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

Those are all decodable once you know the code.
This did come as a shock to the head of KS1 in my DS school though.

de code able
Not in the slightest bit difficult ONCE YOU KNOW THE CODE.

Schools don't have the money to get rid of all their previous reading books and buy new ones. We can buy some and have them available but we just have to manage with what we've got.

How did you spend the matched funding? I suspect that there are very few schools that couldn’t have replaced their early reading stock over the last 13years. Even at £50 a year + matched funding you could have a large collection of reception & year 1 books by now.

My DS old school has books that are 25 years old. It has also refused to set up a PTA which would be an ideal way to fund new phonics books.

As an adult, I'm the kind of person who remembers written words well, and if I read something once I can remember it for hours or even days. If I hear something, I forget it in five seconds flat. S
If someone tells me to turn right at the end of the road, I reach the end and can't remember if they said left or right. My brain just doesn't process sound as well as it does letters - I'm a reader, not a listener.
As a kid learning to read, I was mostly taught by phonics at school. I got on awfully with it. As in happened, my mum was a SAHM and an ex-English teacher, and she knew that was fairly intelligent and that she'd been reading poetry to me for the first five years of my life, and she did not think I should be struggling to read as much as I was. She bought me a sentence maker and determinedly taught me to read at home with methods that didn't emphasise so much on phonics. I ended up being an avid reader as a teenager, who read at least one book and was one of the best in the class at English. But if my mum hadn't had the time and inclination to help me out as a kid, I would probably have spent all my life thinking I was crap at reading. Not all kids are lucky enough to have a SAHM who is an ex-English teacher, and a lot of the kids who are naturally good at reading will struggle with phonics just by nature. I firmly believe it's important to teach by multiple methods so that nobody is left behind, and no one thinks that they "can't read" just because they can't work out how to pronounce "x" properly and get bad marks on their phonics tests. I

novaphonlexable = the ability to read a word you haven't heard or seen before.

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

I am not discussing the detailed research because it is government expectation it will be followed. @Feenie said on the other thread it is statutory. If teachers (a group of professionals) think the research is flawed why haven't they (via the NUT or whatever) organised better research? It's not like there aren't hundreds of children out there to be used, and enough schools already doing different things that it can't be done.

I dont get what you are so cross about.

You started off saying don't teachers read the research but when it was suggested that it was flawed and teachers had read it and other research you sad I dont care about the research they should just do it! Honestly I don't get it.

@TeenPlusTwenties ds has no idea how he reads but he does. Looks at a word he’s never seen before and 9/10 he says it’s right. And it’s been remarkable because it seems to be working in French too.
Are you suggesting that he should have been made to use phonics ignoring the fact that he wasn’t learning?

I think the main issue is people don’t understand how phonics is taught. It isn’t just c-a-t, the sounds made by collections of sounds are taught too, so:

ay (as in may)
ai (as in snail)
a_e (as in cake)

ure (as in pure)
tion (as in attention)
tious (delicious)

And so on, for as many sounds as you can think of.

There are a small number of exceptions (‘one’ and ‘once’, I can’t immediately think of many). And these FEW words are taught as whole words.

My year 1 child (age 5) could easily read disestablishmentarianism , not because he’s a genius, but because he has been properly taught phonics and it is, indeed, fully decodable.

I’ve observed, with no offence meant to OP, that phonics is one of those “forum things” groups of people like to get het up about online, but phonics particularly so on MN.

People get het up because they’ve sort of whipped themselves into a culture of caring about it (usually from the example of a couple of children, maybe their own) but in real life is something people never really think about.

“Forum things” usually come Down to something that the annoyed person isn’t directly involved in and can therefore critique from afar.

There is ALWAYS “research” which they might’ve discovered first hand or second hand from other members of the forum group think

A strong argument is always that those who don’t agree with them don’t understand the research therefore insinuating everyone else is a little dim/ ineffective

The threads discussing it are always started by one of the group usually following innocent questions elsewhere. And they are nearly always in the vein of “x is brilliant/ terrible/ dangerous, discuss” as an excuse to repeat their well worn argument to new people

I am glad that my dc’s teachers use their knowledge and experience as well as research and use a mix of sight words, minimal guessing and phonics. Both of my children read very well and picked it up fairly quickly

Pass You may well be right.

But how children learn to read and the best way to teach them is so fundamental to primary teaching (could be argued it is the most important), I struggle to understand why the jury is still out.

I also don't see how anyone can read a new word independently without breaking it up into known sounds (ie using phonics). (It doesn't pass my 'common sense' test.)

I discuss it here because it's fun.

(My eldest, who did not learn to read under my watch, used to struggle to read new words as her phonics was very poor. I caught her up somewhat when my youngest was learning, but eldest still has gaps.)

I think what’s personally really annoying is you get people saying “phonics is a waste of time” (actual quote from another thread), when it is evidenced to be the most effective way of teaching reading for MOST children, and when there are so many kids who would really struggle to remember the words in whole-word teaching, who become excellent readers because they always know how to break down a word whether they’re seen it before or not.

Children who don’t get on with phonics should absolutely get individualised support. Because it doesn’t work for the minority of kids doesn’t mean it should be scrapped and mixed methods introduced again.

It's only statutory if you teach in a LA maintained school. The NC is not statutory anywhere else.

It is estimated that 5-10% of children have Auditory Processing Disorder, often undiagnosed. The great majority of these children struggle to learn phonics because what they hear and what they process is mismatched. There’s lots of research on this too.

I am thankful that teachers aren’t making the lives of these children even more challenging in the classroom by forcing them and assessing them on a method they are never going to be able to learn by.

Nobody actually uses phonics to read in the end - there are far too many English words that are not decodable, and it's too slow

Yes you do. You just aren't aware of it. Scientists have used brain scans to see which areas of the brain fire up when we are reading. The areas used by adults who can read are the same areas used by children when sounding out and blending. The conclusion is that, when reading, we are sounding out and blending at high speed. And the reality is that there are hardly any English words that are not decodable.

It is my understanding that children (and adults for that matter) learn in many different ways and I can’t see the harm in learning more than one approach to a problem

That theory has been thoroughly debunked. And the harm in this case is clear. If you teach purely synthetic phonics you will have a 95%+ success rate with many studies reporting 99%+ success. If you use mixed methods, even if one of them is synthetic phonics, your success rate will drop to around 80%.

We all use various strategies when reading. If you decoded every word you read you would be a very slow reader. All sorts of cues are picked up in the process from awareness of the content of text, contextual cues such as “to the” etc. Recognition of words and of course phonics. Also becoming familiar with book language which is different from spoken in many ways. All these things impinge on a child’s ability to read not least his confidence to succeed. Overburden of the “sounding out” process can in fact slow a child down so much that the meaning of the text is lost as deciphering takes place. It can in fact actually teach a child how difficult reading is.

I am pretty sure that when I see a new word I sight read the individual morphemes (nova, phon, lex, able) without going down to phoneme level. I I'd be interested to read the studies using brain scans - how does that distinguish between someone between recognising a series of graphemes and recognising a morpheme?

There’s a bit of a flaw with that graph theworld. Is the school you are a governor at using phonics first, fast & only or mixed methods to teach reading in EYFS and KS1? Roughly what proportion of schools do you think are teaching phonics only?

And by phonics only I mean well matched decodeable books in the early stages, no picture/context clues, no looking at the first letter and guessing, no lists of ‘sight words that can’t be sounded out’.

What if it had said, novaphinlexable or novaphanlexible, Una?

novaphanlexible..... Nova phan lexible

novaphinlexable.... Nova phin lexable

Our primary uses full phonics teaching and (after a faltering start) DS2 has 'got it'.

I was taught the whole word reading method (look and say) and it was a disaster. I needed remedial reading at 7 and struggled for a year or two with reading. Not the best start to secondary school.

It would annoy the fuck out of me too if the best teaching method was ignored.

It's only statutory if you teach in a LA maintained school. The NC is not statutory anywhere else.

Very true.

Wasn’t academisation wonderful?!

If you decoded every word you read you would be a very slow reader

The evidence from brain scans is that you do decode every word you read at very high speed. You aren't aware of it but that is what is going on inside your brain.

I've seen an English lead actually state on a Facebook grouo that studies are 'fudged ' and that the 'government ' get commission from decodable books. But her children, bless them 'do well from their starting points '.

It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. And quite scary.