Primary School wont diagnose dyslexia

[bethalexander]

My 9yo DD is really struggling with her spelling and is bottom of her class. We think she has dyslexia but her primary won't test her. Getting her tested privately costs a fortune. Surely the primary have a duty to test her?

mrz I'm talking about the evidence about children's development and reading and particularly phonics. The evidence that was used to produce the Rose Report. The evidence that has been mentioned in this thread.

Except when the illustrations tell a separate side story that's just a tangent. Children learn well when what they learn is in an authentic context. Illustrations from their real life.

Sorry what's not an assumption?

If teachers have the training, the resources, the decodable books, and the top-quality programmes the level of success will vary with individual children. That's the point I am making, no method fits all and the best literacy strategies will be ones that are adapted to the children.

"I am saying that there is more evidence that they do even better when phonics is used with other methods."

It depends what is meant by "other methods". Everyone agrees phonics should always be taught alongside intensive exposure to high quality stories, poems and other literature, along with everything that goes with that. Reading researchers also agree that a lack of vocabulary and general knowledge will prevent good comprehension.

However, when it comes to decoding, or "lifting the word off the page", as the phrase goes, there is no evidence that any other method besides phonic decoding is useful in the long run, and there is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that teaching other methods such as looking at the picture, or guessing from the first letter and the context, can be positively harmful for more at-risk children.

The problem is tomatodizzymum that many teachers have had no training and have simply been given a copy of Letters and Sounds and expected to muddle through.
In some schools teachers are doing their best with no training or resources to teach effectively

Is it the well taught phonics alongside a rich literary environment that works - with the phonics being the most important part? I'm following with interest at someone who works with juniors who have fallen behind. Totally agree that lack of vocabulary and general knowledge can be hard, but also 'patchy' phonics and no knowledge of how to deal with irregular words.

The evidence is that when phonics is used alongside other strategies such as using illustrations or initial letters to guess the word the effectiveness is diluted. Context can help with the meaning of unfamiliar words and to distinguish between heteronym but doesn't support accurate reading.

Ppolly so called irregular words should be dealt with in exactly the same manner as any word.

I do spend some of my time saying "don't guess" and "the answer isn't in the picture"

In fact part of my job seems to be getting them to unlearn the poor methods they have developed themselves and getting them to look at the actual word in some detail.

mrz that's serious. If that is the case then England needs to re-assess the quality of it's teacher training. The government brings in a system for teaching children that they trump up as the "way to make children read quickly and skillfully" but don't focus on training teachers to implement it. I still think there is an unhealthy obsession with getting children to read quickly too, why does the department of education need to get children reading "quickly" when there is a lot of evidence against doing this? Other countries that start formal education later (6 or 7) and use a variety of reading approaches have a higher level of literacy than the UK. That's not a coincidence, using phonics since 2007 is unlikely to change the results dramatically either, especially if what you say about teaching phonics is true! Time will tell I guess.

Anyway, thanks for opening my eyes about phonics instruction, it has been very interesting. This for anyone who is interested www.educationreview.co.nz/magazine/september-20/phonics-is-the-big-debate/#.VXcoPdJViko

Unfortunately, tomato, I think part of the issue is that a lot of the trainers in ITT institutes and in LAs don't have much more knowledge than the teachers they are trying to train. In many cases they were the same people who'd spent the previous decade going into schools and sending out the message that English can't be taught using phonics at all.

One of the people who is now teaching students in my oldITT is the same person who taught me that phonics is no use at all because suh-uh-nuh doesn't sound anything like sun when you sound it oiut. I'm fairly sure he's never taught a phonics lesson in his life.

Someone posted the reading lists for some of the well known ITT establishments and surprise surprise they are still promoting whole language.

Students say they've had half a day (or less) input on phonics.

Matched funding was wasted on puppets and games rather than ensuring staff received high quality training.

There are plenty of threads on MN from parents concerned because their children's schools continue to send home books published in the 80s.

I took part in an online focus group to develop a new reading scheme the other day - the suggested scheme had a phonics 'strand' which sat alongside the main whole word scheme. Other teachers, having introduced both themselves and talked about the literacy problems their schools had, were wholeheartedly in favour. When I pointed out that it in no way matched the new curriculum, they all went quiet, then one said 'Well, you still have to cater for children who just don't suit phonics, don't you?' And everyone else agreed, all ignoring the swathes of non-readers they'd been so concerned over in the beginning.

Depressing.

The copy of the proforma I've seen for assessing students teaching phonics places 'have students planned and made links with other units/topics from the curriculum and provided for different learning styles' slightly above 'are children given opportunities to blend words?' and 'are given opportunities to segment words'.

That's a fairly good example of where it's going wrong. That first bit shouldn't be part of the criteria for a good lesson at all, let alone seeming to be given more importance than blending and segmenting. Now I know why I was surprised when I met a student teacher who really knew her phonics last week. Sadly she wasn't trained round here.

Different learning styles? ITTs are still teaching learning styles?
Words completely fail me

I think that what is being missed out in parts of this discussion is that 'phonics' is not just a teaching method; it is a 'body of knowledge' which needs to be learned in order to be come an effective reader. If you scratch the surface of someone who claims to have learned to read without being explicitly taught any phonics you are 99% likely to find that they use phonics to work out unfamiliar words, even though they may do it almost unconsciously. (There really isn't any other way to do it...)

That skilled readers use phonics was discovered by reading researchers way back in the 1970s and their findings have not been overturned.

The ways in which phonic knowledge is taught can vary a great deal; some methods, such as synthetic/linguistic phonics, are more effective than others, but 'phonics' describes what must be taught, not how it must be taught.

P.S Was trying to post this last night but laptop wasn't playing.. discussion has moved on a little but I still think this is an important point to recognise.

When Portuguese speakers read English words they don't know I have noticed that 100% of the time they apply Portuguese rules to the letters, producing the same sound. You can give 100 native Portuguese speakers who don't have previous knowledge the word time and they will all produce the same sound (permitting for regional accent variation)

I have heard Engish (family and friends) saying the word Gerais in several different ways. Everyone from my 7 year old cousin to my 75 year old mother have produced several different interpretations. That's because there is a range of sounds that English can produce from the same symbols, so phonetic knowledge is a great start but it is not all that is needed for reading fluency.

For example if the word comes from their own language and they apply the wrong rule then they will not understand the word and it will be meaningless, even if they actually know the spoken word. This can damage reading enjoyment and fluency because getting it wrong can be a knock back and some children may not apply another rule, even if this is what we would like to think happens when they are taught. I am not talking about small children, more those that have basic word knowledge but are tackling more advanced books alone. Only 40% of British 10 year olds read for pleasure. That is considerably lower than their European counterparts.

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/284286/reading_for_pleasure.pdf

I was surprised by the learning styles maizie, and hoped it meant something else. But my line manager did an adult teaching qualification there 2 years ago and I know her first session was on learning styles because she made us do a bloody learning styles test in our training session that week.

They use phonics to work out unfamiliar words, even though they may do it almost unconsciously. (There really isn't any other way to do it...)

When adults read text, they look for wohle wodrs and ipmortant markers, aslo look for contxet and if you only scramble a few lettes the markers are still there. This suggests we cannot be "unconciously" using pohnics. It's so much more complex than phonics.

Please can you link the research because I like to read research like that and know what methods they used.

That's a similar thing to the cambridge research meme isn't i? I thought that had been debunked on the basis that the evidence showed that some different process happens in the brain when we read words where the letters were swapped. It certainly slows readers down and the most likely explanation seems to be that the brain is unscrambling the letters.

If we weren't looking at every letter when we read then I'd imagine that we'd never notice that messages like yours were scrambled. The fact that it's obvious when you start reading it would suggest that we are looking at something else as well as the markers.

When adults read text, they look for wohle wodrs and ipmortant markers, aslo look for contxet and if you only scramble a few lettes the markers are still there. This suggests we cannot be "unconciously" using pohnics. It's so much more complex than phonics.

Well, I don't read like that. And even if skilled readers appear to recognise words as wholes that is not what their brains are doing; not according to neuroscientists. Try Stanislas Dehaene:

If you scramble a few letters in simple words they become anagrams which are easy for skilled readers to solve. Makes reading very tiresome, though.

Discussing the meme Bruce Murray from Auburn University, Alabama, USA points to the following quote as representative of a line of research showing that misspellings (and letter transpositions) do disrupt the reading process:
"Regardless of semantic, syntactic, or orthographic predictability, the eye seems to process individual letters ... Disruptions in adult readers' eye movements indicate that the visual system tends to catch the slightest misspelling."
(from Adams, M. J. (1990) Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 101)
There's an interesting issue here which is that the subjective impression of difficulty that one gets from reading a jumbled text may be quite different from a more objective measure of reading difficulty obtained using an eye-tracker (a device that measures the pattern of eye movements made when people read printed text).

It's also been pointed out that meaning can be lost when you start transposing letters
Perhaps the most ambiguous jumbled sentence?
"The sprehas had ponits and patles"
This might come out as...
The sherpas had pitons and plates.
The shapers had points and pleats.
The seraphs had pintos and petals.
The sphaers had pinots and palets.
The sphears had potins and peltas.

RafaIsTheKingOfClay it was debunked as being a published study, it's actually originally from an unpublished thesis. No one knows what information we use for reading but it's unlikely to be a single peice of information. Reading is a complex process.

Yes, it is very difficult to read scrambled words (I have not claimed it isn't) the words can be carefully scrambled for them to make sense. If you scramble the letters in certain ways it does make reading more difficult.

MaizieD you actually linked research that supports this. You assumed I said we look only for whole words, read it again. I said a number of other things, it is a complex process. But actually the research states that in skilled readers a small area of the left visual system automatically responds to whole written words, regardless of small changes.

Dr. Dehaene's work is interesting in that it hypothesis that children learn to read by linking object recognition and the pre-existing language circuit. They learn to read when the words are meaningful, in this case the authentic context of their language. The theory is that there are three phases of learning: pictorial, brief photography of a few words and the phonological stage that decodes sounds and symbols and finally learning the spelling so word recognition can be fast and automatic. This process takes time and the brain develops and alters, whole word learning will not work as well as phonetic processing but it is far more complex than both and the actual stage in the process will vary from child to child and take a long time to fully develop.

This process will on average take longer in English children which makes in light of Dr. Dehaene's research due to the complexity of written English and it's less direct relation to spoken words than some other languages. There is plenty of published evidence that English children require more experience before they reach the same level of profeciency as their German, Spanish and Portuguese counterparts.