Phonics check

[BucksKid]

Why do teachers, on Internet forums, say 'yah, (eg) 83% of my class passed the phonics check' Rather than 'oh no, 17% of my class didn't pass the phonics check' ?

Do they realise how disrespectful that is to the 17%?

Do they care that 17% of their pupils have left their class without the basic skills needed to learn to read?

Is it because they met their performance management target?

they look for real words when decoding which is the reason so many children fail

You are aware that the teacher is supposed to tell the child that the words are not real words? Each of the imaginary words has a picture of an imaginary creature beside it. The teacher is supposed to tell the child that the words are names for types of imaginary creature. The administrator's guide emphasises the importance of telling the child whether the page contains real words or types of imaginary creature on each page.

This is the kind of rubbish teachers (and others) come out with when they don't believe in phonics and haven't used it properly to teach their pupils to read.

A child that cannot decode the nonsense words is not a skilled reader. They don't have the tools to deal with words they have not previously encountered.

You can tell some children that they are looking for an imaginary creature name as much as you like, but logically many 5 and 6 year olds will still try to seek out a real word.

"Imaginary creatures" may or may not capture a 5/6 year old's imagination or be meaningful to them. How do you control for that variable?

logically many 5 and 6 year olds will still try to seek out a real word

If they do they are not skilled readers. There will be many real words they have not encountered before. They need to have a strategy to cope with them. If they have been taught phonics properly they have a strategy and should use it. If they have been taught other approaches they don't have a strategy so of course they may try to find a real word.

prh, children are not a one size fits all, they dont all fit into your perfect little mould.

Maizie: It's not the English spelling system that causes problems in learning to read.

Really?
U have to be phonically dazzled not to see that learning to read English would be much less difficult, and take vastly less time, if the following letters and letter strings had just one sound instead of two or more, as they do:

a: and – any, father, apron
a-e: gave – have
ai: wait – said, plait
al: always – algebra
-all: tall - shall
are: care - are
au: autumn - mauve
augh: daughter - laugh
ay: pays - says

cc: success - soccer
ce: centre - celtic
ch: chop –chorus, choir, chute
cqu: acquire - lacquer

e: end – English
-e: the - he
ea: mean - meant, break
ear: ear – early, heart, bear
-ee: tree - matinee
e-e: even – seven, fete
ei: veil - ceiling, eider, their, leisure
eigh: weight - height
eo: people - leopard, leotard
ere: here – there, were
-et: tablet - chalet
eau: beauty – beau

• ew: few - sew
• ey: they - monkey

ge: get - gem
-ger: anger - danger
gi: girl - ginger
gy: gym – gymkhana
ho: house - hour
i: wind – wind down, ski, hi-fi

• ine: define –engine, machine

ie: field - friend, sieve imb: limb – climb ign: signature - sign mn: amnesia - mnemonic

ost: lost - post
-o: go - do
oa: road - broad
o-e: bone – done, gone
-oes: toes – does, shoes
-oll: roll - doll
omb: tombola - bomb, comb, tomb
oo: boot - foot, brooch
-ot: despot - depot
ou: sound - soup, couple
ough: bough - rough, through, trough, though
ought: bought - drought
oul: should - shoulder, mould
our: sour - four, journey
ow: how - low

qu: queen – bouquet
s: sun – sure
sc: scent - luscious, mollusc
-se: rose - dose
ss: possible - possession
th: this - thing
-ture: picture - mature
u: cup – push
ui: build – fruit, ruin
wa: was – wag
wh: what - who
wo: won - woman, women, womb
wor: word – worn
x: box - xylophone, anxious

• y-: type - typical
• -y: daddy – apply

z: zip – azure

The reliability of any test is increased the fewer the variables. The issue with the phonics test is that the proponents do not have the underlying scientific knowledge of language and literacy development to be aware of all the variables thrown up by pseudo words.

maizieD, phonics does not work for all children,

Tell that to someone like Sue Lloyd, who worked in EY for many years and, as an SEN teacher, developed her phonics programme to help children who struggled to learn to read. She would hardly have persisted with it if it had not been successful. She told me that in her long career she only encountered one child who didn't 'get' phonics'.

i know alot of very skilled 6 year old readers who cannot decode the nonsense words.

I would suggest that you know a lot (2 words) of badly taught children.

The test is not helpfull to children or teachers, children can be assesed without the test.

They can, but they aren't always. So many teachers, as Debbie said, think that if a child is 'getting the gist' they are 'good' readers. Never mind if they can't actually work out what some of the words 'say'.

All the test did was confuse my own son who is not the best reader in the world but he does try to find a real word when decoding,

The oddest thing about anti-phonics discourse is that some people claim that children don't 'get' the meaning of a word when they have decoded it. Your belief that children 'naturally' look for meaning kind of negates that claim, doesn't it?

Not that I believe either claim. There's nothing 'natural' about reading and children's reading behaviour reflects what they've been taught. (This is not my 'opinion', it is proposed by reputable reading researchers) If your son's teacher places more emphasis on 'making meaning' than on accurate word reading his desire to 'make meaning' probably reflects his teaching.

alien words confuse him

What on earth does he do when he comes across a 'real' word which he's never seen in print before? Does that confuse him, too? Does he sound out and blend it or does he wait for someone to tell him what it says? If it's the latter I'd be very worried about the quality of reading instruction he's getting.

If you conflate expressive language with heard vocabulary you may indeed have the impression that children are encountering many words for the first time when they read them in a book. But that is incorrect.

But they may be encountering the written form of the word for the first time.

I am assuming that your distinction between receptive language and heard language is that receptive language is words that they hear and know the meaning of whereas heard language is words they hear but don't know the meaning of?

Firstly im sorry that my finger missing the space bar offended you so much. Your whole post seems to ignore the fact that children can learn in different ways, no two children are the same.

Your whole post seems to ignore the fact that children can learn in different ways

Your posts are based on the mistaken view that children learn to read in different ways (and sound like the classic "mixed methods" arguments). They don't. There is now a huge amount of information from studies of what is actually going on in the brain when we read. To simplify somewhat, good readers are unconsciously sounding out and blending at high speed. That is what is going on in your head as you read this post. Bad readers use a totally different part of the brain that shows they are treating words as pictures.

Good readers have either been taught synthetic phonics or have figured it out for themselves. Around 80% of children will learn to read regardless of the methods used. If synthetic phonics is used as the only method over 95% of children will learn to read. Mix it with other methods and the success rate drops.

children are not a one size fits all

No they are not. But please explain how children who don't have a strategy to tackle unfamiliar words and therefore try to read them as words they already know are skilled readers.

With my own children it took a while to get them to read what was on the page rather than what they thought was there. When you are learning it is much easier to guess. But you are not a skilled reader until you actually read what is on the page, regardless of whether or not you know the words already.

I feel that there are several issues here.

There is the first issue of whether pure synthetic phonics is the best method to teach reading.

There is the issue of how much freedom teachers should be allowed in the classroom.

And the third issues of the huge amount of pressure that young children are put under to pass a constant stream of exams in primary. I feel that our children are over tested. Both our teachers and children are under a lot of pressure to perform.

Finally for whose benefit is an education system for?

maizieD - yes, that's more or less it.

Children may have heard many thousands more words than they understand. And the fact that they are encountering the written form for the first time doesn't preclude them making the mental connection between the word they have heard (but don't understand and cannot use) and the letters they are sounding out. And since a fluent reader aged 5/6 will have encountered many hundreds of words that go beyond the grapheme-phoneme correspondences they have been explicitly taught at school, they will be used to making rapid mental connections between the words they have heard and the "new" word on the page. They don't somehow "switch off" their knowledge of real language to sound out in phonics and they re-relate back to their knowledge of real language if they are already fluent readers.

As far as children learning to read is concerned I think the education system is for children's benefit in that reading is an esential and lifelong skill and without it children cannot progress. We should be focussed on the most effective way to do it.

For the rest, it's a very deep philosophical question

If pseudo word tests must be used, they should be used purely, in isolation, and never in a list of real words.

Does anyone know...Has the pass mark for this years' screen been released yet? I thought it was going t be released at the end of June...

It's 32, same as last year.

The pass mark has been released-32, same as last year.

Bonsoir-my Y1 DD encountered the following words the last time she read:
Honeyvale
Malice
Trixibelle
Descended
Aquamarine
Topaz
Courtier

Now she may have heard some of those before, but not all of them and not often enough to remember. She knows they should have meaning, but seen in isolation she would have no way of knowing the meaning.

I don't see the difference between presenting a mixture of real words and nonsense words and presenting a list of familiar/unfamiliar real words.

To a Y1 child, an awful lot of words appear to be nonsense words the first time they encounter them.

What happens to year 2s who fail the phonics check. Are they made to resit it in year 3?

So how, exactly, are alien names any different from peoples names?

How many children will have met a Stanley, Kipper, Winnie, Lyra, Edmund, Ramona, Amelia or Wilbur?

How about author's and illustrator's names?

Of course it is possible that a young reader can read well and fluently without being able to decode ... until they meet a word that requires decoding. If said word contains complex code or an unusual spelling then it's fair enough that a child, or indeed an adult, may need help.

This does not, however, apply to the phonics check - it is only checking competence of the simple code and a range of common alternative spellings.

Can teachers give an example of a child they know that can read fluently AND decode new words that they come across BUT were unable to read the pseudo words on the phonics check?

How about children that can read fluently, but need support when they come across new words due to poor decoding skills - they are the children I think are being referred to IMO.

Perhaps we need two terms - fluent reader and fluent decoder. The best readers are surely both?!?!

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

My elder DD, just finishing y10 loves reading.

Trouble is her phonics knowledge is quite poor.

So when she comes across an unfamiliar word she can't sound it out to read it. When I tell her how to pronounce it she generally already knows the word.

If phonics tests had been around when she was in y1, it would have been identified she couldn't sound out, and she would have got the help she needed.

Children have to be able to sound out nonsense/unfamiliar words. How else can they read Dr Seuss, Roald Dahl, Harry Potter?

'they will be used to making rapid mental connections between the words they have heard and the "new" word on the page'

I'm not quite sure how you could do the research that would lead to this conclusion.

Research shows that presenting pseudo words alongside similar real words can affect whether or not meaning is attributed to the non word (varies with age of DC) but that's not the same as a DC incorrectly decoding a word to match one that they have heard before.

pippiLS but in the phonics check the pseudo words aren't presented alongside real words. They are clearly signposted as alien names and I believe on separate pages to the real words.

If pseudo word tests must be used, they should be used purely, in isolation, and never in a list of real words

Each page of the test contains either pseudo words or real words. The two are never mixed together on the same page.

Each pseudo word has a picture of an imaginary creature alongside it. The teacher should tell the child that the words on this page are names for types of imaginary creature. The administrator's guide emphasises the importance of making sure the child knows that the words are not real words.

One of my fluent readers (2B) has failed. This is due to her nerves. The KS leader insisted they were present to oversee the process and said child is terrified of this person.