WHY don't some teachers teach pure phonics? And what impact does it have on how teachers are viewed?

[TeenPlusTwenties]

As seen on this board by a current thread (which I decided not to hijack) and another one this week on AIBU, there still seems to be a chunk of current teachers not attempting to teach decoding via phonics but preferring mixed methods (phonics, plus whole words, plus guessing).

Do you think the fact so many teachers are failing to teach phonics properly impacts on how the profession as a whole is viewed?

If the main thing that parents of young children understand is important (reading) is not being taught in the way deemed most effective from research, that is also mandated in the NC, doesn't that undermine trust and respect massively?

I'm trying to think of a good analogy, but in medicine there is NICE which looks at data on effectiveness of medicines and then says what can / can't be used.

Is this because teachers are so overworked they don't read the research? Or are primary teachers not maths-literate enough to understand data, and so prefer their own sample-of-one instead?

Do parents end up 'not trusting' teachers because they can see such a blatant example of not following good practice /not knowing what they are doing

https://theeconomyofmeaning.com/2013/10/29/lecture-by-prof-stanislas-dehaene-how-the-brain-learns-to-read/
From the brain's point of view, learning to read consists of:
1 First, recognising the letters and how they combine into written words
2 Second, connecting them to the brain systems for coding of speech sounds and for meaning.

Professor Dehaene says, "whole-word reading is a myth". The brain processes every single letter and does not look at the whole word shape.
Teaching letter to sound correspondence is therefore essential. It is the fastest way to acquire reading and comprehension.

.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=snUNsYfrxjY

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1529100618772271

https://www.dyslexie.lu/JDI0202_04.pdf

"It was the early 1970s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher.
Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words.12 He knew about Goodman's work and thought he was probably right that as people become better readers, they relied more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure to read words and didn't need to pay as much attention to the letters.

So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.
They couldn't have been more wrong.
"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13

The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14

Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory:15

	Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.
	Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.
	Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems.16

The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works."

I misread "windy house" in DS bedtime story as "house with wind blowing" rather than "twisty turny".
I am clearly, at the age of umpty-mumble, and having been taught with Peter and Jane, using phonics not context (it talked about "going up", not weather).

Teachers embed the skills good parents should facilitate. Phonics are easy peasy. Letters are easy peasy. Reading and nursery rhymes are easy peasy. Picgures are fab to explain.

Both mine were free reading at 6. Happened because we loved books and words and conversation at home.

Mine are grown up. I went in to hear readers. School refused to write to parents to advise them to hear their dc read every day. Said it all.

Both mine were free reading at 6. Happened because we loved books and words and conversation at home.

We also love books and words and conversation but that's not what makes children able to read.

I’m finding this thread really interesting.
If, when adults read we are just decoding at high speed, how is it that we can read that paragraph that sometimes does the rounds when only the first and last letter of each word is given? It must be context and some extent of whole word recognition at play?

And I also referred to phonics and letters and reading and nursery rhymes. A is for Annie apple, C is for clever cat, S is for Sammy snake, N is for naughty Nick. We had so much fun learning at home before school.

, when adults read we are just decoding at high speed, how is it that we can read that paragraph that sometimes does the rounds when only the first and last letter of each word is given?

Doesn'3 work - huge myth. Been debunked loads, especially by Cambridge where it supposedly comes from. Try it. Total nonsense.

Both mine were free reading at 6. Happened because we loved books and words and conversation at home

Another huge myth - I read to my ds every night from when he was a baby, I'm a Literacy Lead and his Dad is an A level English Lit teacher. House full of books. Still confused by the mixed methods they chose to switch to in Year 1 without telling me. Free reader by Y2 because I took over teaching him when I found out. The whole point is you don't know which kids will be confused by mixed methods until they are - no.One demogtaphic, just luck.

no one demographic - sorry, kindle has a life of its own sometimes.

Perhaps I just had very bright children Feenie . I taught them phonics at home - their teachers had little to do.

This is the jolly phonics song my GC is learning at school, he loves it.

So your children learned to read because you taught them phonics.
They probably have great vocabularies because of the books/talking/love of language thing so they can make better sense of what they read.

Systematic synthetic phonics should be the starting point but if that is not working then other methods should be used. Older learners may benefit from a morphological approach.

Right: how many people managed to read that new word without using phonics (ie breaking the word up into known sounds)?.

When I assess well compensated dyslexics for Disabled Students Allowance, they often described a convoluted process that essentially involves using analogy to read unknown words Ie thinking of words they know that look similar - not particularly efficient but has got some of them into medicine or Oxbridge.

Some individuals have such weak phonological awareness that phonics will always be problematic even with intensive specialised interventions - that doesn’t mean they can’t learn to read.

My ds is extremely bright, ohtheroses, and I know many similar!y bright children confused initially by mixed methods who later excelled. So let's also put that smug nasty little myth to bed also.

It was a bit of joshing Feenie. That's why there was a wink.

Fucking hilarious.

My child was taught phonics first and only in Reception - the Y1 teacher had little to do. She fucked it up.

The International Literacy Association have the answer to your questions OP
https://literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-meeting-challenges-early-literacy-phonics-instruction.pdf

This argument is still rumbling on. Good God!

The original premise was the sweeping statement that primaries aren’t teaching phonics properly.

However, the results of the first set of Ofsted inspections under the new framework has revelled that most primaries inspected had deeply embedded phonics teaching.

So much for the anecdata of this thread. Ofsted are saying phonics is generally well taught.

Feenie it may well be a myth in that it doesn’t hold very widely (the first and last letter in a word thing), but it’s still interesting that I can read that paragraph very quickly and easily, suggesting that at least sometimes, decoding isn’t the only thing going on when we read. Or am I such an expert anagram solver that I solve the anagram and then decode all in a nanosecond? Perhaps! I am good at anagrams