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

For the phonics experts among us: my 6 year old (Y2) is a good reader and picked it up very quickly and easily in reception. However, from reading this thread I am starting to doubt how well our school teaches SSP. How could I test my DD to see how well she’s been taught (if it’s possible)? She passed the phonics screening easily but didn’t get 100% (one wrong I think)

When I went to school I could already read well but we were then taught by phonics in class and as a direct consequence my spelling is awful

Miffmufferedmoof you do realise that in expert readers decoding requires a fraction of a second?

If you're interested look at eye scanning and brain imaging research. They clearly show that we process every letter in a word and we don't recognise words as wholes.

"Skilled readers are processing letters simultaneously, whereas children need to work slowly, one letter at a time, till they gradually get faster and more automatic."

And for those that say that all children are different

" Brain mechanisms for reading are the same around the world and good predictors of learning to read include phonics and vocabulary, in all languages."

I teach reading the way the school tells me to. Each school will have a differing approach. We use a mix of tried and tested methods, some of which I didn't know about after my training but that had worked for 10+ years in the school.
Variety is the spice of life and all that!

Tried and tested how? What method did you test it against and how different were the results? What effect did it have on the attainment of the lowest attaining 20% of the cohort in reception or year 1?

Or by ‘tried and tested’ actually a synonym for ‘it’s what we’ve always done and it seems to work Ok’?

Your school is not following the national curriculum then don't.

I agree that good phonics teaching is embedded in most schools now, but definitely not all. I arrived at my current school five years ago from another school where phonics was well-taught and I had noticed the effect on the number of children reading. To my concern, the literacy lead at my new school parroted on that phonics didn't always work and we should use different methods. It has taken 5 years of pressure from literacy advisers and the academy trust that we joined to get her to embed phonics teaching in the curriculum. If you have one teacher in EYFS/KS1 who doesn't teach it properly then that is a whole class of children who are not learning proper synthetic phonics.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay by 'tried and tested' I mean using one method over a range didn't reach as many children. Overall the whole cohort are at a good level of reading at the end of the year. When we identify that one or all of the methods don't work for one child we readdress.
I'm disappointed that you would assume it's a case of 'what we've always done' when I am extremely passionate about doing the best I can in my job. If that means looking at new research for reading, or anything else for that matter, that's what I'll do.
I brought in a new phonics method when I joined the school 3 years ago and continue to strive to do the best for the children in my class.

Yes I do realise that Norestformrz, in fact I frequently marvel at the speed at which our brains can assimilate so much information. However I was referring to this paragraph www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/can-you-read where whatever is going on in our brain can’t be the same as normal decoding

MIL taught from 1958 to 1998. MIL showed me phonics, I used them with the children born 94 and 98 although I also read them the Odyssey and Illiad as tiny babies. Their primary wasn't teaching phonics at thag stage. MIL said some other methods were helpful for some children but phonics were key. Both DC are excellent spellers.

Some classess will be different and require different techniques. DS's reception class - one child went to Oxbridge, one is doing medicine. DD's reception class - 8 at Oxbridge, two doing medicine.

I'm sure you're familiar with anagrams ...the simple fact is that the more jumbled the letters the longer it takes a skilled reader to work it out and if we had to rely on this for everything we read reading would be very slow and meaning compromised (as we are relying on what we expect to see).

Brain mechanisms for reading are the same around the world and good predictors of learning to read include phonics and vocabulary, in all languages."

“Brain functioning, and indeed structure, is moulded by experience. Learning a regular spelling system such as Italian creates differences in brain organisation compared to learning highly irregular English...

Learning Chinese creates specific demands on the areas for remembering visual patterns”

Butterworth and Tang. Institute of Neuroscience, UCL

My point with the above is that some readers of English may well develop the area of the brain that remembers visual patterns particularly if they have a phonological deficit (a key characteristic of dyslexia).

The human brain changes when we learn to read. This is the same in all languages

OhtheRoses in the original Greek I assume.

Most studies of language differences in the reading system use single words or pairs of words presented in isolation rather than text reading

“During naturalistic reading, differences between English and Chinese were observed throughout the visual cortex, in the left middle temporal gyrus and ventral occipitotemporal regions bilaterally. Differences in visual regions are likely related to the greater visual complexity of Chinese characters relative to English words” Wang et al

Again my point above is not an argument against phonics teaching first and foremost, but that for the 5% who don’t benefit from phonics other methods need to be considered. Well compensated adult dyslexics have often developed visual strategies for reading - these may not as efficient -hence the need for extra time in examinations - but they do not stop many reading/studying at a high level

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=25GI3-kiLdo
“Another thing that we understand a little bit better now is this very classical question of phonics vs. whole-word training. You know there’s been a lot of debate in psychology and in education should we teach the whole word level or should we really teach every single letter and their pronunciation? Is there anything such as the global shape of the word that is being used in reading? Well, here there is something very important. As adults we have forgotten how we were as children. We have forgotten how difficult it was to learn to read and we think we can just lay our eyes on a word and it immediately pops to mind. Indeed, there is this notion of parallel reading, we read all of the letters at the same time. This gives us an illusion of whole-word reading, but in fact, if we look at the brain, the brain still processes every single letter and does not look at the whole shape. So whole word reading is a myth, basically. What we have is letter processing, but letter processing in parallel across all of the letters of the word. The brain does not use the global word shape. And in fact in children it’s even worse. Children require more and more time for more and more letters. ”

"Learning to read Chinese might seem daunting to Westerners used to an alphabetic script, but brain scans of French and Chinese native speakers show that people harness the same brain centres for reading across cultures. The findings are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
Reading involves two neural systems: one that recognizes the shape of the word and a second that asseses the physical movements used to make the marks on a page, says study leader Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Gif-sur-Yvette, France."

but that for the 5% who don’t benefit from phonics other methods need to be considered

As a previous poster - I think on this thread - has said, the MOST important thing here is the sequencing. So phonics should be used first, foremost and exclusively, to the best possible standards, supported wholly by graded phonic reading material.

Once it has become apparent who - if anyone - is in the 5% even after this exclusive phonics teaching (and that doesn't mean after 6 weeks, or even a year) and intensive phonics intervention, THEN it might be time to consider other methods.

The problem is that in many schools, these other methods are introduced in a 'just in case' way, pretty much at the same time as phonics or after a very very short period (or, possibly most commonly, to cope with the fact that the school doesn't have any phonics readers, or not enough, so the reading books don't support the phonics teaching), and unfortunately that raises the possibility of failure from 5% to 20%

@Norestformrz

As a matter of interest what interventions do you use for learners in Upper KS2/ KS3 upwards who have had high quality phonics teaching and hours of phonics intervention throughout primary school and are still reading and understanding texts at well below expected levels? Do you keep going with the same thing, even though it doesn’t appear to be working, or do you consider a shift in approach?

@cantkeepawayforever I agree with everything in your post. However, I worry from some of the posts on here that there is no acknowledgement of the different needs of the 5%

As a matter of interest what interventions do you use for learners in Upper KS2/ KS3 upwards who have had high quality phonics teaching and hours of phonics intervention throughout primary school

The only three children this would ever have applied to had very complex SEND and went on to SEND specialist settings. The Ed Psych recommended a whole word programme and this also failed. Those children could not read more than a few words.

For those children who join us from other schools/abroad We use Phonics International and these books:

www.phonicbooks.co.uk/tag/phonic-books-for-older-readers/

I would agree with Feenie that the only children I have encountered who fit this description were
a) children who have arrived from other schools and have not been properly taught phonics in their previous setting (and more specifically have had to use books which do not match phonic teaching)
b) have arrived from abroad with limited English or have started school very late from a cultural group with high levels of illiteracy (older traveller children, specifically)
c) have very specific visual problems that severely affect ability to track (behavioural optometrist assessment followed by phonics has then been successful)
c) have complex SEND and have moved on to SEND specialist settings

Children in group a) have generally had to be 'untaught' guessing and other unhelpful strategies, alongside intensive teaching of the extended phonics code. Most have only been taught the limited initial set of sounds.

But obviously this is anecdata and personal experience, not a statistically significant sample.