Reception - reading

[Ifyoubuildit]

I'm sure this has been asked before but I wanted some insight from those in the know, so bear with me.

DS started in Reception in Sept. He brings reading books home every night but they are soooo dull and repetitive (GINN 360) and they don't provide any challenge to him.

Is this deliberate? I can understand them trying to build his confidence but to drain any love of reading out of him with this dull, repetitive, story-less material seems strange to me. But then I'm not an expert.

No one pretends it has the same code as other languages masha. It's complex but there is a code whether you like it or not.

It makes me feel like crying when you start listing the number of words that have a certain feature, Masha. It doesn't matter how many of the words in the English Language have more than one sound; children have to learn all the variants.

What do you suggest that all these poor British children do? Should we move them all to Italy so they don't have to contend with our language?

Lougle
It makes me feel like crying when you start listing the number of words that have a certain feature.
They are the words that keep stumping children when they are learning to read.

Because adults read words as wholes, they often find it difficult to understand why children sometimes stumble over the same words again and again. If they took the trouble to look at their spellings more carefully, they would be able to see what is causing the problem and help more effectively.

The ideal solution to the perennial reading and spelling problems would be to modernise English spelling, to bring substantial numbers of the rogue spellings into line with the main patterns and make English literacy acquisition easier. But this is not going to happen, because literate adults have generally become too attached to all the quirky spellings, because of the long time it took to learn them.

By being more honest about the reading and spelling problems of English, it would be possible to have more sensible discussions about how to deal with them, instead of pretending they don't exist or blame teachers and parents for not helping enough, or using the wrong teaching methods, which is the favourite tack of SP evangelists.

But if anyone tries to have a sensible discussion, or give practical suggestions, you just start hand-wringing and bemoaning about how difficult the English language is, Masha!

You remind me of Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter books, stopping in on every reading and spelling thread to have a good old wailing session.

I loved Moaning Myrtle. I think she is one of JK Rawlings's best characters.

Marsha's input on MN, on the other hand, I find repetitive and a bit barking, tbh. She spouts the same claptrap on every thread that she goes on, with no proper engagement with people who present systematic arguments to disprove her points.

And Moaning Myrtle didn't cut and paste.

Oh no, not wishing to kick things off again, but, we're back on GINN - arrrggh

"The ideal solution to the perennial reading and spelling problems would be to modernise English spelling, to bring substantial numbers of the rogue spellings into line with the main patterns and make English literacy acquisition easier."

Or to equip parents with the knowledge that reading acquisition is a process, that Tarquin doesn't need to be fluent at reading within 2 weeks of starting reception and that there is more to reading than being able to chant the words on a page, parrot fashion?

Oh....and to embrace our language and it's evolution. Nobody suggests making Russian, Chinese, Lebanese or Hebrew speaking people use the Latin alphabet so that we can understand it. I mean Esperanto really took off, didn't it?

Perhaps the Spelling Society forget the resounding success of ITA

Learning to read Russian is very easy, because all letters and letter strings apart from g in the combination ego (pronounced evo) have just one pronunciation.

Chinese children now learn to read phonetically with the Latin alphabet first and then memorise their pictograms with the aid phonetic subtitles. That works well for slower readers in English too, e.g. said (sed), heard (herd), through (throo)....

Even adult Chinese type phonetically on computers using the QUIRTY keyboard.

Schools who used i.t.a. in the 1970s did so to prevent spelling reform.

In 1953 the House of Commons had passed Mont Follicks Spelling Reform bill. In 1963-4 this led to an experiment with 1,670 children to test if making English spelling more regular would speed up literacy acquisition. Half the children used i.t.a., the rest normal spelling in their 1st school year.

The teachers who saw that i.t.a. enabled children to learn to read and write much faster had the daft idea that if all children used i.t.a. for the first year, and learned what reading and writing was about, they would cope better with normal English spelling afterwards. Their reasoning was that if this worked, there would be no need for spelling reform.

This was a classic case of putting good research to really bad use.

So James Pitman didn't base ITA on the Spelling Society's system masha?

No.
I.t.a. had been devised by his grandfather Isaac the inventor of shorthand.

Interesting that the Spelling Society's own website says otherwise masha

spellingsociety.co.uk/journals/pamflets/p11ssshistory.php

"Little more was done for some time, but meanwhile Sir James Pitman had evolved the Initial Teaching Alphabet, using the Society's system as a base and had been largely instrumental - he was a member of the Committee of the University - in persuading the University and the National Foundation for Educational Research jointly to undertake the research into the question of whether the unsystematic spelling of English caused difficulty in learning to read and write it, which had been envisaged in the bill. The first research using the Initial Teaching Alphabet was launched in English schools in 1961, and others in America and elsewhere in 1963 and later."

Yes, James Pitman evolved the i.t.a. which was first devised by his grandfather.
It was not the Society's system. The Society favoured New Spelling at that time. Pitman was not a member of the Society.
The Society kept out of the research to avoid the project being regarded as biased.
But this is getting completely off topic.

So the article on the Society website claiming it was their system is a lie!