'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.

Decodable books refers to books used for teaching children to read, not books that are read and shared with them. Most schools use them for reading instruction, as the curriculum dictates.

However, if you wait to learn the code before you read any words containing that code

Not at all - most commonly used correspondences are taught by this stage in Year 1, meaning children can use those skills to read most age appropriate books at 5/6.

Tricky words like 'was', 'all', 'said', 'there' - children are taught to read these without sounding them out as at the point that they are learning to read them they wouldn't be able to. Yet it is very hard to read a book that doesn't contain these words. Am I missing something here?

Yes - you are missing the fact that the advice has not been to teach them without sounding them out for many, many years.

From Letters and Sounds (2005):

Procedure

Explain that there are some words that have one, or sometimes two, tricky letters.
Read the caption, pointing to each word, then point to the word to be learned and read it again.

Write the word on the whiteboard.

Sound-talk the word and repeat putting sound lines and buttons under each phoneme and blending them to read the word.

Discuss the tricky bit of the word where the letters do not correspond to the sounds the children know (e.g. in go, the last letter does not represent the same sound as the children know in dog).

The National Curriculum states that children should be reading a wide range of books - not just sharing them with adults. Of course books that are sent home should have words that they can read but not entirely made up of words that they can sound out. Children can read words that they can't sound out. What about children who read beyond their stage of phonics teaching? My DS aged 4 is reading end stage Year 1 books yet he hasn't been taught a lot of the phonemes. It is possible to read without knowing them.

At our school, as I said, to e get two lots of words. Phoneme and not phoneme related. DD1 when she was P1 she first had some flash cards of words required to k own, then she was given a booklet of words she had to recognise instantly.

As it turned out, DD1 never had any use for phonics as she would learn the easier books by heart by rereading the once or twice, but now she cannot read Mr Grimes (but she can read rather complex text)

Feenie - you are therefore not teaching them to sound out tricky words. You are saying that they can't sound out the tricky bit, they just have to learn it. Would you therefore object to 'go' or 'said' being in a book sent home as they can't sound it out? Context would tell them that the word was 'go' or 'said' or they have learnt what it looks like. That is my point.

Tricky words like 'was', 'all', 'said', 'there' - children are taught to read these without sounding them out

Only by teachers who haven't read anything for 12+ years, I'm afraid. But there seem to be quite a few of you. As I said, the inventors of the term are said to be horrified at this bastardisation of the term they coined but never intended to take on the meaning and the poor teaching behind it.

Boysrule I'm going to have to side with you here. I loathe the huge emphasis on phonics and since the current phonic based approach was introduced, I feel like children's comprehension has declined dramatically. I teach Y2 and see so many children who sound like they can read beautifully but as soon as you start to discuss what they've read, show little recall or understanding.

Boys - were you my DS's y1 teacher for the first term of this year? All sounds familiar

No, boysrule, it's a phoneme they haven't been taught yet, not something that isn't a phoneme.

You are mistaken over books children should practise with and share - I've attached the relevant NC section to clarify.

Your ds has clearly worked out part of the alphabetic code for himself - some children do, but these days we tend not to rely on this, since it doesn't work for all children

How can decoding well possibly mean that comprehension is therefore diminished? I can't quite believe you didn't catch yourself on when typing that.

Lack of comprehension means that your Y1 staff are not teaching it!

No one has mentioned the joy of 'ough' yet lol.

Boys I'm a teacher and was in the same mindset as you until I started reading up on quality phonics, starting with posts on here contributed to by Feenie, Rafals and mrz. Thanks to this I focused much more on decodable books than I have before, I still had to use some old ORT ones and keep my 'new' methods quiet due to very old fashioned thinking in my school. The children are doing fantastically well, I have 2 out of 30 who aren't able to read a simple sentence and this is likely due to as yet unidentified additional needs.
I have done no whole word teaching but lots are able to read many of the first 100 hfw words and pictures in the reading books have only been used to talk about the story in general not to guess words.

I googled this a few weeks ago and found that non decodable "sight words" make up 75 percent of commonly used words in English, compared to something like 2 percent in French. Are some of you saying this analysis is now out of date?

There are the phonics Biff books which are mainly decodable and then the stories which slowly introduce the common "sight words" which are not decodable, I thought?

Floppy phonics, I assume you mean.

Arkadia I am trying to control myself here - I don't feel that it is a teacher's job to decide that children don't need to understand or read words like choir, chord, chorus, choral, chemist, chemistry, chemical, Christ, christ-like, Christian, Christopher, or indeed Christmas, christmassy, christmas-time; or as spanieleyes says, school, scholar, schooled etc.

Feenie if your rather dismissive comment and face was directed at me, then let me clarify. I didn't say that decoding well meant that comprehension was therefore diminished. What I actually meant was that because phonics is relied on so heavily, children aren't being encouraged to think about the meaning of what they read.

Greater value is being placed on phonically decoding nonsense words through Rec and Y1 than on showing understanding of what is being read. Then comes Y2 with the massive push to get children to test standard in reading comprehension, and we have masses of kids who can read aloud fluently, but haven't got basic skills such as recalling main events in a story or locating information to answer a question, let alone who are ready to develop more advanced skills such as inference and deduction.

I agree with everything you've written regarding what the national curriculum advises. Yes, you're right about phonics being the primary (only!) approach to teaching reading, including when teaching 'tricky' words. However, my comment above was that I personally loathe this approach. I find it dull and dry and not successful in developing great all round readers.

Around 6% of words are thought to be genuinely non-decodable.

Schools should be using decodable books which closely match their developing phonic knowledge. Floppy's Phonics are fine, ordinary ORT are not. Decode and Develop ORT is a new strand that is sneakily only 60% decodable (in the small print).

annandale charisma, chasm, chameleon, anchor, echo

What I actually meant was that because phonics is relied on so heavily, children aren't being encouraged to think about the meaning of what they read.

I know exactly what you meant. And the problem lies with your Y1 staff. Ours don't ignore comprehension and teach it explicitly - which is again what the NC dictates.

Why don't yours?

Feenie I knew there was one thing wrong with the Decode and Develop ones!! Was all excited when I found a stash in my book box thinking I had a whole load of 'new' books to use then when I actually looked they weren't what I wanted at all!

I was also a phonics sceptic when I started teaching it. After all, I learned to read without being taught phonics. However, I moved from teaching year 3 for several years, where at least 1/3 of the class would come up without being able to read fluently and some children who couldn't read at all, into Year 2, just when Read Write Inc was being introduced. The scheme has its downsides but the success rate was undeniable. Kids that were still unable to read 3 letter words at the beginning of the year were all reading properly by the end of the year. Since I started teaching phonics I haven't had a single child fail to learn to read.

I don't know if there has been any research to it, but possibly it is the fact that phonics teaching requires a very structured, repetitive approach that helps build success as much as the tools of phonics themselves?

Since I started teaching phonics I haven't had a single child fail to learn to read.

This ^^ Just this. Stop not reading research/statutory documentation and do your job.

Annandale, indeed. My point is that you have to remember those words by heart anyway because normally you don't read "Ch" as "k". So you either know those words or you don't. If you come across a new one you don't know, you WILL misread it.
Now a child would have to be excused if he came across a word with a "Ch" phoneme in it and read it "k" and if he kept doing it. After all if you are saying that "Ch" can be read either way how is he to know? If Instead the default position is to read it as "tch, that means that y the rat is an exception you have to remember by heart, making the introduction of a specialist phoneme rather... pointless.
There again, as it was said above, you can point out the Greek origin of most of those words, Christ being probably the easiest example, and expand form there. Now the matter would make more sense.

In any case, no, I don't think that small children really need to know chorus or choral, at least not out of context.