Interesting article re. synthetic phonics

[Biscuitsneeded]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25917646

The thing is learning to write can be a lot more arduous as there are the physical mechanics of little pudgy hands holding pencils,sitting down for longer periods of time etc alongside learning to spell.Learning to read by comparison can be so quick and easy for some there are bound to be differing rates of achievement.

unfortunately lots of people both for and against phonics argue ideologically rather than according to what actually happens either in life or in language.

Well, cg, I argue from a great deal of study of the subject and a number of years experience in school of picking up the pieces when a lot of other people's children fail to learn to read.

What about you?

I can tell you that the guy who wrote the pamphlet is incredibly ignorant of the teaching of SP. Definitely ideological.

I'm neither for nor against, myself.

caused lots of laughter in the staff room this morning

"To subject either the fully fledged readers, or those who are well on their way, to a rigid diet of intensive phonics is an affront to their emerging identities as persons."

I found this bit particularly funny. The bit where he tried to argue it was almost a form of abuse was much less funny, and did leave him looking like a bit of an idiot.

He's not even comparing like with like though. The equivalent of what he's trying to argue synthetic phonics is is taking those same children who can read and making them start on the very first ORT book and insisting they read every single one regardless of how well they can read.

Maybe that relates more to reading schemes in general than specifically phonics ones. But our school certainly does behave a bit like that.

I can see how the sounds of words can be useful to learn to aid with spelling as they get to that, but I am when DS (age 4, YrR) comes home telling me about diagraphs and triagraphs (?). Think I covered them in degree level phonetics, but otherwise, really? Isn't the time better spent just teaching them words?

It seems that the media keep telling us that the 'kids today can't read or write' yet everyone seems so convinced that teaching kids all this stuff around the words works.

DS can already read just fine, so I wonder at the benefit to him of learning this when something more useful could be taught but fair enough if there are more kids in the class that are starting to learn.

However, if you are just starting to learn to read, does learning what a diagraph is really help? I know DS didn't learn this way at all.

Columngollum if your school is like that, it's just bad teaching. Not the fault of either the reading scheme or the method of teaching. Children should be given reading material appropriate to their level, not made to work their way through x number of texts and then moved on- whether they've made progress or not.

Basketofchocolate the time would not be better spent just teaching them words because there are thousands of words in the English language, but only 44 phonemes. Even when you look at all the different possible spellings for each phoneme, it's still an awful lot more efficient to teach sounds than individual words.

You say that he can already read 'just fine' but he will continue to encounter new words for many years to come, and needs the strategies to deal with them.

My year 6 class can read 'just fine' but the ones who don't have solid phonics knowledge struggle to read aloud confidently when the text is an appropriate level.

As far as the vocabulary of digraphs/trigraphs goes, you're right- it's not strictly necessary. You could just say 'these two letters represent the sound...' But young children generally love technical sounding vocabulary, and it certainly doesn't do any harm.

The reading scheme isn't specifically teaching, is it? Especially if the child can already read. Actually, all the teachers are doing is ticking the children off on the reading scheme book list. So, it's bad administration or bad policy. Administration and policy might all be wrapped up in teaching, of course. But, I think that if a school has a scheme, especially one that it sticks to rigidly, common sense reading is going to take a hit. There's nothing anybody can do about it. The hit comes with the scheme. How big and how bad the hit is probably depends from school to school. But people might as well get used to it. Get library cards.

In DS's class they won't change his reading book until he's read it. Doesn't matter if it's the most boring, inappropriate book. They have a library at school, but the kids get to pick whatever they want, so no guidance on an interesting reading book. Again, most seem to be very old non-fiction books.

MrsK - you say that, but how the F did we learn to read for years then? And, if you say 'we didn't, that's why we do it like this now' is the media wrong that kids today have poor literacy? Is it comparable to other countries or comparable historically?

I haven't read the original pamphlet, just the BBC article, but it sounds as if he's done some research which has discovered that some children enter reception as competent readers, (true enough) and then speculated/anecdoted that those children will be put off reading by going back to phonics teaching - and then fuzzed the whole lot under the umbrella of My Research Shows.

I guess it's possible that a good reader might be put off reading by poorly differentiated work - (though it certainly wasn't that way for me even though the teacher forced me through the whole of Peter and sodding Jane regardless of my actual reading age). But that is down to poor differentiation. You also shouldn't assume that everyone whose mums' say they can read can actually read - the ingenuity of the primary child's mind is extraordinary when it comes to memorising stories and guessing around the pictures.

It never ceases to amaze me the number of children who can apparently read Roald Dahl which is full of made up words, but can't pass the phonics test.

Because it doesn't matter how you pronounce the made-up Dahl words. What is beautiful about them is that in the context, you know exactly what he means by them. With Lewis Carroll's frabjous day I couldn't tell you whether I should say it 'frabjus' or frabjows', since either is possible, but a child of six reading it can infer that it is a triumphant and happy day. And that is why humans read - to derive meaning. Making children articulate nonsense words devoid of any context doesn't tell you anything about their reading or comprehension skills.

You would think so wouldn't you ItsATIARA ... I invited him to come to my school to see phonics being taught but he declined as it conflicted with his views

You also shouldn't assume that everyone whose mums' say they can read can actually read

Well, that's partly what the argument is about. It's no skin off the teacher's nose to take the Roald Dahl book away and start the child off on wordless books. Our school even sends out a letter saying: Even if you think your child can read she's still getting wordless books...after Christmas!

So, before school starts you're sitting there thinking, hmmm, this is going well!

Yes gollum, you'd think there would be a (not particularly narrow) middle ground between assuming that proud mums are telling the precise truth about their children's ability, and not even bothering to find out whether the child does have any ability but just assuming they start at zero. But sometimes apparently not.

I thought we might be treated to research there and not someone's opinion. Weird article.

"It's no skin off the teacher's nose to take the Roald Dahl book away and start the child off on wordless books." really I would say it's a pretty stupid policy when schools are judged on progress.

In 20 years I've taught 3 or 4 children who were reading fluently when they arrived in reception. The USA put the figure for "precocious readers" at 1%

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/2048-416X.2013.12000.x/asset/imp12000.pdf;jsessionid=C1C15C12BC740F89FDC10CB267972EF4.f01t01?v=1&t=hqzo9ez6&s=0c1c52356f0a741e86267cfaad783c1ae9639529

In this pamphlet Andrew Davis argues that there is another, more basic problem with Gove’s claim. Whatever it is that empirical research- ers take themselves to be doing when they investigate synthetic phonics, he maintains, they are not investigating a specifiable method of teaching reading. This is for two reasons. First, there are no such things as specifi- able methods of teaching. Teaching is a vastly complex human activity involving contextual and reactive practical judgments that are responsive to the myriad contingencies of classroom life. The idea that teachers might proceed by way of prescribed methods rather than practical judg- ments is, as Davis puts it, simply a fantasy.
Second, teaching children to correlate letter combinations with sounds, and to blend sounds into sequences, is not teaching them to read. Reading is a matter of grasping meaning conveyed by text. While sustained attention to letter-sound correspondences can be helpful to some novice readers, we should neither assume that it is helpful to all nor confuse mastery of such correspondences with the ability to read.

haven't read the original pamphlet, just the BBC article, but it sounds as if he's done some research which has discovered that some children enter reception as competent readers, (true enough) and then speculated/anecdoted that those children will be put off reading by going back to phonics teaching - and then fuzzed the whole lot under the umbrella of My Research Shows.

I doubt he's done any research. Probably just heard one or two stories from friends/acquaintances, read a bit of Rosen's anti-phonics polemics and jumped on the bandwagon. I claim that I've researched this too Asked on the TES EY forum how many children came to school reading and some teachers responded. Mostly saying that they hadn't had any! Do you think I could work that up into a pamphlet?

Anyway, he doesn't actually believe in educational research as all classrooms & teachers are unique and teaching can't be measured. That was one of his arguments...

Oh, zebedee's elaborated my last point for me.

Kids come from a variety of environments,pre schools and nurseries some of which cover a degree of simple phonics,kids will surely vary.You may get 1% reading fluently,others not fluently but still reading,some just beginning to decode and some who have had massive book exposure who then learn to read fluently extremely quickly.

Andrew Davis, for example, is a twat. What a load of codswallop.

"Teaching is a vastly complex human activity involving contextual and reactive practical judgments that are responsive to the myriad contingencies of classroom life." and teaching phonics in no way compromises the ability of teachers to teach how they find most appropriate ... something Andrew Davis chooses to ignore. Phonics teaching in my class will be very different to phonics in the school up the road or the school in the next town or the school in the next county because each teacher brings something personal to the job.

Oh. Is this the guy we were talking about on another thread a few weeks back who has some sort of conference coming up? And is this pamphlet the piece he wrote in a non peer reviewed 'journal' that he owns/edits that turned out just to be a very long opinion piece backed up with no research or evidence?