Yr 1 reading/phonics

[RunsWithScissors]

Hello,

DD (5.5) seems to be doing pretty well. Nearer the top end of reading in her class (on orange band, I know not stunning based on MN standards ;-) but she's moved up leaps and bounds from the beginning of the year.

The phonics test is this week, and her teacher caught me yesterday to say she doesn't think she'll pass it. I know it's for the school to see how she's doing, etc. she's moved her into a different phonics group to help her out.

I'd noticed she doesn't tend to sound things out much, I think she remembers words/word recognition?

I didn't learn phonics growing up, but can't recall the learning process of reading that I went through. I've always loved reading, as does DD.

So, my questions are:

Is the lack of ability/knowledge going to make it harder for her? She seems to be progressing really well with her reading, and has wonderful comprehension of what she reads. Very expressive when she reads a book for the first time, so I know she is understanding it. I'm just wondering if a better grasp of phonics would make it easier for her, or do some children naturally read in a different way?

Secondly, although her spelling is also progressing really well I do notice that some misspelled words reflect her speech (which we are having assessed) eg. 'Wiv' for 'with'. Her hearing test was fine last year, she has a great vocabulary and can explain things really well.

I am a bit confused tjough, as she seems to use sounding out to spell. Is this not a similar skill to reading by sounding out?

I know the school will do a great job to support her, and we are thrilled with her progress this year. I just want to ensure we are doing what we can to support her, and that we aren't missing out on things that might make it easier for her/be a more natural fit for her style of learning.

Thanks if you've read this far!

You seem to be assuming that good readers have developed misconceptions ... You really do underestimate young children

No it was answering your statement about teaching alien words ...with over a million words in the English language there are plenty of unfamiliar real words for my class to decode ...

I don't think correctng to known words is a misconception at all, other than in the context of the phonics screening check. However, I think it's safe and wise to say we all have misconceptions about a great many things.

Mrz, of course children will encounter new words all the time. Are you sure you are actually debating my point, as you keep making lots of statements that I agree with.
My argument is that many children naturally correct new written words to known spoken words, and that those children need to be explicitly taught not to for the check, despite the fact that it doesn't necessarily harm their reading at other times.

And I'm saying you are wrong

How many children do you hear read 1-1 in an average day/week?

Good readers read what's on the page ...good guessers don't

Your not just saying I'm wrong though, Mrz. You're also disagreeing with some of the most eminent experts in the field. Unless you think I've misinterpreted the quotes I posted earlier? If so, where do you think I went wrong in my interpretation and how do you read the same material?

There is nothing in your quotes that contradicts what I'm saying Micksy

"the child learns by pronouncing a letter string and matching the output to a word that the individual has learned by using speech"

And you are interpreting that to mean that readers expect every word they meet to be in their vocabulary and if it isn't we substitute the unfamiliar word with a similar looking word from our vocabulary? ??
It's amazing that we can extract any real meaning from texts if your model is correct.
How does our vocabulary develop if we expect every word to be one we know already?

It works well whilst a child's verbal vocabulary is bigger than their written one. We interpret new words by matching their components to ones we already know. I honestly don't know what determines whether we choose a known word we think might match or ether we decide that the word we are trying to read is not in our vocabulary. There must be something that allows us to do just that, as the connections models are able to interpret pseudo words without any phonics instruction at all, but merely through exposure to full word mappings. I would imagine it's to do with some kind of vector comparison in computer models, with a threshold effect at some level, but that's a total hunch.

But if you're going to have to switch to learning that not every word is one you know at some point, then why not teach it from the start? And if we did that, then couldn't we start to expect more interesting reading scheme books with more adventurous vocabulary choices at an earlier stage? Much better than endless levels of Biff, Chip &Kipper and their ridiculously formulaic sentence structure and vocabulary.

My eldest niece used to sound out words and ask what they meant all the time in year 1. She didn't just change them into ones she did know. And she's a very able reader.

So your maths students will read equilateral as equation or equality or equivalent or equator or equal depending which they already know?

That theory always reminds me of this

"Thank you Whole Language. Thank you for your many pearls of wisdom. Thank you for Context Clues. Thank you for Prior Knowledge. Thank you for the Initial Consonant. Thank you for Picture Clues. Thank you for Miscues.

But most of all, thank you for my wife. The other day she and I were riding along the highway and saw a sign for a town called Verona, so my wife read "Veronica". It's very simple, you see. First she applied Context Clues (she knew we were looking for a name). Then she applied the Initial Consonant ("V"). Then she applied Prior Knowledge (she already knew of a name "Veronica"). She put these Whole Language strategies together and ... success! At least, as much success as we can expect, I suppose.

Thank you William S. Gray for inventing "Look-Say" and the "Dick and Jane" series of basal readers. Thank you A. Sterl Artley for helping Mr. Gray and for your phonics-bashing diatribes of the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to the National Education Association for giving Mr. Gray and his friends two years of free promotion in the NEA Journal in 1930 and 1931. Together you all had managed to essentially eradicate phonics from America's public schools by the 1950s and early 60s, when my wife went to school.

But more importantly, thank you for my wife. Awhile back she was reading a pamphlet about something that was described as "venerable". Now that's a word you don't see every day, so what did she do but cleverly pull out her Whole Language skills? Context Clues, you see, told her that she was looking for an adjective. Next was the Initial Consonant "V". Then out came the Prior Knowledge -- she simply thought of an adjective she already knew that was about the right length and started with "V". And voila ... success again ... she came up with "vulnerable". Perfect! Well, at least as perfect as things get in publik ejukayshun, right?

Thanks Kenneth Goodman for reviving the floundering Look-Say, adding a few New Age twists and renaming it Whole Language back in the early 80s. Just like the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Grains and everything else that was Whole ... what else could it be but wonderful? Without you, Kenneth, the evils of phonics might have returned, and then where would we have been?

Thank you Dorothy Strickland for "Emerging Literacy" -- the idea that kids are naturally inclined to read if only we will surround them with literature. Thanks to all the other Whole Language textbook authors who cranked out textbook after textbook that either omitted phonics entirely or disparaged phonics openly. Thank you Teachers College, Columbia for promoting Whole Language to teachers' colleges worldwide. Can you even imagine how effective you were in eradicating phonics instruction throughout the English-speaking world?

Thank you International Reading Association (IRA) and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). For decades you appointed people like William S. Gray and Kenneth Goodman to lead your entire organizations in the fight against phonics. Somehow you raised hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of dollars to pay PR firms to get their opinions so heavily quoted in the press that the public is now completely confused in its ideas about what works and what doesn't work in reading instruction.

But once again thank you for my wife. Awhile back she was reading about some Congregational Church. And do you know, even with the Context Clues and the Prior Knowledge (about what names churches might have, presumably) and the Initial Consonant, she still managed to come up with "Congressional Church". Even though this was years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday.

Thank you Alfie Kohn and Dennis Baron and Mike Ford and Gerald Coles and Harvey Daniels and Regie Routman and Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen and Jim Trelease and all the other propagandists who lash out continuously against successful practice in general and phonics in particular. Through your tireless efforts, the public is continually misinformed. Without the public's perpetual state of confusion and misinformation, Whole Language would not have survived a single day. Thank you for keeping Look-Say and Whole Language and Balanced Literacy alive to create yet another generation of people who can read as well as my wife does.

Speaking of my wife, last night she was reading a brochure aloud about a museum with an "eclectic" collection, and what do you suppose she said? You guessed it (and so did she): "electric"! Maybe the absence of the Initial Consonant threw her off.

Thank you Marie Clay for inventing the phenomenally expensive Reading Recovery, a program installed in virtually every public school, it seems, and designed to treat the educational effects of Whole Language by applying yet more Whole Language. Thank you for giving my school district more stuff like this to spend my tax money on. How is it that I am not clever enough to imagine things like this?

Thank you Richard Allington, current (2005) president of the International Reading Association, for your campaign of misinformation against Direct Instruction (a successful phonics-based program). The cleverness of your propaganda puts the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, and all the other tyrants of the 20th century to shame. You know of course that Direct Instruction (DI) participated in a huge study (Project Follow Through) in which all the participants except DI failed, and in which DI succeeded brilliantly. And so you twist this around to say that by virtue of its association in this study with the constructivist-favored instructional styles that failed so miserably, we should all conclude that DI must necessarily also have been a failure. Your logic, so typical of that of the IRA, the NCTE, and the rest of the Constructivist Cabal, is irrefutable.

But once again thank you all for my wife. Hardly a day goes by when she does not demonstrate the success of Look-Say, or Whole Language, or Balanced Literacy or whatever you all call it now. Really, it's so amusing I really can't even quantify it. I never know what she'll read next ... and neither does she! Just imagine all her Miscues!

The sheer unpredictability of listening to her read is astounding ... and unpredictability is the essence of entertainment, right? I mean, she might read "deleterious" as "delicious" or perhaps "injurious" as "injustice" or "parabola" as "parachute" or maybe "quintessence" as "quintuplet", or "signify" as "signature". I could go on and on almost endlessly. The laughs just never stop here. And all thanks to you. All of you.

So thank you, Whole Language. Where would we be without you? The possibilities just boggle the mind. "

I don't actually think you'd have to learn new methods, though. I think probably a threshold would gradually change. How we teach is not how children learn. No one is saying, teach people to learn by building a neutral net of associations that work in parallel, that's just the way the brain really works. I think phonics works really well bedside it's a super efficient way to lay down lots of correct connections in the brain between letter groups and sounds. I don't think we actually have that much control over how it does this.

This might be a slight tangent, but I wonder whether there's a difference between good phonics teaching and less well taught phonics in this respect. It's not something I've found children tend to do unless they have gaps in their phonics skills. And it's not something my nieces and nephews tend to do. But none of those children have been taught using L&S.

Many of the teachers I've met that use L&S weren't that experienced in teaching SP before L&S came on the scene. They have a tendency to be quite inflexible about the phases. I wonder whether that's causing some children to develop alternative skills when they try to read print in the environment and they aren't pushing this skill to one side when the gaps in their knowledge are filled in phase 5.

The NfER review shows that over 90% of teachers (who responded) are using mixed methods and most say they teach phonics ??

My theory on why some children are worse at correcting the alien words to known words coming up!
When children are taught phonics from scratch, they should be given books which are very decodable at every stage. The few tricky words will be well practised as well. They will rarely come up against words where all the generated pronunciations make no sense semantically. These children will require there to be a high match between the visual input and their own verbal output.
Children who are not given the phonics tools needed to decode the text they are given will generate an output with a lower match value.
These are exactly the children that we want the phonics check to pick up on.
However, there may well be a third group, what I am going to call "wild readers." These will be children whose home reading has vastly outstripped the instruction they receive at school. These children will have been trained on texts that they didn't have the phonics knowledge to fully decode. They will have had to generate input output connections by checking whether the output makes semantic sense. This group will also generate outputs with lower match values.
The difference between the "wild readers" and the poor readers is that the wild readers may have lower match values, but could quite possibly generate successful outputs on far more complex previously unseen words than even the phonics taught group, as they will have more known word parts to get triggered by the recognisable parts of the new words. They are also, however, more likely to be fast and loose with perfect matching on these unknown words.
I am unconvinced that these "wild readers" will not tighten up their matching criteria as they become even more well read. As I say, the connectionist model of reading generates pseudo words with no explicit knowledge given at all.
Please note that I have not at any point advocated whole word teaching, or ever suggested that all words are encoded wholly in the brain. I do vaguely suspect that some (probably short) words are probably encoded wholly as well as in parts, but I have no idea of the relative weights those wholes or parts are given.

Your third group is exactly the children the check is able to identify the ones most at risk of future failure the ones who don't have an effective strategy for reading unfamiliar words. The children who read sliver as silver and equilateral as equilibrium. The children who aren't obvious so are most at risk.

I am unconvinced. You've yet, on any thread I've read, to produce evidence of it. You speak about the (and I may have the term wrong, forgive me) third grade slump. All the googling I have done on this describes it as a socioeconomic effect,not specifically related to reading outcomes at all.
What I would really like to see is some evidence about the outcomes of children who fail alien words but not real words.
First, do these children actually exist at all? Connectionist theory seems to suggest that words should only be corrected to real when relatively close and that even without explicit instruction pseudo words should be very readable. From what I've seen, there are never that many words that are particularly close to real ones. Whilst I can understand the old storm strom mix up, and don't think it necessarily problematic, I don't think there are many word pairs as controversial as this one. It could well be that these failed "good readers" are apocryphal.
If these children do exist, are they treated differently or the same as those who fail more generally? Do they respond well to additional phonics input? Are there any negative effects to their enjoyment of reading from being moved down reading groups, etc?
And has there ever been any kind of control of children who fail alien words only and then do not go on to receive further input. Would they improve anyway over a year? Would they be able to read the words if they were signposted by context as being fabricated? Is there some way of measuring whether their overall reading improves, rather than only their ability to pass the check?

I'm sure the answers to these questions all exist somewhere. No-one is being an idiot for asking them.
You have on many occasions, Mrz, said that all your good readers pass on both sets of words. Does anyone here have any first hand experience of children failing only on the alien words? Do my "wild readers" exist, or are they perfectly capable of reading both sets anyway?

I'm not aware of any theorists who believe we read systematically from right to left. I've skimmed a couple of papers on how we order the various word parts, but it's pretty dense stuff that gets extremely biological.
In the general course of reading we ALL occasionally mix up sliver for silver though we would be far, far less likely to mix up equilibrium and equilateral, if given as single words, again because it's extremely simplistic to think that we read from left to right once we are past the sounding out phase. ateral and brium words/endings and all possible permutations of smaller chunks would also be triggered. We do however apparently have a window of focus that spreads beyond the current words we are reading and onto the next, so we may well be priming out brain to recognise known "equi" words by the time we got there.
I think when you teach sounding out, you assume that's how mature readers read. I really don't think it is at all. Maybe that's the problem that"good" readers have. Maybe reading and blending are not actually the same thing at all, just that one lays the pathways for the other. Just musing aloud here as its a fascinating topic.

"Scientific evidence strongly demonstrates that the development of skilled reading involves increasingly accurate and automatic word identification skills, not the use of "multiple cueing systems" to read words. Skilled readers do not need to rely on pictures or sentence context in word identification, because they can read most words automatically, and they have the phonics skills to decode occasional unknown words rapidly. Rather, it is the unskilled readers who tend to be dependent on context to compensate for poor word identification. Furthermore, many struggling readers are disposed to guess at words rather than to look carefully at them, a tendency that may be reinforced by frequent encouragement to use context. Almost every teacher of struggling readers has seen the common pattern in which a child who is trying to read a word (say, the word brown) gives the word only a cursory glance and then offers a series of wild guesses based on the first letter: "Black? Book? Box?" (The guesses are often accompanied by more attention to the expression on the face of the teacher than to the print, as the child waits for this expression to change to indicate a correct guess.) Even when children are able to use context to arrive at the correct word, reliance on context to compensate for inaccurate or nonautomatic word reading creates a drain on comprehension. This kind of compensation becomes increasingly problematic as children are expected to read more challenging texts that have few or no pictures, sophisticated vocabulary, and grammatically complex sentences."

Mrz, again. I agree with pure phonics teaching. I really do. Trust me. You do not need to keep posting about how much better it does than alternate methods. I agree!
I just don't believe in pure phonics LEARNING. I also believe that there are children who have already developed strategies to read to a chapter book level very early, and that very many of them have no problems whatsoever without any explicit phonics education at all. We did survive before phonics, after all. Roald Dahl managed to write all those nonsense words without a phonics test, though there is no saying he would have passed it himself. What I'm not sure I believe in are all these good readers who go on to fail later. I can easily be convinced by a good peer evaluated pdf though, I promise!

Mrz, could you possibly give me a link to the quote you just posted. I presume it will cite the scientific evidence it mentions. I like to read original research rather than people writing about it with their own agenda. I'm sure the evidence exists, I am genuinely interested in the topic and it's not terribly easy to find which papers are relevant to what you want to know.

The good readers that fail the test aren't quite apocryphal, but they aren't a huge group.

Of the children that failed in both year 1 and again in year 2 in 2013/2014, 66% were at W or level 1 for reading in year 2, 34% achieved level 2 (mostly 2c IIRC) and 0% achieved level 3. Obviously it's not actually no children, but it's a very small number.

In comparison about 5% of children who fail in year 1, but pass in year 2 go on to get level 3 and 43% of those that pass in year 1.