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

This is an interesting thread. I am an educational psychologist so come across the children who have not picked up phonics by y3/4/11 for whatever reasons. First and foremost I believe that phonics is the best approach for the majority of children. However, what I’m finding is that where children have a short term memory or working memory difficulty, this appears to delay progress in phonics and learning to read significantly.

For example, I assessed a little girl in Y3 last week who’s verbal skills are pretty much average, as was her IQ, but she’s not learnt to read any words at all despite being in an outstanding school with very good phonics teaching. When I assessed her working memory, she is only at the ‘2 item’ level, meaning she could potentially remember two sounds and blend then but that’s her limit at the moment. She simply doesn’t have the memory capacity to identify several sounds, hold those sounds in her mind, and blend them, and that’s before we consider whether she’d be able to substitute different sounds in as in the previous ‘ai’ discussion.

Now could this child learn to read through phonics? Yes I believe she could, but I think you’d have to wait until her memory capacity naturally increases. This is a developmental thing - there’s a lot of research which says that working memory interventions don’t work, and that it simply increases capacity through the process of child development. I’m sure that when this little girl reaches 11 for example, she may be able to recall and hold 4/5 items, and this would be enough to use phonics to learn to read. Yet she’s becoming more and more aware that she can’t read, and this is effecting her self confidence. I will recommend whole-word reading, as for example, as if you teach ‘and’ as one unit, it doesn’t not have the same working memory load as holding 3 sounds in her mind, then blending them. Her long term memory is okay, so once ‘and’ is in her LTM she should easily be able to recall it.

I’d love the have an opportunity to do some research on the theory. I suspect that if you tested the working memory capacity of some year 1 children, you’d be able to have a good stab at predicting who would fail the phonics check. Controversially, where you have children who learn through phonics at age 12/13 where it hasn’t worked before, I suspect this is largely due to the fact that the short term memory system has developed to a point where it can now manage to hold the sounds needed.

For what it’s worth, working memory difficulties are common. Perhaps one day I’ll get to publish some research on this!

skeleton that's really interesting.
I wonder if you could teach her first of all with just two phoneme words and then add on more phonemes?
My DD has some language comprehension problems, probably for similar reasons, and she has kind of got her own strategy like this:

So she'll see
Cat
Say
C a t
Then say
C at
And finally
Cat

@SkeletonSkins

So if working memory interventions don’t really work, is there anything that can be done or is it just a developmental/maturity thing and you need to wait?

I think the story is you can train children to remember words and it will help them to remember words but it won't transfer to other things we use working memory for e.g. pictures, maths.

However, what I’m finding is that where children have a short term memory or working memory difficulty, this appears to delay progress in phonics and learning to read significantly.

Dancing bears program starts every time with flash cards of letter/sounds and you don't take a letter/sound combination out till you have consistent instant recall.

My second child knew jolly phonics letters/sound as older sibling and home and nursery had done a lot of jolly phonics – but when we started the program at home after no progress at school, he frequently still didn’t have instant recall.

We started at the absolute most basic book with him and spent many months on first lessons – but as he did start to get the letter/sound combinations instantly and the shouting out the letters helping him to get blending – he made massive progress.

We’ve seen similar with maths – number bonds and times tables have taken a long time to remember – working them out again and again – lots and lots of practise but once finally there very fast recall – it was remarked upon by the secondary school maths teachers at open evening and since starting.

Actually I think as that child didn’t have the working memory to deal with the mixed methods and so made no progress with school– they were affected least badly by them. They are the most avid reader and one with fewest problems with spelling now older.

They did really struggle with dictation with later apple and pears – couldn’t remember the sentences.

Our other children hobbled along - they do have slight working memory issues when tested so I agree it must be playing some role – but I don’t think the mixed methods and whole word stuff they encountered helped them long term - though how universal our experience is I have no idea.

As to how it makes parents view the teachers ...
As a parent (who also teaches, but not a curriculum subject) I have a very high respect for teachers. I do notice things that any one teacher is not particularly 'good' at, but I blame poor initial teacher training, lack of resources, lack of time for professional development, lack of support. And in most cases I recognise other aspects to that teacher that balance out the 'shortcoming' in one area. DC1's reception teacher and also his Y1 teacher were not good phonics teachers (lack of resources, lack of support, lack of time, no value given to phonics by SLT - so not a lot to do with them personally). But the reception teacher was the most warm, caring teacher imaginable, who managed to create a thoroughly happy environment at school, and also managed to kindle a fantastic degree of enthusiasm for books and stories in that class. So hats off to her. The Y1 teacher had a particular strength in maths teaching and managed to challenge and stretch my fairly able child and keep him interested and fascinated by maths.

DC2's reception teacher in contrast did much better with phonics teaching (within the limits of school culture and lack of resources). I was unhappy about other things (e.g. a perceived lack of 'caring', children anxious rather than happy) but generally I like to keep the things the teachers are good at in my mind, rather than just focusing on their weaker sides (no-one is perfect at everything).
DC2's Y1 teacher is, so far, and as far as I can tell, doing really well with the phonics side of things. But in this instance it is not enough to appease my thoroughly bad feeling about how other things are handled.

So in sum, I am fairly educated about phonics, perhaps I have had more hours of training (albeit informal) than many teachers have had. And I do think SSP is incredibly important. BUT even more important in those early years of schooling, to me, is creating an environment in which children feel safe, valued, and happy - if that is the case, then poor phonics teaching is a shame, but not nearly as bad as if children by end of Y1 have learned that school is a scary / boring /sad place. Now that REALLY affects my view of the teacher, and no amount of stellar phonics teaching will balance that out.

@fedup21, there are some interventions out there that claim to improve working memory, but actually research suggests that whilst the child may get better at the intervention task, they do not improve outside of the intervention, so yes, generally with working memory, improvement comes from natural development as a child matures. However, there is lots we can do to help a child learn despite working memory difficulties. The use of repetitive over learning increases fluency and so things that the child is more secure in natural cause less cognitive load. Furthermore considering how many ‘units’ of information a child can hold at on time and adapting learning to accommodate this can make things easier, a bit like what @drspouse explains.

Interestingly, a lot of research suggests that children with working memory difficulties do not benefit at all from lots of extraneous information eg looking at pictures. I think that it can be distracting. But that’s not to say that I think only phonics should be used as I think using whole-word methods are a different matter than using pictures to guess at words.

I think what’s important is considering each individual child and thinking about how can we best support this child in reading. If phonics is working it needs to be a 100% phonics approach with suitably decodeable books and good quality phonics instruction. However if phonics is not working, we need to look at why it’s not working - does the child need to overlearn new information to retain it? Has the teaching been poor? Have they been absent and missed big chunks? Does using phonics require too much cognitive load for this child? In this last example I think we can either wait it out for the child to develop the required working memory skills, consider an effective alternative (eg good quality whole-reading teaching, little and often) or adapt the phonics instruction to be more accessible to the child in some way.

@Norestformrz

If that was addressed to me then I’ve already said I teach secondary and have no idea of the intricacies of teaching reading. I’m not pretending to.

I’m just trying to point out that there’s a reason why phonics teaching is so mixed across schools and that watching a few videos is pretty poor training.

If it is so important there needs to be more investment. Just saying they’ve already had money and should be better is pointless.

My Yr11 have had 60 hours of teaching for Macbeth. They should be competent to answer an essay question. But there will still be some who aren’t, for a variety of reasons. If I want them to succeed I’m going to have to provide interventions and not just to the PP and SEND ones.

A Literacy Lead will have time set aside to do much more training than that with staff, and much of it isn't expensive, nor is it always necessary to go off site, get cover, etc. Those were the points I responded to.

Parents who are working full time in their own paid employment are getting to grips with teaching phonics.

Belle its so mixed because ITT still isn't training teachers to teach children to read.

If a school had 55% girls would you then hand out tampons to everybody?

OP your post is deeply misguided. Both our kids got on better with whole word recognition and we were pleased that we had teachers with a mixed approach. NC policy makes the catastrophic error of failing to realise what what benefits the majority of children is not the best for every child.

Our kids were held back by the phonics obsession. As soon as you hear an educationalist spouting a One Size Fits All policy you are wasting your time listening to them.

why you can tell who the girls are before they need tampons.

If a school had 55% girls would you then hand out tampons to everybody?

err, no. Because it would be easy to distinguish up front who would need tampons and who wouldn't.

My understanding is that good phonics teaching reaches 95% effectively, mixed methods reaches 80% effectively but (And this is the important bit) you don't know who is in what group up front.

ps You haven't been very clear. On the one hand you say they were 'held back' by phonics, and on the other that your school had a 'mixed approach'. So how long did the school try pure phonics before it switched?

How do (you and) your DC read brand new words now such as novalexaphoniable?

I guess the reason why many teachers don't teach 'pure' phonics, and why many parents are glad that they don't, is because the research results are thoroughly counter-intuitive.

You would think, wouldn't you, that if method A (phonics) succeeds with 95% of children (with some people claiming more, eg. 98%, some less, eg.

"NC policy makes the catastrophic error of failing to realise what what benefits the majority of children is not the best for every child." More misinformed nonsense I'm afraid. SSP benefits many and harms none. Just because a tiny percentage of children manage to intuit the relationship between spoken and written language for themselves without explicit instruction doesn't mean they wouldn't have progressed more with instruction. Unfortunately Whole Language and mixed methods harms many and benefits none.

brilliotic#

Yes! Exactly your first 3 paragraphs! That is EXACTLY what happens...

'I know that there are some here for whom this may not be the ideal method for learning to read. So I'll do this method AS WELL and then the two added together will be perfect.' It's common sense ... and wrong...

It also means that as soon as phonics 'seems not to be working' teachers leap in with 'the method that may work better for the tiny minority for whom phonics won't work' rather than 'carrying on teaching phonics better and for longer'.

The thing is, all genuine reading of unknown words means that you HAVE to know the phonic code, in all its huge variety. It either has to be taught directly, or inferred from the assimilation of more and more 'whole words' and breaking them down into constituent chunks to be reassembled into the unknown word.

A moment of thought shows that it is OBVIOUSLY better to teach the phonic code directly BUT that has to be done well, with all the alternative correspondences, otherwise a huge chunk has to be worked out by the child themselves

There are so many phonic rules that small children just get bogged down and can lose the pure joy of reading!
This blows my mind...
kickasshistory.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/potato.jpg

There aren't any phonics rules.
There are 180 ish common spellings to learn for the sounds in English compared to learning over a million words as wholes.

A well taught phonics programme can be delivered daily to struggling readers; it is short, active and thorough and the results are good. The children I used to have rather enjoyed it. I’m a ta and have seen the benefits for those who were behind at the end of KS 1.

Have been discussing this thread with DH. He said, so it's like the cake analogy.

Making a cake.

We want 100 people to bake a complicated recipe.

When learning something new and doing something complicated, human beings learn in different ways and some would perform best with written instructions, some following a demonstration, some by listening to oral instructions.

Say we know if we give all 100 people a written recipe to follow, 95 will successfully bake the cake.

If in order to prevent 5 people not being successful we decide to give all methods of instruction to all 100 bakers at once hoping that one of the other methods will appeal to the 5 that wouldn't succeed with the written instructions. We expect 100 cakes.

We actually end up with 80 cakes as 80 people managed fine having all forms of instruction at once, but 20 people were distracted between the different stimuli being directed at them all at once.

The cake instructors think giving all instructions is best as common sense seems to suggest that this will appeal to all the bakers preferred learning methods and in their experience, it seems to work (80% still being a majority success).

That's a pretty good analogy. The cake makers are complete arses who read any research in erm...making cakes for years though. If ever.

*haven't read

Lightbulb moment!

You are so right.
We teachers (obviously swayed by our endless holidays) had never thought of any of this, thank you for showing us the way forwards.
What utter silly billies we have been.

https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading