Sight reading as a strategy in EYFS/KS1 - mrz?

[Guilianna]

What would you say to a SLT convinced that 'sight reading' is as effective a strategy as phonics, and who advocates teaching mixed methods?

[mrz]

Most people prefer to put up with the roughly 20% rate of functional illiteracy

Untrue masha, some people prefer to teach all children to read and write

[storynanny2]

"Most teachers do not have phonics training" - what a strange thing to say.
In my country for instance, all teachers and support staff have had training and have ongoing training. Have you taught everywhere? I wouldn't presume to state "every teacher has phonics training" simply because my county staff have.
Back in the day, we all had phonics training as a matter of course at our "teacher training colleges".

[mrz]

I'm not talking about my county storynanny I'm talking about the situation nationally as reported by teachers and student teachers ... are they mistaken when they say they haven't had any real training?

[mrz]

"Back in the day, we all had phonics training" out of interest what kind of phonics training did you have?

[mrz]

More than half (53 per cent) of teachers reported that they taught systematic synthetic phonics ‘first and fast’ (i.e. they used a systematic synthetic phonics programme as the prime approach to decoding print), although teachers’ responses regarding the use of other methods to teach children to decode words were not wholly consistent with this data .

so nationally half the teachers say they taught SSP but aren't!

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

I'd argue that there's 'phonics training' and there's 'good quality phonics training'. The two are probably quite different.

From talking to friends and looking at what is being posted by some teachers on various different forums, I would be surprised if LA training is covering half of what teachers need to know to teach reading effectively. There are parents on this forum that have a better understanding of phonics and reading than lots of teachers I know.

[storynanny2]

The sort of training as is required to correctly teach phonics to young children! Of course, it probably involved using different terms, eg phonemes was not used as a word in my training, however it must have been good training as I am confident in my phonics teaching ability in 2014.

[mrz]

Phonics teaching today is very different to how it was "Back in the day" but many teachers are still teaching as if "back in the day"

[storynanny2]

But the phonetic code is unchanged, therefore the same sounds are required to be taught and learned. Of course teaching styles and methods change and evolve, that is not what I was saying.

[mrz]

What is taught and how it is taught is very different to what was taught "back in the day"

[MrsKCastle]

I have been teaching for 10 years and have never had what I would consider 'good quality' phonics training. On my PGCE they taught the searchlights model. Then, later, I was trained in using Letters and Sounds, but the focus was more on the simple code- as if once you got to the complex code it would just sort of take care of itself.

It was never felt necessary for me to have more than basic phonics training as I have nearly always taught upper ks2. What I have learned has all been through my own reading.

So I would guess there's a lot of other teachers put there like me.

So

[Guilianna]

Mrz, that' s a great link, thanks. My prob is that colleagues pay lip service to phonics, but say it should be used alongside other methods. Also no one has had up to date training - I agree training and delivery of phonics in schools can be v poor. I'll try!

[mrz]

It isn't teachers who are at fault, many say they have been given a copy of Letters & Sounds and expected to get on with it, other had a couple of hours "training" with a LEA advisor who clearly knew no more than them, some even had a whole session at university

[diamondage]

DD must have been reading this thread and set out to show me how daft my anxieties have been because tonight she read, without batting an eyelid:

crustacean, invertebrates, hydrothermal, cilia and photophore.

Ok they are fairly regular but I was still impressed.


She needed my help with:

investigative (just couldn't get her mouth round it),
radiolarian (she said ar instead of air),
echinoderms (she said ch instead of k)
excruciating (saying /s/ee/ instead of /sh/ee/ mrz am I right to think that in this word the /sh/ is represented by the "c" alone?)
famine (saying igh instead of i)

So all plausible and understandable choices given that none of these words were in her vocabulary. I'm realising perhaps I've done an alright job teaching her phonics after all - perhaps I deserve some

I have, however, had to Google the following words, so I can tell her the correct pronunciations in the morning:

Pterois
Hapalochlaena
Paguristes (I can't find a pronunciation for this at all)

I'd love to know if any of you can decode the first two correctly without having to resort to finding out via Google (or any other means) like me.

[FinDeSemaine]

I'd say Teh-row-iss (ow as in snow) and Happa-lock-leener. Maybe liner, depending on whether it's a word that exists in Latin (liner) or one made up by English scientists (leener). Paguristes ought to be pag-your-iss-tays (with a soft y in the second syllable and the ays very lightly pronounced, nearly es).

I haven't contributed to this thread before but I am constantly amazed at how complicated phonics is sometimes assumed to be by those who haven't seen how well children learn with it.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

I'm with FindeSemaine on Pterois and Hapalochlaena. I might go for Paj-your-iss-teez for the final one.

I think it does look more complicated as a competent, adult reader being presented with all the information at once. In reality presenting it to a non-reader bit by bit is very different. So you might start with the idea that words are made of sounds and that you can use a single letter to represent those sounds. Then a couple of weeks later you introduce the idea that some sounds can be written more than one way, or can be represented by a group of letters not just a single letter. It's not that different to teaching anything else really. You start with the basics and gradually build on them.

[mrz]

ter oh ees (pt as in pterodactyl) ?

hapa loo ch leena (lo as in to) ?

[Mashabell]

Pterois - [te - ro - is] ?
Hapalochlaena - [appa - lo - cleener] ?
Paguristes - [pa - gu - ristees] ?

In all other alphabetically written languages, we would all know exactly how to pronounce those words.

But the spellings which are chiefly responsible making learning to read and write English exceptionally slow and difficult are not unusual ones like those but ones with variable sounds in common words, the ones that children keep meeting as soon as they start reading even quite simple books, the likes of: go to, so who, on once only...

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

Why do I get the feeling those 3 words are going to be added to a list in the near future.

[FinDeSemaine]

In all other alphabetically written languages, we would all know exactly how to pronounce those words.

None of these words are English. The reason I was able to make a good stab at them is because I have been taught languages which gave me the alphabetic code that allowed me to unpick them.

[diamondage]

Yes, the prize goes to FinDeSemaine, (and I'll just trust what you say for Paguristes).

Of course it makes perfect sense because you say you've cracked the relevant alphabetic code (although I'm assuming they're all Latin given that they are species names???).

RafaIsTheKingOfClay - someone could just link to a biology site if they wanted to give phonics proponents a challenge. However these words were all in DDs school reading book and as far as possible I want to be able to demonstrate to her that the code can be cracked.

Looking up how to pronounce something is, imo, no different to looking up a word's meaning in a dictionary. Thinking about it, I don't really understand the idea of teaching children to use context to work out the meaning of a word either. Surely it's better to teach children to use a dictionary? With one method, you may get the answer right, with the other method you definitely will. Using context for word meaning still seems like guessing to me, maybe an educated guess but it's still a guess.

I think accepting that the code can be challenging in no way detracts from the view that synthetic phonics is the best method to teach reading.

Then again, I've seen how rabid and irrational its detractors can become, not to mention the damage caused to a significant amount of children trying to learn via mixed methods, so I understand the desire to ensure that the current direction fully takes hold.

But how is that going to happen if teachers are not being taught phonics thoroughly whilst training? How do you bring around the many teachers who are so fixed in their view that mixed methods are good?

I hope the research mrz linked to is a good start - if it can be shown that children using synthetic phonics are generally two years ahead of peers using mixed methods then perhaps teachers and their trainers will eventually come around.

In the mean time I've learnt even more about our alphabetic code, which can only be a good thing.

[FinDeSemaine]

Anything that starts with pt in English is almost certainly borrowed from Greek. Paguristes looks definitely Latin. Hapalochlaena I wasn't sure about but having now looked it up, it is Greek which definitely makes it leener rather than liner. I should actually have known it was Greek because of the ch which would not exist in Latin.

[Mashabell]

Looking up how to pronounce something is, imo, no different to looking up a word's meaning in a dictionary.

It makes a huge difference to children's ability to learn their own language. It's a little hard to explain, but when u have no doubts about pronunciation, u can learn new words more easily without looking up them up in a dictionary, by simply meeting them a few times in a text. - I did not own a dictionary until the age of 15.

When i was learning Lithuanian, Russian, German, Italian, French and Spanish, i never ever needed to look at guides to pronunciation. I don't know about French, but monolingual dictionaries in the other 5 don't ever have pronunciation guides like English dictionaries.

[mrz]

and yet we have somehow managed very successfully to learn our own language masha

[FinDeSemaine]

When you are taught French as an older child (or Latin or Greek or German, at school), they write the word down and say 'and this is how it is pronounced'. They tell you how the alphabetic code of that language works, just as we do when a child learns to read English.