'Using picture clues and context are great for developing comprehension'

[Sleeperandthespindle]

This is the response I got to asking for decodable books from school for 4 year old in reception who is guessing from pictures when presented with Biff and Chip.

I don't agree. I can ignore the books sent home and give him others, I know, but he is clearly being taught to 'guess' in school.

The school are unlikely to change their mind, I realise, but older DC (in the same school) is struggling very greatly with literacy and the general approach seems unhelpful.

I would use Reading Chest to replace his school reading book, and then supplement it by discussing where his phonic knowledge can be used to decode individual words within the picture book or school reading book. takes the same time, but will be much more beneficial.

Many moons ago when DS taught himself to read, i bought the Jolly Phonics teachers' book to understand what he would be taught in school. It was an easy-read and very basic phonics primer, tbh probably better aimed at parents than the deeper knowledge needed by teachers. The free Letters and Sounds resources are also reasonably self-explanatory and are likely to get you to a reasonable understanding of phonics.

i'm not saying those are 'the best phonics resources' - tyhey are not. however they ARE accessible, and not too expensive, for a parent having to fill in gaps left by a school not doing their job.

The English PoS is pretty clear

"Alongside this knowledge of GPCs, pupils need to develop the skill of blending the sounds into words for reading and establish the habit of applying this skill whenever they encounter new words. This will be supported by practice in reading books consistent with their developing phonic knowledge and skill and their knowledge of common exception words. At the same time they will need to hear, share and discuss a wide range of high-quality books to develop a love of reading and broaden their vocabulary.

'Neglectful parent fridge education programme' 😀

I think you could market that.

I think JP used to do a set of fridge magnets that included digraphs. I don't know if they still do it.

Jolly Phonics one, ripe for rebranding...

Haha! I didn't even know that was a phonics poster. Got a copy from library since my ds wanted it.
I've done lots of neglectful poster parenting, including times tables, names of the animals and birds, world map, names of the dinosaur, etc.

I am just coming on to ask how any child can be taught to read with only phonics?!
Do they keep these children in a bubble? ALL children are exposed to environmental print from an early age and recognise those words "by sight" by the picture they make in their heads. E.g. Tesco/ mac Donald's/ their own name/ Lego - who's to say that even if they are taught only phonics children do not continue to make these pictures/ patterns etc themselves - just as they did as toddlers?
Not saying only phonics is wrong but how do the studies know exactly how these children are decoding?

Logos are quite different though because they are always the same colour and font, if a child saw the word tesco without those clues they wouldn't be able to read it without phonics.

"but how do the studies know exactly how these children are decoding?" MRI scans while reading pseudo words

"Tesco" was a first ever word my ds spelled using fridge magnets before 2.
I think these children are the lucky ones who can crack decoding themselves.
But proper phonics teaching at school only strengthen their skill, not hinder it in any way.

So when children "learn" words themselves (e.g. Names, familiar signs e.g. Stop, titles of favourite book) and then access them independently is this not reading?
Once children can instantly sound blend the word is instantly accessed e.g. Cat rather than c-a-t. If children put that word in the wrong part of their brain they aren't reading correctly?
As I pointed out above before children are exposed to phonics they have a store of print so how we can say that there are children who have learnt to read only using phonics?
Presumably those children also look at picture books e.g. the gruffalo or hungry caterpillar etc etc and will (if it is a well known/ favourite text) start to match/ memorise words - using the pictures as a cue? They use cloze procedure to add in a word - so remembering/ guessing a whole word.
Surely they will then independently apply those successful strategies themselves without it being explicitly taught?
I certainly never taught my dd to use picture cues when reading phonics books but she does it anyway because she knows the pictures hold a clue. Mostly she works out the unfamiliar word using phonics but sometimes has a lucky guess.
Just wondering if any of the research deals with this?

And I'm not saying that the phonics teaching doesn't enhance reading - far from it.
I am genuinely interested in how the researchers can not acknowledge/ be aware of/ realise that children are exposed to print from birth and with interested parents are taught reading strategies (implicitly and explicitly/ rightly or wrongly) from then on.

I've never encountered a child taught using phonics who uses pictures independently.
I have met young children who can recite whole books but don't relate the words to the text so if they turn two pages they continue to recite the words from the missed page ...often they are confused when they get to the end of the book.

But what I'm saying is children are "taught" about "other strategies" often well before anyone has flashed a phonics letter card at them.

And I'm saying that isn't my experience

Goodall (1984) found four year olds were aware that print carried information but were often inaccurate in their interpretations, applying different strategies to interpret environmental print. They used the context to ‘guess’ the words and labels they were shown, e.g. recognising ‘Weetabix’ on the cereal packet was possible for most children, but recognising the handwritten word ‘Weetabix’ with no other context cues or clues was not.

In another study of children’s approaches to environmental print Jones and Hendrickson (1970) suggested that often children recognise the form (gestalt) of a logo, but do not actually read the print.

Secret but you accept there will be children who have got to school without the ability to read, who can recognise logos from the artwork not the letters?

Who's to say it's not those children who are studied?

I have no idea how the studies were constructed but to me, it would seem odd indeed to take children who can already read and attempt to study them learning to read. It's already happened. Surely the studies will have been of children who were actually learning to read via phonics.

Some children read before starting school, of course they do. I don't think anyone is saying oh what a shame about that. But phonics enhances the reading of children who can already read and is successful at teaching non-reading children to read. I can't see the downside here.

I totally agree with Batteries.
I only have my ds' experience, but children who have learned to read(cracked the code) will start reading anything and everything, not just big logos.

Like many teachers Mnetter say, most children learn to read ok with mixed methods. But to catch those who may struggle, the only phonic way has the best results. Why do you still need to question that? Your dc may not be one of them, so however she learned to read, that's fine as long as she grasp the skill to read.
But teachers are responsible for all the children in their class.

Secret In answer to your question

I am genuinely interested in how the researchers can not acknowledge/ be aware of/ realise that children are exposed to print from birth and with interested parents are taught reading strategies

I would say, from my reading of the research, that they are aware of that, but don't see it as a widespread problem. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, no reading researcher would deny that many children are able to learn to read fluently no matter what method is used to teach them. This is because they are able to intuitively work out the phoneme/grapheme correspondences for themselves, due to good pattern recognition abilities and good phonological awareness. These children are not the problem. If all children were like them, there wouldn't be any need for reading research. The children who successfully learn to read by being taught multiple strategies by their parents will fall into this group.

But reading researchers are keen for all children to learn to read well. There is a group of children who will pick up those patterns for themselves only partially, or not at all, and will end up skipping over unknown words when they read, leaving them at the level of their spoken vocabulary, or worse. There is a further group who won't pick up the patterns at all without explicit instruction and practice. For these groups, deliberately teaching them to look at pictures and context as the 'right' way to approach reading can be very damaging.

Why would the researchers need to look at that anyway? If the aim of your study design is to find out what subject content it's best to teach, then what you are looking for is input versus outcomes. In a large enough randomised trial the few children that have genuinely taught themselves to read just through exposure to text wouldn't make much difference to either group.

It's not that different to trials in most areas of medicine.

When it comes to parents teaching strategies before school age, I don't think I know of any parents who've gone for pictures clues and context clues. They've almost exclusively gone for letters/sounds and/or HFW flash cards.

Largely I think because the other strategies are completely counter-intuitive to good readers and only seem to be encouraged by teachers who've been told that's what good readers do and believed it.

I think parenting advice tends to lean heavily on encouraging verbal communication rather than reading. So the pictures are a good chance to get them taking and describing early - when you are reading to a toddler, for example. Using the pictures to guess the text almost shuts down the picture as a separate element in its own right. I guess most parents wouldn't use the pictures to guess the text because by the time you are teaching them to read, you are too used to using the pictures to encourage imagination.

The following is anecdote, the plural of which is not data! However, i am the parent of a child who taught himself to read by 'reverse engineering' - ie working out the phonic code for himself. I would have thought that he was reading by word recognition, but his Reception teacher established that actually he had an extensive and accurate knowledge of phonics.

In his case, he would recite books as mrz describes - absolutely accurate word for word recall, including turning pages at exactly the same point as the 'real reader' did, and following along with his finger under the words as the person reading the book to him did.

From that, he matched words in print to the spoken sound of words - but what it turned out he was also dong was linking phonemes to graphemes - ie the constituent parts of word to their constituent sounds. He could then apply that phonic knowledge to read new words, and also to encode words.

So it is not that self-taught readers don't use phonics, IME. It is that they use known words to work out the phonic code before it is explicitly taught to them. It is obviously more efficient to teach the phonic code directly, rather than to rely on children working it out for themselves, but pre-school readers who are determined to read don't necessarily wait for that explicit teaching!

DD learned to read at school, using phonics. By about the start of Y1, she was as good a reader as DS had been at the same age, despite his earlier start. DS has remained a better speller, possibly because of the early use of visual memory in his learning strategy, so he remembers the 'look' of the correct alternative phoneme / grapheme correspondence more readily.