In my last post I wrote about sociologist, Frank Furedi’s views on reading and whether we do a good job of fostering a love of reading in young people. In this post I want to explore his view that reading has become ‘medicalised’.
Is reading unnatural?
The other startling point to come out of Frank’s talk at researchED was when he said that although he begun his research into reading as a confirmed advocate of phonics, as the deeper he delved the more sympathetic he became to whole-language teaching. Cue, sharply drawn breaths and restless muttering. When prodded he seemed to suggest that, despite its flaws, whole-language teaching at least did a reasonable job of getting children to enjoy reading.
Instead of dismissing this as heresy I wanted to think through what he might have meant. In his book, The Power of Reading, Furedi discusses the ways in which reading has always been seen as problematic and how, latterly, has become increasingly ‘medicalised’. If reading is an activity for which evolution cannot have intended us then, the logic follows, it must be an unnatural activity. And, if reading is somehow unnatural then the inability to read must therefore be more natural.
Neuroscience, psychology and a variety of other disciplines have contributed to the medicalization of reading to the point that its very acquisition is regarded as a complex and challenging accomplishment. Such expectations turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy when reading difficulty is normalized as a natural condition. (p. 211)
My view is that while we certainly haven’t had time to evolve an innate capacity for reading, it’s no more unnatural than wearing pants, eating cheese or living in houses. The miracle of the human brain is that most people learn this “complex and challenging accomplishment” with relative ease. But, in an age where we want everyone to read, it’s perhaps unsurprising that some don’t. Furedi argues that
…the veritable epidemic of dyslexia and other reading-related symptoms is likely to be related to the lowering of educational and cultural expectations, the tendency to re-interpret the learning problems facing children in medical terms, and the expansion of the definition of medical diagnosis. (p. 211)
With this idea that reading is precarious, difficult and best not left to chance, the question of how to most efficiently and effectively teach children to read has taken on increasing importance. In the 1950s, disputes about how best to teach reading led to the ‘Reading Wars‘. This internecine struggle is as alive and vicious as it ever was and as Furedi notes, “…supporters of the whole-language movement casually demonize their critics; they argue that those who support the teaching of reading are ‘in bed with the Far Right’ and that the promotion of phonics teaching is part of a conspiracy to ‘discredit, control, and privatise American schools.’ In turn, some advocates of phonics condemn their opponents as mean-spirited subversives who are determined to lower the standards of American [and British!] education.” (p. 176) And who could forget Andrew Davis calling the teaching of phonics to children who could already read ‘almost a form of abuse’?
Now, I can be as tribal as anyone, but the point is, everyone wants children to enjoy reading and perhaps we end up talking past each other. In a classic example from the high-profile phonics opponent, Michael Rosen he’s delighted to discover ‘evidence’ that the popular phonics programme Read Write Inc. has apparently switched to ‘mixed methods’ because teacher are being encouraged to let children take ‘real’ books home as well as their phonics readers. Ruth Miskin’s website confirms this:
Ruth and the team have chosen their favourite real books to link to each Read Write Inc. Literacy and Language unit for every year group. Each unit has at least four suggestions for wider reading; a mix of classics, fairy stories, legends and recent publications.
One of the stated reasons for doing this is to “foster a love of stories and story language”.
Rosen says, “Taking a ‘real reading book’ home (as opposed to a phonically regular ReadWriteInc book) will inevitably involve children in reading through using other methods than phonic decoding. This is at heart what is meant by ‘mixed methods’.”
If this is indeed what’s meant by mixed methods, let’s allow Michael his victory. It’s clear that Read Write Inc maintain the need for a phonics only diet up until the end of Year 1 and that the Literacy and Language units in question are intended for children from Year 2 onwards, once they have mastered the basics of phonically decoding. Once children can decode fluently there’s no issue with using ‘mixed methods’ – that’s what every adult reader does.
Much of the antipathy to phonics is a product of the belief that although phonics instruction may be the best way to learn phoneme/grapheme relationships, it’s not the best way to get children to learn to enjoy the act of reading. It’s not too great a stretch from there to believe that if phonics is all children do, then of course they won’t enjoy the process of reading.
While I have some sympathy with this view, all but the most hardline phonics exponents would, I think, agree that just as children need to practice forming letters before they can write stories, phonics is the most effective way to learn how to recognise letter/sound correspondences and will best enable children to read ‘real’ books. At the same time it’s unlikely anyone will enjoy something they find hard work and although a majority of children may learn to read any old how, a sizeable minority won’t. If we’re interested in children who value the written word then they must be able to read effortlessly.
Too much of our focus though is almost always on how children should be taught to read and not what they should be reading. Once children have learned the mechanics of reading, what then? This brings us back to the question of content we discussing in Part 1: most people don’t really care how children learn to read as long as they do, we’re much more interested in what children read. And if reading is unnatural, stories most certainly aren’t. Daniel Willingham describes stories as ‘psychologically privileged’: they tap into a part of our brain that process the world through narrative. As I argued here, everyone loves stories even if some people hate reading. If we want children to enjoy new and exciting books we might do better to read to them.
As a parent I hated my daughters bringing home books to read. Together we’d struggle haltingly through the adventures of Biff and Chip as they did their best to read aloud. And reading became a chore, a task to be completed but certainly not something I or they enjoyed. One of the best pieces of advice Ruth Miskin offers is that children should take home challenging books that they have already mastered at school so they can experience the pleasure of showing off their accomplishment to their parents.
Maybe we could transfer the thinking that underpins this sort of approach to secondary schools. Instead of giving children either extracts from Dickens to PEE to death or the plodding banalities that pass for most text books, maybe we could get them to master worthwhile texts, revel in content and really learn that reading is a transformative act.
I think one of the great lies about phonics is that those who advocate it want children to inhabit a world where they don’t encounter real books. It’s because we want them to that we advocate phonics. The sooner they learn, the quicker they can move on to a range of different texts.
Is it a lie or is it a misunderstanding?
It is either a lie or the most blatant example of ‘fingers in the ears and we can’t hear you’ that I have ever encountered. I have been arguing the case for initial phonics instruction for some 12 years now; other colleagues have been doing it for far longer. People like Michael Rosen have been told over and over and over and over again thet the whole point of phonics instruction is to enable children to ultimately read any text that they care to read. When you know the code *all* text is decodable.
Ruth Miskin adding ‘real books’ to the mix is *not* an endorsement of ‘mixed methods’, it seems to me an attempt to make very explicit the objective of phonics instruction (as I’ve just stated it). Mixed methods has nothing to do with the books children are given to read (although some, such as the ‘old’ ORT books, have been specifically written to support mixed methods teaching) Mixed methods is teaching children to ‘guess’ at what the words on the page ‘say’ by the use of pictures, context, word shape, etc. There may be a smattering of phonics in the mix but the primary method is guessing.
I can only come to the conclusion that the ‘balanced literacy’/Whole Language folks are either so cognitively challenged that they cannot understand this very simple concept (i.e rigorous phonics instruction enables children to read ‘real’ books with ease) or they deliberately ignore it as it weakens their case against phonics.
Maggie, if you let children take home a ‘real book’ you can’t control how they will read it. They will use ‘mixed methods’. That is precisely why Nick Gibb told me that you shouldn’t do it.
I’ve followed the phonics debate closely for nearly 20 years. I’ve lost count of the number of times phonics advocates of all stripes have said that schools should, in addition to using decodable books, read aloud real books to the children in class, and also send home ‘real’ books that parents can share with their children by reading them aloud. And once children can decode with reasonable fluency, they should move on to ‘real’ books, in the same way they previously would move on from scheme books like Biff and Chip.
Michael Rosen’s argument appears to be based on what one teacher told him about one training session. Are we really supposed to take this seriously?
Maggie is right. The twisting of words and the fingers-in-ears spurious misrepresentations by certain anti-phonics campaigners is, and always has been, a disgrace to reasoned argument.
No, it’s based on what several teachers have told me, and what Debbie H. told me. Part of this is a matter of prepositions: reading to, reading with, and reading by. So yes, I’ve seen and heard phonics experts explaining why children should be read to, as part of a phonics programme. I’ve also heard phonics experts explain very clearly why you shouldn’t read non-phonically regular books with children or ask them to read such books to you, because it’s confusing and because it leads them into multi-cueing.
My only point is that it is clear that Ruth M.’s trainers suggest that teachers of Yr 1 classes right from the off, should buy the linked ‘real books’ and invite children to read these in class and/or take them home…whereupon I’m suggesting that they may well multi-cue.
[…] Part 2 I’ll explore Furedi’s thinking on the ‘medicalisation’ of reading and look […]
“My only point is that it is clear that”
Sorry, but I don’t think it’s clear at all. Your argument is based on hearsay, and subject to miscommunication or misinterpretation by parties who, given that they contacted you, are likely to already be prejudiced against phonics.
On a very recent Ruth Miskin blog, she states:
“If she were in a good Read Write Inc. school, she’d be taking home two books: a ‘real book’ for you to read to her, and a Storybook at her ‘Goldilocks spot’ that she’s read two or three times. She’d read it with love, and you could say ‘Wow’ every night.”
http://www.ruthmiskin.com/en/news/2016/09/15/ruths-blog-whoopsy-daisy/
As you’ve just confirmed what I heard by ‘hearsay’ I have no idea what point you’re making. Yes, indeed. Ruth and the trainers do recommend that children take home a ‘real book’ – one that is linked to her programme. That’s what I was saying. You’re saying the same thing. I had heard that she used not to say this and now she does. Ultimately, whether this point is true or not is not terribly important. It’s señior teachers who seemed concerned that they used to be told one thing and were now being told another. There seemed to be a point of principle involved: Nick Gibb confirmed that to me. If now that point of principle isn’t a point of principle, we’re all reading from the same hymn sheet, aren’t we?
And can I get this clear: once a child reads a book on her own, or takes it home, there really is no guarantee that that child will not multi-cue, is there?
You mean when teachers come back from training sessions where they used to be told that in the first months of initial reading they should not let the children spend time looking at ‘real books’, these teachers were lying? And now that since August teachers on the same courses with Read Write Inc are now told that the children can take home or read in class ‘real books’ which are ‘inked’ to the phonics scheme, this was going on all the time before? And that when I was told that for children to do this was ‘confusing’ by Nick Gibb, I’m lying? And when Debbie H. says that ‘multi cueing’ for initial readers is wrong – which is why she makes clear that real books should be read TO initial readers rather than letting them read, otherwise they won’t get the alphabetical principle, I’m lying when I say that she says that?
The point is, Ruth Miskin (no ‘h’, David), has shifted slightly between July and September. Teachers who have been on the Read Write Inc courses have posted info about it. I know teachers who’ve been on the courses. The reason is simple. Phonics alone does not teach children how to understand text and with non-phonically regular words only gives them one strategy to grapple with them.
If you ‘let’ children take home ‘real books’, you can’t control how they will read them. They will use a variety of methods to enjoy them. Ruth knows this and is accepting it. Debbie knows this and says that it’s wrong.
By the way, David this isn’t about me, and what you or anyone else might ‘let’ me have in this argument. It’s about what teachers are told and have been told over the last five years and whether this has shifted. If it has (and I believe it has in regards to Read Write Inc) this will screw up the stats which will claim or not claim that changes have occurred in reading success ‘due to phonics’. A key variable has changed.
Just to be clear, are you saying that Miskin’s (thanks for the spelling pointer) trainers are now telling teachers they must encourage children to take home non phonically regular books before KS2? As far as I can see from the Read Write Inc website, the message is pretty consistent. Once children can decode it doesn’t matter whether they use multi cueing. There’s nothing wrong with multi cueing – all skill readers do it. The point is to attempt to master phonics first.
Of course you’re right that to say “Phonics alone does not teach children how to understand text and with non-phonically regular words only gives them one strategy to grapple with them.” Obviously! Whether or not Nick Gibb understands this – while a concern – really isn’t the point: no one in the know disputes this.
The only argument seems to be over what happens in KS1. Do you really think an exclusive focus on phonics (alongside lots of reading real real books to children) is a bad way to start? Is your argument that it would be better to start the process by explicitly teaching students to multi-cue?
Trainers are saying to all teachers incl yr 1s: children can take home RWI linked real books and look at them in class. That’s what I’ve been told by several teachers. Since August.
OK, that’s not what the website says. Clearly some confusion. Also, it’s be great if you could answer this:
Do you really think an exclusive focus on phonics (alongside lots of reading real real books to children) is a bad way to start? Is your argument that it would be better to start the process by explicitly teaching students to multi-cue?
Thanks
I’m afraid Michael is up to his old tricks, ignoring the incontrovertible fact that all good readers can decode letters to sound effortlessly and automatically, and that this skill is learnt far more effectively when it is explicitly taught. Also, the old ‘searchlights’ were abandoned because children who find decoding difficult were always ‘guessing’–and important content words are seldom guessed correctly. I have personally rescued hundreds of children from a form of humiliation that Michael apparently ignores–and every one of them was taught to read with ‘mixed methods’. No child is going to love reading if every word is a struggle and being asked to read merely exposes your shame. Sorry, Michael, you don’t seem to understand how devastating reading failure almost always is.
Fortunately, those days are largely behind us, although Michael seems determined to bring them back. The problem Furedi raises is quite different: unquestionably, most pupils who can decode effortlessly seldom read for pleasure. I agree with most of his analysis, except that I can’t see that ‘whole language’ teaching will make the slightest difference. Most of it consisted of ‘predicting’ how characters might think or act. I can’t think of anything better calculated to kill the flow of narrative. Rather, I put it down to the current practice of handing out very brief reading assignments. Pupils are seldom, if ever, expected to read a complete novel; or for that matter, any kind of extended reading. With non-fiction, we encourage them to go online and get a shallow, potted Wikipedia account rather than reading a book which will give them a deeper understanding of the subject.
All of this reflects a shallow educational philosophy that everything must be ‘fun’. In effect, this is throwing children into a gaudy educational arcade with plenty of flashing lights but no real substance. Children’s literature has a lot to answer for; my own son never read any of it of his own volition except for Just William and Tin Tin; as an adult, he reckons that it was like being talked down to and drip-fed a lot of fashionable ideas. From the age of 9 he never read anything but adult fiction and non-fiction.
I’m not sure which bit of what I was reporting was tricky. Either Read Write Inc trading has changed or it hasn’t. Teachers tell me it has slightly changed.
As for people picking up on reading failure: I hear another story. This is teachers worried by Yr 2 and year 3 children not understanding what they’re decoding.
Did last with text predict on my phone . Trading = training. Sorry.
And I hear Y4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9 children unable to decode what they can understand which is more frustrating.
The phonics screening check was first brought in in 2012. The 2011/2012 year was the first year, then in which we can fairly sure that most schools followed one of the government’s recommended phonics schemes. The children from that year will be in year 6. The following year in year 5, and the year after in year 4.
Why would any of those children be unable to decode?
It’s a really important question and I thank you for raising it.
The answer is that these children have been taught phonic knowledge following one of the schemes, but, at the same time, haven’t been taught to apply phonics when reading.
During 1:1 reading with their teacher, despite learning phonics from the same teacher in the same week, they have been told to read as *fluently sounding* as possible, as early as possible, reading whole words learnt by sight, guessing words from picture clues, guessing words from the rest of the sentence and, finally, by phonics. Current Y4 & 5 children I hear read were told in Reception (these are real comments with real dates taken from October of a Reception reading log book):
– 4/10 of Reception: ‘X started by sounding out the repeated words but by the end of the book he had started to recognise the pattern of the book and became more fluent’;
– 12/10: ‘Well done, much better, X still insisted on sounding out ‘this’ but read the rest without as much focus on using phonics.’
– 18/10: Well done, X much more fluent. X is starting to use the pictures to help his fluency.
The legacy of this approach, teaching phonics but then encouraging children not to apply them right from the off, is the flawed guessing strategy used by many struggling but also supposedly average readers in KS2 and KS3 and probably beyond.
We know that the pictures disappear and guessing synonyms from context is no help at all – it rarely happens in practice. More often lookalike words are inserted which resemble the misread word but are not close in meaning. Despite this, they carry on regardless. In Connie Rosen’s words, a ‘child’s response to a ‘sense of misfit’ is rarely to go back and re-read. He is more likely to accept it as one of the many things he doesn’t understand in life or simply to lose interest and discard the book.’ Even if the book is not discarded, if a sense of misfit occurs frequently, a grasp on overall meaning is lost.
Phonics is being taught in all primary schools, yes. But, without a committed approach to teaching children to apply their knowledge when they read, to use phonics to decode from the off and not to memorise words by sight and guess words from pictures in a bid to sound (artificially) fluent, poor reading habits set in for many. Spoken words are added to their own store of vocabulary – their comprehension increases with age – but, with a fading knowledge of the alphabetic code (either taught or deduced) and no habit to apply it when reading, they are stumped when faced with words they do not instantly recognise.
By Y4 and onwards, these children, the children who don’t naturally absorb the alphabetic code for themselves, are increasingly unable to decode words that they would otherwise understand. And for them, reading anything in print is not a pleasure, it’s frustrating.
Et voila!
Michael is wedded to whole language – and understandably so. With influential parents in the education system who disseminated and led the introduction of whole language principles in Britain in the 1970s, it stands to reason. Michael’s first poetry was published thanks to, and works have been introduced by, some big names in the whole language movement; Ken Goodman himself and Margaret Spencer to name two. Michael has much of his family history tied up with the philosophy, and so it is understandable that his views on whole language and phonics are unshakable, and that he seems to be on a mission to attack the teaching of phonics at all costs, no matter what is presented in discussion.
Of course, all of that doesn’t change or prove anything; I’m sure Michael’s views are very much his own, but it does help to give context to his unwavering support for whole language – an approach based on learning words whole, by sight, ‘like facial expressions’ (Frank Smith), and the idea that ‘letters correspond to sounds only coincidentally’.
Declaring bias is important. I came to learn about phonics with some bias too: my frustration and a sense of powerlessness from spending more years than I should have done, in very challenging secondary schools, teaching an English curriculum to children who could barely read or read laboriously, with many errors, and without pleasure.
Without a viable strategy for the classroom at that time to teach students to read where primary methods and parents hadn’t succeeded, we failed to show these students that reading was doable, let alone inspire them to see it as lovable.
I now know that good teaching of phonics, teaching children not to rely on limited sight memory and reckless guessing, enables children to read skilfully, eliminating one main reason for not reading for pleasure – finding the act of reading slow, difficult and, therefore, painful.
To tackle the other reasons, the lure of the internet and the appeal of Minecraft, phonics is not enough, agreed. And Ruth, Debbie, et al. say the same. Encouraging an interest in books is something teachers do in all sorts of ways alongside and as well as high quality teaching of the alphabetic code and after it has been mastered, not instead of it.
Were you in the room when I was helping my kids to learn to read? If you were you must have missed me not doing ‘whole word recognition’. What a shame. Thanks for the biography again though.
I think I agree with your take of Furedi’s analysis. Having scoured his book, I can’t find anything that would support whole-language. Maybe he was being mischievous?
“Children’s literature has a lot to answer for…” Yes indeed. Particularly Beatrix Potter.
We (both parents) did most of the teaching to read. The school essentially managed some of the process by sending reading scheme books home in book bags with reading diaries to record progress. The latter started when the summer-born girl was a three-year-old attending the school’s Nursery adjoining their Reception class. We integrated it into the bed-time routine and I roped in a subversive Sooty glove-puppet to save both our souls from Biff & Chip. She read between the giggling fits I caused, then I read Winnie the Witch or some similarly strong antidote to blandness. We went off-scheme quite a lot, especially outside term-time. Phonics didn’t arrive until Reception and was roughly what we’d been doing without any formal recipe. I have a fond memory of the tiny girl beaming with pride as she demonstrated a phonics routine they’d learnt which had little arm actions etc. That may or may not have helped reading, but it was certainly harmless.
Reading to us stopped much earlier, but we weren’t allowed (sad-puppy sense) to stop reading stories to her until around the age of eight when reading for pleasure really took off. Books were always pitched as precious and given as birthday gifts or as a reward for something, and the choices were mostly mine and aimed at her character. There was Sabriel and Lyra for the not ‘girly-girl’. Curious Incident was for the maths-geek with her dash of Vulcan rationality. The latter led directly to a voracious Sherlock period when every available story had to be found and read. Katnis, which I banned for a year until Y6, trickled down from friend’s older siblings and was a clear symptom of children wanting to prove they’re more grown-up.
PEEing arrived in Y6 for SATs and then we got secondary and it feels like watching stars go out. She makes most of the choices now, but I think I could have easily nudged her towards places that likely won’t be visited now because school-side ripped a page out of a book and dissected it. I think English has lost the plot with literary analysis and I’d like to see it banished from UKS2 and KS3. Perhaps even KS4. I also wish ‘young-adult’ fiction, that literary tar-pit between children and adult fiction, did not exist.
I better step in seeing as Michael Rosen is misrepresenting what I have ‘said’. Here is a pdf I created years ago to explain how systematic synthetic phonics starts and progresses. I include an explanation about the ‘first, fast and only’ expression because of the way it is misunderstood and even twisted (see the blurb). As Maggie Downie rightly states, no matter how much we SSP proponents explain SSP and the KNOWN dangers of guessing words by multi-cueing, this falls on deaf ears time and again.
https://phonicsinternational.com/teachingmodel.pdf
Please note that it clearly states in my information:
“Learners are not REQUIRED to write, or read books INDEPENDENTLY, which are beyond their level of alphabetic code knowledge and skills, but they do have free access to books and can share books with others in a variety of ways.”
I comment about the ‘first, fast and only’ expression that Michael bangs on about ALL the time, I say this:
“The idea of ‘phonics first, fast and only’ appears to have misled some people into thinking that the ‘diet’ for learners is only phonics when this is not the case at all. The teacher simply needs to identify the precise learning intentions for the various literacy and language activities. The teacher, for example, would not be concerned about attending to letter/s-sound correspondences whilst reading aloud an exciting storybook to the learners or when demonstrating how to use an information book.”
I created this graphic below to illustrate that phonics provision in different schools looks very different. We know from the NFER three-year survey that many teachers still persist with multi-cueing by teaching it, or children apply guessing to words by default when REQUIRED TO READ BOOKS INDEPENDENTLY THAT THEY CANNOT DECODE. We can attribute continued weak decoding in key stage 2 to weak phonics teaching and multi-cueing guessing strategies being taught – or brought about by ‘default’:
https://phonicsinternational.com/Simple%20View%20of%20Schools.pdf
Recently, the BBC showed a documentary ‘B is for Book’ where we saw very clearly how uncomfortable children are made to feel when asked to read a book, or words, that they cannot read. This is in a school that is using Ruth Miskin’s RWI resources but they have not had her training and they are still applying multi-cueing guessing strategies – this is a ‘Reading Recovery’ school in reality. It is painful to watch a boy being asked to read a book independently that he cannot read. You can see that he does not like reading the book, then he is told the ‘secret’ of the book’s structure and starts to get through the book – but not by actually reading the words. We see a girl asked to read a list of the days of the week – she cannot. Why not.
Here is the link about the ‘B is for Book’ documentary where anyone can see what happens in a guesswork school:
http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=613
Finally, regarding the issue of Year One and Year Two children. With good SSP provision, the vast, vast majority of the children should be very good readers – most will be ‘free readers’ in fact. Most will probably not even need specifically ‘decodable’ story books although I would still advocate using cumulative, decodable plain texts as part of the core phonics programme for reading more challenging words with the focus letter/s-sound correspondences and for spelling purposes – assimilating spelling word banks with words spelt with the same letter/s-sound correspondences.
Michael, if ever you had attended one of my SSP training events, you will have heard me describe ‘Alice’ who was a precocious reader right from Reception. I don’t advocate the Alice’s of this world being patronised with ‘satipn’ reading books but neither must a child like Alice be allowed to guess her way through books that are too challenging. Sooner or later this will do such children no favours. ‘Skipping words’ when reading silently is probably the most unknown state of affairs in our schools. Children can still get the gist of books with lots of word skipping (that is, they cannot, or do not, pronounce a new word although they might get the meaning of it from the context). Without coming up with a pronunciation for new words, children cannot add them to their spoken language. This will impede their intellectual development.
Thank you Debbie. I wasn’t trying to misrepresent you. You sent me some info which clearly showed ‘reading to’ and I must have missed the sharing and taking home bit when referring to ‘real books’. Apologies. I think you were st the conference where Greg Wallace explained a)why his superb language and literary rich curriculum for year 1 was not teaching the children how to read and b) why/how these sessions were reading ‘to’ sessions. As I have heard from teachers being instructed to do this too, I made the mistake of believing them.
The stories of Yesr 4-6 not being able to decide are indeed sad. Again, I hear from teachers who say that they have regular experience of children being able to decode but not being able to comprehend. Jacqui says that the former is ‘more frustrating ‘ than the latter. I’m not sure why. I can decode German and Italian but am a very poor comprehended in both. Yesterday I was researching in a holocaust archive and found my lack of comprehension immensely frustrating. Wouldn’t that be similar for children?
Thanks again for your clarifications.
O dear text predict again. ‘Not being able to decide” = ‘not being able to decode ‘ (nb I have noticed irony of writing about reading with gobbledygook)
Of course it’s frustrating not to understand the meaning of a text you want to read, but once you can decode you are at least able to consult reference works or other support in order to compensate. If you can’t decode you can’t even do anything.
Both are vital but the ability to fluently and effortlessly decode means children have their full cognitive capacity free to make sense of what they’re reading.
Hi Michael
I hear what you say about your German and Italian and I do see what you mean. Phonics isn’t enough because really expert reading is about meaning which goes beyond decoding. We all agree with that. Absolutely.
– excellent decoding skills + limited comprehension (general knowledge, vocabulary, understanding of story structures etc) = frustration when reading
However, it is also true that
– any level of comprehension + poor decoding skills = frustration when reading
The second equation is very common. Very many children across the key stages will understand a text better if it is read to them. In these cases, their decoding is the reading ‘issue’, not their comprehension.
Our first and minimum task should be to ensure that we enable a child to decode absolutely every word that they can already understand and then, on top, endeavour to help them extend comprehension.
We now have the knowledge and materials to teach phonics very well and very quickly if key principles are followed. The job was much harder in 1973 without the logical and systematic programmes of today that start with the sounds of English and map letters (or sound pictures) to those sounds. When we started with letters and the misunderstanding that letters ‘say’ sounds, teaching lots of unconnected ‘rules’ and exceptions to rules, phonics was very difficult indeed. I can see why a whole language approach was attractive to teachers in the 1970s.
Teaching comprehension cannot be systematic or delivered as part of a programme. Can it be ‘taught’ at all? Really, it comes from life at home and experiencing the outside world more than it ever can from the classroom.
The magic ingredient for extending comprehension is getting children to read which brings us back to the heart of David’s thread. Thinking strategically, being practical first, teaching positive attitudes to reading should start by equipping children with the skills to decode effortlessly.
You can decode Italian but not understand it. You’ve said this before – I’ve seen it on the NUT website on the anti-phonics page. I’m glad you’ve said it again because I’d like to address it if you’ll give me a minute.
As we’ve agreed, phonics isn’t enough without understanding in order to read language fully. But it is an essential element. Consider this:
I learnt to decode Russian last summer for a Russian speaking boy who came to stay with us for four weeks. I made posters that listed English phrases written in Russian phonics. It was tough writing the posters, but, gradually, I learnt to decode the Russian symbols and encode English in them.
I’m not ready to read real books because I don’t speak Russian but I can now ‘read’ lots of words in Russian. You can ‘read’ these words too.
You can! Try it.
рубль
сувенир
флаг
Интернет
Can you read them?
I could put them into sentences and let you guess from overall meaning (although we know children don’t actually do this in practice, but let’s give it a go):
– I offered my рубль to the shopkeeper.
– I wanted to buy a сувенир.
– I told him that I didn’t like the флаг he had flying at his front door because it was tatty.
– he said he’d get another from the Интернет.
Can you read them now?
Not sure? Some you might recognise like faces, similar looking to English words.
– I could tell you these words and you could learn them as wholes by sight.
– I could give you a picture of each of these words so you could guess and then learn by them sight.
– I could do this often until you know them on sight and, subconsciously, you start to work out the code for yourself. If you’re naturally aware of units of sounds in words you’ll notice there’s mostly a letter for each sound in the word; some letters repeat and so you might start to deduce patterns.
Or, I could help you unglue the sounds in the words with explicit teaching and then teach you the code in a logical, structured way that doesn’t overface you, layer by layer and you could practise applying the code independently with texts that are not too difficult for you so you experience the glow of success at every step.
Try it!
I’ve given you the code you need below (not the full Russian code). It’s like a puzzle – challenging but fun and very rewarding. Here they are again next to the code key.
рубль
сувенир
флаг
Интернет
[Russian symbol = English phoneme]
а = /a/ or /u/
б = /b/
p = /r/ (with a bit of a roll!)
y = /oo/
г = /g/
e = /ye/ or /e/
и = /ee/
л = /l/
H = /n/
p = /r/
c = /s/
т = /t/
ф = /f/
B = /v/
ь = this symbol softens the preceding consonant
Without the code, you can understand the words but you can’t ‘read’ them – you can’t get to the meaning when it is in print rather than spoken aloud.
With the code, you can understand the words AND you can read them. You CAN get to the meaning when it is in print as well as when it is spoken aloud.
If you and I learnt to decode Russian we’d actually have a fun time in Russia understanding lots of words that are very similar to words in English and French – I know you understand French.
Back to English.
The children I’m talking about understand the English words that they can’t decode and that denies them access to meaning. The print is a barrier for them. Being able to decode words that you can’t understand means that at least print isn’t the barrier to understanding. That’s a better scenario because it maximises existing understanding of everything they read.
What matters most next, beyond phonics, is encouraging skilled decoders to read widely (or learn Russian in my case!), putting explicit knowledge and understanding of the alphabetic code into practice, encouraging them to read often and for pleasure.
And that brings us right back to Furedi’s challenge – how do we attract children who can already read away from the Интернет, away from the Компьютер, and back to deep reading?
I think the sections in B is for Book where the children struggled to read were bits where the tv production team have them stuff to read rather than the teachers. That’s what I recall but would have to rematch to be sure. The school is in very deprived area and gets excellent results by the way- so whatever they do, it works. ( disclosure, my husband works there but only teaching maths, so I know very little about how they teach reading)
I’m a foreigner and I learned English from talking to people, watching English tv and reading books……When I started to work at school here as a TA and I was introduced to your phonics it helped me lots to understand the language and it improved my reading very quickly…..We all need basic phonics knowledge before we start to use the “mixed methods”, in any language. Every child is different and some can jump to the “mixed methods” earlier than the others, for example my daughter started Y2 and she reads Michael Rosen books easily hahha….
And my twins came home from school beaming yesterday… Mummy we had a great day today. We are learning all about Michael Rosen and his funny poems! Fantastic!
I don’t think you should be admitting that in front of Tom Burkard (see above) and here:
“All of this reflects a shallow educational philosophy that everything must be ‘fun’. In effect, this is throwing children into a gaudy educational arcade with plenty of flashing lights but no real substance. Children’s literature has a lot to answer for; my own son never read any of it of his own volition except for Just William and Tin Tin; as an adult, he reckons that it was like being talked down to and drip-fed a lot of fashionable ideas. From the age of 9 he never read anything but adult fiction and non-fiction.”
Am happy to admit most things 🙂
To be fair, he did say that it’s a shallow educational philosophy if ‘everything must be fun’ – that doesn’t rule out fun. I’m sure he wouldn’t object to a little Chocolate Cake along the way!
I’m a bit puzzled by the assumptions that once a child has learned to read with rigorous phonics instruction they will revert to ‘mixed methods’ when they are a skilled reader. Why would they bother when they can easily work out what the words on the page ‘say’ without having to revert to guessing from context, pictures etc.? I have never found any high quality, peer reviewed research which supports this assumption; if anyone knows of any I’d be very happy to read it.
On the other hand, that skilled readers use these ‘mixed methods’ strategies has been asserted for 100+ years; Huey (The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading 1908) was an influential perpetrator of this assertion, though if you read his book you find he has no evidence for it beyond his own ‘belief’;a belief which seems to have been held by some even before Huey was writing and which has been repeated in some circles as ‘true’ ever since. Stanovich and West cast strong doubts on it way back in the 1970s when they found that skilled readers used phonics based skills as their prime method of ‘reading’ unfamiliar words and research has repeatedly shown that children taught explicit phonics have superior reading skills. Yet it persists as a seemingly unchallenged truism.
I note that people will say they are skilled readers and cite their own experience of using mixed methods but when you consider that this has been the dominant method of teaching reading for many decades it is not surprising that they practise what they have been taught. Though when you dig deeper you find that many of them are unconsciously using some form of phonics for word identification.
Interesting. I assumed – maybe erroneously – that when I read certain words I’m not decoding the letters I’m recognising the words. I *think* I only decode when I encounter unfamiliar words. Is this incorrect?
I believe this is a common misconception. Although the conscious experience is of whole-word reading, subconsciously the brain is taking in much smaller units. Researchers use eye-tracking to work out exactly how this is happening and have a much more complex model than either phonic-decoding or whole-word.
Ultimately, the most important thing is the empirical evidence on initial reading instruction. This shows pretty clearly that the best units to teach are the grapheme-phoneme correspondences. (other units have been tried)
Thanks Nic – that’s really helpful. Can you point me towards any studies?
Try searching on Keith Rayner. His ‘moving window’ research is interesting too.
Interesting. Lack of ability to read the words must be more frustrating than not understanding what you read. My French comprehension is poor (7 years of school French many, many years ago!) but I can read it with ease having been introduced to French phonics. If I want to know what it means I can get a dictionary. If I could not decode the French, however good my vocabulary, I could not read it so would get nothing. The same goes for English, good vocabulary will not help you if you cannot actually read the words – you will get terribly frustrated. The miserable thing is that without automatic decoding ability reading for pleasure is impossible, and the older a child gets the more difficult it is to fix the problem.
Being able to translate is not the same as looking words up in the dictionary. The other day I had to translate ‘chabraque de chambre’. ‘chabraque’ can mean a saddle-cloth. We don’t understand text through understanding words. We understand it through understanding phrases and sequences.
…words in combination as phrases and sequences of bigger wholes, yes.
Exactly.
That is precisely the reason that accuracy of reading individual words is crucial. A single word misread can cause confusion or render an entire phrase meaningless. It is precisely because single words work as part of bigger units of meaning that each needs to be read correctly for overall meaning on the larger scale to be clear.
The more individual words read incorrectly, the more a sense of ‘misfit’ in phrases and sentences occurs.
We’ve all struggled to read a student’s story because of poor handwriting. Just a few unrecognisable words makes it very difficult for skilled readers like English teachers to make good sense of the whole piece. Our frustration at trying to decipher the letters of words in order to read the sentences that tell the story must feel very similar to the frustration of a child struggling to read with weak decoding skills.
We are in their shoes and we know how it feels.
We are weak readers when reading the work of these children because we do not understand their personal handwriting and spelling code and so their writing is a barrier to our understanding of their meaning.
It can be impossible to decipher, or possible but hard work, and is generally less pleasurable a process than reading clear, legible print.
With time, we can learn their code, recognising how they form their letters and knowing their spelling habits, and we become more able readers of their work. But we are willing, able and paid to do so.
The key difference is that soon enough we know we’ll read a story by a child with clear handwriting (relief), read the paper on the way home (simple) and read a chapter of our book-on-the-go before bed (bliss). The child with poor decoding skills faces the frustration of reading what is essentially illegible handwriting (to varying degrees) EVERY TIME they read.
If everything I read required as much effort to read as the stories of my children with weak spelling and handwriting (my daily paper, my novel…), I wouldn’t choose to do it for pleasure.
I’m sure there must be something wrong here….
http://ow.ly/4QBP304ey7s
TES report on phonics screening check. A researcher thinks that maybe it doesn’t test what it says it tests.
Debbie or Jacqui will have to sort them out.
I can’t even sort out my sock drawer!
And I haven’t an academic pedigree or inheritance from an educational aristocracy with elite influential connections all over the realm…
Besides, I haven’t even read the report yet. Do you have a link to the report rather than just an article? The content might not even be the author’s own as we’ve learnt!
I’ve seen the headlines that the phonics check is too basic but that’s been said many times before. I don’t think that’s news.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-37372542
I’m always keen to read reports by Dr Solity and I find I learn by doing so. I’ll try to track it down.
I think we should move thread though, to David’s phonic check post.
See you there…
PS apologies for typos I haven’t spotted – tiny keys on my phone – hope you can decipher!
More detail here. I’m sure the whole paper or even a video of the presentation will come out soon.
https://www.bera.ac.uk/bera-in-the-news/press-release-children-can-pass-phonics-test-without-extensive-phonic-knowledge
I think we can all take this as an accurate representation of what Mr Solity said the next day. Warwick Mansell had obviously had sight of it when he wrote the press release.
The whole thing demands balance, which is what most real teachers of real reading would advocate and have been advocating for a long time.
Yes we need SSP, but we don’t need to waste time on the more obscure phonics items and their weird little practice ‘books’.
Yes we need real books with real, whole language and vocabulary in them, but we don’t need to ask children to read books they cannot read, (books with more than 1 or 2 words in every 10 that need working out.)
We may have established here that the real language folk do not say “No phonics!” and the phonics folk do not say “No real books!”.
A major breakthrough I think.
I’d like us next to establish that the PSC should be abolished.
More balance here, from Michael Rosen’s blog.
http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/educational-psychologist-writes-to-me.html
What’s not to like?
This is great – thanks v much Pat.
Really detailed article. I’m keen to read the full report too when available. It sounds like some good points are raised. Will comment on phonics check thread…
Which thread is that, please? Not the one from new year, surely?
https://www.learningspy.co.uk/reading/phonics-screening-check/
From July 2016… ‘What is the Phonics Screening Check for? I know he likes to keep us in check, no pun intended… 🙂
The phonics screening check does not do what it says on the (Nan can tap it ) tin. It says it helps ID children who need extra help. It doesn’t. Children who need extra help are identified by class teachers, long before the June PSC. If you fail and retake in year 2, that’s it. No more PSC for you. So what good has it done you? Reception, year 1, year 2 devoted to daily phonics lessons as major events, and you still fail. Most very low achievers would have learned to read long before this, if taught to read instead of taught to do a separated-out aspect of reading as a discreet subject.
It says it assesses children’s knowledge of blending phonics – it doesn’t do this properly, as most of the compulsory phonics are not used in the PSC.
It should be scrapped.
Re: obscure phonics, I was looking at one of Miskin’s ‘books’ that contrives to write a ‘story’ using /aigh/ /ay/ /a/ /ai/ and /a-e/ as often as possible. These books are meant to give children ‘practice’. Apart from being exceedingly boring and annoying – there are twee jokes to try and keep the adults involved awake – how many uses for /aigh/ can you think of? Is it valid for 6 year olds to be spending time on this stuff?
And yes I do teach phonics – early reading lessons involve making an alphabet book for single letter sounds and the most common digraphs – th, sh, ch and a few others. We learn others as they come up in children’s writing and reading. Many children learn to read with this amount of phonics and their blending (probably how most commenters here learned?) plus books of real stories and information they can have scaffolded so that they can read them independently. Many children have difficulty with what used to be called blends – str, dr, spr etc and need to be taught to get their mouths around them. These are anathema to phonics advocates because they are not what they want to identify as digraphs. But /nk/ and /ng/ are. Why are they so different? Much to do with phonics is arbitrary and tyrannical to teachers of young children. The PSC is a sword of Damocles continually swinging over their heads.
It should be scrapped.
https://whatdoiknowdotco.wordpress.com
Pat says she teaches “single letter sounds and the most common digraphs – th, sh, ch and a few others.” She writes, “We learn others as they come up in children’s writing and reading. Many children learn to read with this amount of phonics and their blending”. But many do not.
The Phonics Screening Check is doing a great deal of good. Children who are taught the way Pat teaches, and do not learn to read, do not succeed with this check and are re-checked in Year 2. Without this check, they would often be put in a low-ability group where they made very slow progress and the gap between them and other children grew wider as time went by and eventually their literacy difficulties became severe.
I have had many teachers tell me they thought they were doing the right thing by putting these children in separate low-ability groups that got further behind. They saw it as problem with the children, that they were dealing with correctly, instead of seeing it as a problem with teaching and organisation that the school must put right. The Phonics Check is challenging this attitude. Now that these children are re-checked in Year 2, there is a strong incentive for schools to give them the extra phonics teaching they need and avoid the misery of not being able to read words as they get older.
It is shameful that the government has decided to give up on those children who do not succeed in Year 2, now that plans for a re-check in Y3 have been abandonded.