, you, call, come, could, do, down, into, me, now, only, other, right, she, some, their, there, two, when, want, were, what, where, which, who, your

and different children will learn them at quite different speeds.

I think the head of KS1 and masha have a point.I can't see the problem with the odd word being difficult for the child to read unless the parent can't read it either in those cases more care should be taken to find books that the child can read independently.

If the parent can help the child with the odd word here and there I can't see the (practical) issue. Yes, I can see why phonics purists would get excited about it, but not normal people.

masha/column - the point about parents being able to help is what is concerning me right now - we have a fairly high proportion of EAL students, some of whom don't have any English when they start, so their parents might not be able to read the words (in English). We also have some children who have very limited experience of books at home, and eg don't know which way to turn the pages when they start school. So I don't know how obvious the common sense approach that masha advocates would be to these parents. And it's really hard to get parents to come into school so that the teachers can explain stuff like this.

I think there is a seperate point about children feeling more confident when they can read a whole book by themselves (which Paper and I have seen with our children, but anecdotes don't equal data). And also the fact that the statutory requirement is for the books to be at an appropriate level (but I don't really know how closely this can or should be followed - hence asking for more advice).

Clay - that's really useful info on Rigby Star - thank you.

"If phonics was as simple as Mrz and co claim, nobody would have any trouble deciding which books can be included in early readers, nor would authors have to take great care to avoid troublesome words."

Mrz has never claimed phonics is simple masha ...if you read my posts I have said many, many times it is complex. You seem to confuse the facts to suit your own argument nobody has any trouble deciding what should be included in early readers ... that is simple ... if a child is expected to read the book independently the book should include words they are able to read independently without resorting to guessing or using picture clues ... simple! The problem is schools are still using books that were written decades ago for the look & guess method and expecting children to be able to read them independently.

phonicsgovernor
Like your KS1 head, i see the problem with the odd word not being decodable.

Learning to read English is like that for years on end. I'm 69, but had to check the pronunciation of 'inchoate' quite recently. 'Marine' and 'echoing' were words both my granddaughters stumbled over a little while ago, despite being the best readers in their respective classes.

U ar right to worry about children who don't get much help with reading at home, because that makes the biggest difference to how well children cope with English. But first generation immigrants tend to be exceptionally hard-working and motivated to succeed, so their children are probably less disadvantaged than the offspring of feckless locals.

But the unreliable pronunciation of many English graphemes is a big problem. I detested not being able to sound out English as reliably as Lithuanian and Russian when i first started learning it at 14.

When i helped struggling readers who were clearly getting no help at home at all, i resorted to respelling more sensibly the tricky words they kept stumbling over , (e.g. 'bought' - baut, there - thair, here - heer).

I think it might be really helpful for weak readers to have all the most common tricky words (i.e. from the 1st 200 most HF ones) set out on a laminated card, grouped by their tricky sounds
and those with the stupidest spellings respelt more simply in smaller or fainter letters next to them, e.g.
the - he, she, me, we, be
[hee, shee, mee, wee, bee]

 <strong>who</strong>   <strong>do</strong>  <strong>through</strong>
  [hoo]    [doo]   [throo]  etc. 

That way children would be able to learn them much more easily by themselves.