Appalling reading advice for parents and TAs

[Feenie]

This document is being flagged up in lots of the teaching pages i've liked on Facebook:

literacyforpleasure.wordpress.com/ta-guide-to-listening-to-reading-making-comments/

It's terrible, full of recommendations to encourage children to guess. Really depressed at the number of teachers tagging others to flag it as 'useful'. It really, really isn't.

If you're starting as a reading volunteer in September, I hope you're not given anything like this. Any advice encouraging children to guess words is really poor and awful practice.

If a child is 'stuck', encourage them to look at the sounds and blend - or if they're really stuck, give them the word and come back to it later. Feedback to the teacher on the sound they couldn't recognise is fabulous.

And thank you for volunteering in the first place - your help is invaluable and much appreciated.

Yes, but it's probably less obvious in R and year 1. The curriculum focus used to be more on literal recall.

I just don't ' think I'd considered the longer term implications of poor decoding completely.

The Reading Process & Practice - Weaver (2002)

Can you provide the direct quote?

In mrz's link to you tube video, prof. talks about link between reading and spoken vocabulary.
It really makes sense to me.

I think my ds's school turned around drastically after the massive failure in PSC. They seems to have fewer number of less able readers. And I can see clear links between the children struggling and lack of interaction at home.

Still no acknowledgement of the typical problems faced by older, struggling readers - guessing, mispronouncing or skipping words - and how best to help them.

I guess that's nigh on impossible to do if your recommended strategies are also those very characteristics.

'I think you'll find that the 'guessing' you are so dismissive of comes in the
'language structures syntax, semantics etc' thread, under 'language comprehension'.'
I think you will find it doesn't user

'who is we'
We are the people you made false accusations about user

'everything I have said is completely credible. ' yes Literacyforpleasure but credible and true aren't the same thing it's the fact that Smith was credible that resulted in literacy failure

I've got as far as the first line of the preface in your citation about enjoyment of reading and reading habits. Am I right in thinking this is an American paper based on a decline in reading habits of American children in or pre 2007?

The teaching of reading in the US is still very much whole language. At best synthetic phonics could be said to have been introduced with common core a couple of years ago, but it still isn't widely used in the same way that it is in the UK.

How does this tell us anything about the reading habits of UK children since phonics only was introduced in late 2006?

Are we now talking about "why-children-should-be-encouraged-to-only-ever-use-phonics-as-a-back-up-strategy/'" ?

Yes. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess the other citation from that section (the 2016 NUT one) comes from a survey they asked their members and offers no reasons why reading time has been squeezed from the curriculum.

Gove, the 2014 curriculum, ks2 SATs and increased expectations would be my bet for reasons that came top because that's what would have made the headlines during the conference.

I'm not sure where to start there are so any cliches and nonsense

To the posters who thinks guessing is a good strategy to teach, how do you tell the difference between a child guessing wrongly and a child just reading it wrong (but thinking they are right)?

While in some cases guessing words wrong can be written of as an error without consequences mixing public & pubic can be rather embarrassing, not to mention if you are writing spellcheck won't fix it for you either.

http://www.learningspy.co.uk/reading/5-things-every-new-secondary-teacher-know-reading/

Good advice there for secondary teachers - this is exactly what I was trying to explain last night:

Knowing this stuff won’t magically make your students read better but it will make you a more effective teacher. Whatever your subject, at some point academic success depends on students’ ability to read. If you understand a bit more about the processes and why some children struggle, you will be better placed to adjust your classroom practice and refer students for appropriate support.

Unfortunately, if the teacher isn't in the slightest bit nterested in knowing about the processes (which I am still by - how could you not??), then the children are definitely stuffed.

Reading is central to accessing the curriculum ...it can't be ignored!

Buffalo lucky for you that you have children who are all fantastic readers. Who you have managed to teach yourself. Please remember that not every child or adult will become a fantastic reader and learning to read can be a frustrating process.

Trust me I do not fall into the category of "fantastic reader" despite the best efforts of my mum. She taught me with phonics along side the schools look and say. That said encouraging a child to guess is totally wrong. Many struggling readers probably do guess they might get it right once but the next time they will trip up.

It astounds me that the phonics gestapo are insisting that a rigid one size fits all approach is the only way of solving the problem of poor literacy in this country without reference to the rest of the problem. There is such an enormous problem with the direction of early education, swimming against all the evidence. Perhaps if teaching reading and writing was left till a more appropriate age instead of imposed far too early, this rigid phonics approach would have more success. Because children would be developmentally ready for it and find it less of an off-putting struggle.

Children don't find it an off putting struggle as parents have already stated.

Gentleness, you say : "if teaching reading and writing was left till a more appropriate age instead of imposed far too early."

Are you talking about other countries which starts school later?
My country starts school at 6/7. But they are taught reading/writing/basic numbers in kindergarten.
By the time they start school, they are ready to actually learn, sit properly, follow instructions, be independent etc.
When I look at reception/yr1 in England, I think it's pretty similar to that of kindergarten in my country.

And calling teachers who are dedicated to help children and us parents "gestapo" is very unpleasant.
Why they come on MN and give us great advice? ....I assume because they care for children's education. You can disagree, but no need for rudeness just because you don't agree with them.

It astounds me that the phonics gestapo are insisting that a rigid one size fits all approach is the only way of solving the problem of poor literacy in this country without reference to the rest of the problem. There is such an enormous problem with the direction of early education, swimming against all the evidence. Perhaps if teaching reading and writing was left till a more appropriate age instead of imposed far too early, this rigid phonics approach would have more success.

But if every child in your school learns to read, why would you consider doing something else? Especially if that something else was the thing you changed from because it wasn't working. Maybe they've already solved the problem of poor literacy in their schools.

Not a teacher, would previously have stayed well clear of this kind of debate. However we are now in a different country (English speaking, first world) and I am wholeheartedly grateful that our kids learnt to read before we came.

System here is look and say with some very basic phonics (single letter sounds essentially, the teacher's response to anything beyond that is blank). Some kids are reading fine. Some of those have a lot of parental support. A few kids in DC2's class are functionally illiterate, age 8. At least some of them also have a lot of parental support, I don't know the parents of all.

I go in to help with literacy session on a regular basis. They simply do not have a toolset to work out what they're reading. They guess based on the first letter and it's hopelessly inaccurate 99/100 times. They try again. By the fifth guess, they've forgotten anything about the sentence anyway. What are they learning? That they can't read. And most other people can. And that the first half hour of every day makes them feel stupid (independent reading time).

My heart breaks for them, it's desperate watching them internalise that lesson. Worse, I suspect learning difficulties for at least 1 of the ones I regularly read with but the school can't tell the difference between failure to concentrate, late bloomer or specific learning obstacle like dyslexia. Thankfully his parents are supportive, have a private tutor engaged and are seeking specialist assessment - guess what the tutor teaches: phonics. Guess where he's beginning to see progress. But yes, he's back at CVC words and the first digraphs which means that in school he still feels stupid and those beliefs are already harder to shake.

I wasn't taught phonics, I was one of the lucky ones who pretty much learnt to read independently before school and it just clicked. But I'm trying to make sure the DC (good readers for their age) still develop their phonics knowledge through spelling etc - it's interesting seeing how they forget to apply it when their teachers aren't using it and start asking me how to spell words that they can work out with a bit of thought.

Before coming here, I would have thought this was a topic for the experts to squabble over and the rest of us to shrug and assume that some kind of middle ground was probably fine everywhere. I'm now convinced that some kids will be fine with anything, but phonics are helpful in putting structure to what they've effectively worked out themselves. For other kids, phonics really is vital in giving them the tools to access written words for themselves. It might still be harder work for them and we will want to think creatively about how to keep them interested in reading of all kinds, stories and literature. But we let them down in their general education and their deep beliefs about themselves if we don't give them an effective toolset.