year 1 phonics check

[SmileAndNod]

Does anyone know if this is done in the summer term, or is there no set time for it? Also what exactly is it they check? That they can decode a word rather than read? It was mentioned at the start of the year but nothing since!
Thank you

Someone at work told me about country - for the life of me I can' remember the name - that changed their whole system of spelling to be phonetical too make it easier for education.

It's so interesting what is mentioned about Chaucer, because if you read the writings of 16th/15th century monarchs and nobility they also spell things differently. Maybe loosly constructed spelling rules enabled them to have time to learn other things - like Latin at the age of 4.

proudmama72,
U ar probably thinking of Turkey which switched from using Arabic spelling to Latin letters in 1929, because its modernising president Ataturk thought this would make learning to read and write easier.
He was, however, also motivated by wanting to bring Turkey closer to western Europe.

The Korean emperor Sejong the Great instigated the design of a simpler spelling system in the 15th C, but it only came into widespread use in the 20th century, because until then the upper class preferred to stick to the older, more difficult Chinese-based writing system. - So the groundwork which i hav been doing for modernising English spelling, i.e. identifying the irregularities which are chiefly responsible for making learning to read and write English exceptionally slow and difficult, may be of use some day yet!

English spelling wasn't completely standardised until Johnson published his dictionary in 1755. The use of different spellings by different people remained quite wide-spread until then, although it had been moving towards standardisation from about 1660 onwards (after the return of the Monarchy, the plague and much destruction of London by the great fire).

But before the publication of Johnson's opus, u could still use 'here/hear/heer' or 'there/thare/their/thair' as u pleased, as had been very much the case in the first printed English bibles of the 16th century and also the King James one of 1611.

Ah, well maybe the information given and method of teaching has been changed in the past forty years then. As I didn't mention "random spelling changes", and from my own research, spelling wasn't standardised until well into the end of the EMdE period (like you say, with Johnson), and many people weren't even internally consistent in their spelling, I have no idea why you think they were "like the more regular spellings of Chaucer and many others (frend, lern, meny; beleve, reson, speke) and the adoption of far more complex ones after 1430 and many other silly, totally gratuitous changes." Especially when you consider some words had over seventy different recorded spellings (though had 74 ish I seem to recall)
Though I personally find your spelling reforms very hard to understand, literally reading your spelling system takes me time and effort, much in the same way I can't really read 16th century spelling reformers either!

I also assume you weren't having a dig at me by suggesting that I just copy from others work? Since you know nothing about me, or my studies or the amount of work I put into conducting my own research.

I find it interesting though that you find every reason under the sun (including some that my etymology lecturer had never heard of!) but refuse to acknowledge the Great Vowel Shift, considering that is what caused many changes to English spellings. Well according to every scholar I have ever spoken to...

The British Libaray had a fascinating exhibition a couple of years ago, showing source texts which substantiate the Great Vowel Shift - there was also a section on the history of spelling reform campaigns.

Masha clearly didn't go, but did you Seryph ?

No! I wish I had, but since I moved to Glasgow I've not been able to get down for things as often as I'd like. My current aim is the Vikings exhibit! I'm an Anglo-Saxonist, (I also study Archaeology!) and I'm desperate to get down to see the exhibit because once it all closes I have no idea if I'll ever be able to get to Stockholm etc where all the artefacts are kept.

Seryph: I have no idea why you think they were "like the more regular spellings of Chaucer and many others (frend, lern, meny; beleve, reson, speke) and the adoption of far more complex ones after 1430 and many other silly, totally gratuitous changes."

Chaucer spelt nearly all the words which now have irregular spellings for e (bread, friend, heavy ...) with e (bred, frend, hevy)
and words which now have a clear, long /ee/ sound almost entirely with an open e (seke, speke, lene, grene, beleve, preche) - as we mostly still do with long a, i, o and u (late, bite, note, tube).

To me, regular spellings for a sound (speke, seke, beleve) are simpler than irregular, unpredictable ones which have to be learned word by word (speak, seek, believe), as in all 352 common words with the /ee/ sound.

I was not belittling your work any way. I know nothing about it.
I was thinking of people who write books about English spelling without doing any real research in earlier texts themselves - just regurgitating what they find in books written about it by others.

Perhaps this is because they find earlier texts with their great variety of spellings difficult to read, as u say u do 16th century texts?

Masha, are you deliberately picking and choosing which parts of what I write you read? I said spelling wasn't standardised until well into the end of the EMdE period...people weren't even internally consistent in their spelling which by the way INCLUDES Chaucer! I also said I can't really read 16th century spelling reformers not I can't read 16th century texts, because I can, to a degree, I will admit I sometimes need a glossary, but I'm not perfect and my speciality, as I've said, is as an Anglo Saxonist. I have less of a problem with Chaucer than I do with your predecessor John Hart.

I see, well I have no idea who you are talking about, I study primary texts (with some secondary research); as do all of the undergraduates, postgraduates, and lecturers/researchers at my university. Sorry you haven't actually dealt with real scholars before now, in academia proper you have to do your own research. As you seem to know.

Seryph, i think u ar taking the discussion too far away from the OP.

Also, Anglo Saxon, i.e. the English which developed from the Northern German which the invaders brought over in the 5th century, has little relevance to children learning to read and write now.

This old English was changed enormously by the Norman Conquest of 1066. Most people even have trouble understanding Chaucer, who died in 1400.
U and i ar interested in very different languages.

Also, Anglo Saxon, i.e. the English which developed from the Northern German which the invaders brought over in the 5th century, has little relevance to children learning to read and write now.

perhaps you need to consider the etymology of some of our more unusual words to understand the relevance for children (and adults) and my dialect includes many Anglo- Saxon words

Thanks Mrz! It's also worth remembering that a huge number of everyday English words (most of which should be in Masha's 7000!) are of Anglo-Saxon origin; including words such as: who, why, woman, how, home, like, at, answer, beard, child, earth, easter, fish, from. You can find a fairly good list here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Anglo-Saxon_origin
I didn't mean to get off topic, and I'm sorry for it. I already said that I feel parents and children shouldn't stress out about these tests.

Also, while my main interest is in OE/ON and ME, I have spent the past two years studying all forms of English, from Socio-linguistics and Child Language Acquisition, to phonetics, to how and why we swear!

@23 pages in, I'm not altogether sure that the OP cares any more.

I thought you would be interested columngollum

Thanks for posting, it was very interesting, but I found her premise that only progressive/whole word teaching involves reading for meaning from the outset deeply flawed.

It's a very common and frustrating misconception.

That was the same thing I'd picked up on Feenie. But it was after I was already querying her examples of progressive/traditional in maths. I'm not quite sure the author has it straight in her head about what those labels mean. And I think most of that part could have been left out.

Other than that it was very interesting though. I'd be interested to see a more in depth analysis of the results among HE children and from the democratice free school.

I've recently read a piece on "Specific Reading Comprehension Disability" which found that out of almost half a million children less then 1% who had adequate vocabulary and appropriate decoding skills had any difficulty with understanding ... which suggests the whole idea that children who use phonics struggle with meaning is a total myth

Unfortunately a great number of those "precocious" readers fail later and I say that as the mother of such a child

You are supposing the article is accurate ThreeTomatoes?
My son was a fluent reader by the time he started nursery. His favourite reading at that point was the Financial Times and progressed to the Nato defense publications when he started school. In primary he was assessed by an Ed Psych as having a reading age more than double his chronological age.

My son is an adult ThreeTomatoes

I could take Peter Gray seriously if he didn't cite theories that have been widely discredited as "bad science"