Do antibiotics work? Well, that rather depends on what you’ve got. If you’ve got a viral infection like influenza antibiotics will be useless. To fight viral infections you need to use antiviral drugs. Does that mean antibiotics don’t work? Of course not. If you’re suffering from a bacterial infection like brucellosis then an antibiotic might well be effective. This, I hope, is straightforward.
So if I conducted a piece of research which found that antibiotics are ineffective because they don’t cure viral infections that would be a bit stupid, right?
Well, for some reason, professor of education Stephen D Krashen seems to have done something very similar. He got in touch in the comments section on my last post to tell me the following:
I concluded that the published research shows that intensive decoding instruction only helps on tests in which children pronounce words presented on the list. It does not contribute to performance on tests in which children have to understand what they read. [His article is available here.]
Professor Krashen has found that decoding instruction doesn’t contribute to reading comprehension. Frankly, I would have been surprised if he found anything else. Just in case anyone is unclear, word recognition and language comprehension are two very different aspects of reading. Reading depends on the ability to render graphemes (squiggles) into phonemes (sounds) and to turn these into morphemes (units of meaning).
These two strands of reading rely on different mental abilities. Word recognition depends on our visual-auditory systems to pay attention, block out distractions, apply rules associating letters to sounds and to perform saccades (tiny eye movements between words). Language comprehension requires us to think about the meaning of words, utilise our semantic & grammatical systems, make inference and hypothesis as we read and also to anticipate what’s likely to come next.
Systematic synthetic phonics is an excellent way to store alphabetic principles and spelling-sound correspondences in long-term memory, but of course, this isn’t everything that’s needed. Krashen says that “intensive decoding practice is only the first step, necessary but not sufficient, and it needs to be followed by a great deal of practice in applying the principles learned.” Well, of course. Children also need to store vocabulary, stories and as much knowledge of the word as possible, leaving working memory free to do the hard work of trying to work out what a text means. The trouble is, while we seem to be hardwired to learn vocabulary and stories, we have no such capacity to pick up decoding. If children don’t have fast, automatic access to spelling-sound correspondences they will expend precious working memory resource trying to decode instead of on making inferences, clarifications, hypotheses and predictions needed to be able to take pleasure in the act of reading.
Once a child has learned the sounds made by letters and combinations of letters they can turn writing into speech, but if they don’t already know what a word means the ability to decode is unlikely to magically assist with their understanding. As a fluent reader, after only the briefest pause, you will, no doubt, be able to pronounce a word like adscititious, but obviously that doesn’t mean you will know what it means. For that you will require a definition.
Similarly, you might struggle to discern the meaning of this passage from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
A manifold, contained in an intuition, which I call mine, is represented by means of the synthesis of the understanding, as belonging to the necessary unity of self-consciousness; and this is effected by means of the category.
Even though you probably know what all the words mean, without a fair bit of background knowledge you won’t have a blessed clue what the paragraph is about.
Krashen concludes that “the path to reading proficiency is not through worksheets but through books and stories.” This seems reasonable. I hope nobody has ever argued that children will becomes proficient readers without ever reading books and stories, but just in case anyone has, let me be clear that I think the widest possible range of books and stories is absolutely crucial. If phonics is the antibiotic, then a broad general knowledge is the antiviral needed to make sense of what we read.
The bit I struggle with is that Krashen appears to be of the opinion that although a little of phonics right at the start is helpful, a “high level of proficiency” in decoding actually makes children worse at language comprehension. Not only is there an absence of evidence for this point, it appears profoundly illogical sense to suggest that the ability to decode print interferes with our ability to understand what we decode. If he’s right then clearly phonics really is the Great Evil it’s made out to be by Rosen et al. Needless to say, I’ll need some convincing.
The assumption is that (1) a firm grasp of phonics is necessary for fluent reading, that is, decoding; (2) fluent reading/decoding is necessary for comprehension; (3) the only way to develop a firm grasp of phonics is through intensive systematic phonics instruction.
If these assumptions were true, we would expect those who have had intensive phonics instruction would do better on tests of reading comprehension. But there is no relationship between between exposure to intensive systematic phonics and performance on tests of reading comprehension. They are better at decoding, but not reading for meaning.
Let’s have a look at the results of the Clackmannanshire trials–yes, I know they have been criticised on procedural matters, but it’s very difficult to get everything absolutely right in the messy world of education. Wyse and Styles slammed the results because the experimental group was ‘only’ seven months ahead of norms on tests of reading comprehension. Never mind that they were 21 months ahead of norms on a spelling test, and in secondary school there is more concern about writing ability than reading.
What is remarkable here is that pupils from a disadvantaged population have actually scored above norms on a test of verbal intelligence. As Chall has quite rightly argued, reading tests effectively become more like tests of verbal intelligence as you go up the scale: by the time the Clackmannanshire pupils were in Primary 6, the tests would have been largely IQ tests. In the US, massive efforts to improve the cognitive ability of low SES pupils have been made with Head Start and other interventions for over half a century, and there has been almost nothing to show for it.
One of the peculiar aspects of the wonderful world of education is that every teacher I’ve ever met acknowledges that pupils vary enormously in ability–even siblings vary, despite having identical SES. Yet somehow, educators assume that you can ‘teach’ comprehension skills. Dan Willingham has reviewed the literature, and found good evidence for gains in reading comprehension only for comprehension monitoring–which is little more than asking pupils to reflect upon what they’ve just read. It is true that education (and environment) affect performance on tests of cognitive ability: clearly, the dimmest 16 year-old will have a raw score higher than a bright 4 year-old. And there is good reason to believe that age normed scores can be positively affected by good teaching over long periods of time. And one of the things which is most likely to have a positive effect on verbal intelligence is how much the child reads. And that, I would maintain, is why the Clackmannanshire pupils scored well on a test of reading comprehension–it’s the old Matthew effect, plain and simple.
Clackmannanshire had a problem over and beyond ‘procedural’ matters. Interventions other than an introduction of systematic synthetic phonics took place. That’s not just ‘procedural’. That’s failing to hold as many factors as possible constant, while testing for one variable.
Don’t we want children to be better at decoding? Why on Earth would one expect a decoder to be better at comprehension since comprehension relies on a different set of factors, ie has the knowledge to know what the decoded word means?
Is the reverse true then? Does poorer decoding fit with higher comprehension.
Perhaps I am misreading or misunderstanding what you are saying but it seems like nonsense to me. Be happy to have it explained to me.
“Don’t we want children to be better at decoding? Why on Earth would one expect a decoder to be better at comprehension since comprehension relies on a different set of factors, ie has the knowledge to know what the decoded word means?”
SK: You (not I) would expect a good decoder to be better at comprehension because decoding, according to your position, is a prerequisite to comprehension. Bad decoders should have a hard time understanding text. Again, I do not interpret your position as saying that decoding is the only prerequisite.
Dear Stephen
I don’t think that is what I’m trying to say. It’s a challenge for me but I’ll try to explain.
A child who can decode all words that they already comprehend can demonstrate their actual level of comprehension in a test.
A child who cannot decode words that they comprehend is unable to demonstrate their actual level of comprehension in a test.
Being unable to decode all words that a child can already comprehend is a barrier to best possible comprehension of the same text. Without the benefit of best possible comprehension, best possible new learning from the text being read is not likely.
Being able to decode all words does not raise comprehension beyond a child’s existing comprehension level at the moment of reading. However, it ensures that a child’s comprehension of that text is best possible for them at that moment. With the benefit of best possible comprehension, best possible new learning from the text being read is more likely.
In order for general comprehension to increase significantly at the best possible rate, accurate reading of lots of texts would have to take place.
To exemplify with a specific case:
A Y2 boy I worked with recently likes reading, reads often and can read sophisticated words like orchestra, choir, circumstances and exhausted on sight. Despite this, his mum was worried about recent lack of improvement in his reading and asked me to listen to him read. He read quite happily from a Y2 comprehension test passage: scrunchy for scratchy, stripped then stritted for stirred, cram for cream, wide for wild and werve for wove, to name 5/21 misread words in 42 sentences.
He turned five real words (at least three of which he would have understood if spoken) into words that are alien to him: stritted for stirred, scrabbler for scribble, ragging for rigging, werve for wove, trattled for tattered. Although ragging is a word, it isn’t one he recognises. (Spellings of his made-up words are my own phonically plausible interpretation of what he said aloud, of course.)
When the boy guessed individual unfamiliar words incorrectly, whole sentences were rendered meaningless to him but he kept going. Some words were pivotal in a sentence, some were not and so, overall, he was able to pull together enough meaning to answer some comprehension questions correctly. However, when I read the passage to him myself, he was able to answer nearly all questions correctly. Limited decoding skills prevented best possible comprehension of the text for this boy.
Moreover, if he had been able to accurately decode words that he didn’t understand (he wasn’t), e.g. ‘rigging’, he may, from the rest of the correctly decoded sentence have been able to guess the word’s meaning and so make better sense of the passage.
If a word is correctly decoded and recognised by the reader as unknown, it is possible to deduce its meaning from context and possibly from the word’s own morphemes. (This doesn’t mean it will be correctly deduced – I’m just saying it’s possible.)
However, if an unknown word is guessed wrongly and incorrectly identified as substitute known word, the real word’s meaning will not be deduced at all.
If a word is guessed incorrectly rather than identified as unknown, confusion is more likely and comprehension may be hindered rather than maximised.
I have said, though, that for comprehension to increase significantly, lots of reading of lots of texts would have to take place over time. A good grasp of phonics alone won’t increase comprehension.
I’m saying that if a child reads independently often with inaccurate decoding skills, their comprehension level is likely to increase in relation to how much they read (beyond any increase due to non-reading factors), but not at the best possible rate because they will not understand everything that they should and could.
If a child reads independently with accurate decoding skills, their comprehension level is likely to increase in relation to how much they read (beyond any increase due to non-reading factors) and at the best possible rate because they understand everything that they should and could.
If a child rarely reads independently, any increase in comprehension through independent reading is going to be very limited, whether or not the child becomes a skilled decoder and so in addition to teaching phonics thoroughly, we need to get children reading independently, often.
If the child listens to others read texts, it is likely that they will increase their level of comprehension in relation to the amount of listening to texts, whether or not they are a skilled decoder, but they may not be able to demonstrate any or all of this gain in a comprehension test if they remain unable to decode new known language that they don’t immediately recognise, and so increased comprehension may go un or under measured.
Therefore, I’m suggesting that the best combination to maximise comprehension is:
– Possession of accurate decoding skills and habits to maximise comprehension of, and new learning from, every text read
WITH regular independent reading for exposure to language and new understanding,
which would be supplemented significantly (immeasurably?) by
– listening to others read for exposure to language and new understanding;
– and all other non-reading related factors that increase comprehension when growing older and living life!
I’m saying that a good grasp of phonics is essential for best possible understanding of each text read; for best possible demonstration of existing comprehension; and for best possible access to new learning in books read independently. However, a significant and measurable increase in overall comprehension through reading cannot be achieved with only a good grasp of phonics. Ultimately, it relies on the reading of lots of texts – the more the better.
That takes us on to encouraging reading for pleasure…
With all best wishes,
Jacqui
There may well be many reasons as to why ‘there is no relationship between exposure to intensive systematic phonics and performance on tests of reading comprehension’ but one, I would suggest, is that reading is not a matter of reading words; it’s a matter of reading text: that is, phrases, sentences, lines, verses, paragraphs, and in the end whole texts. The unit we call a ‘word’ has very little meaning or use outside of textual contexts the word is in. Of course, we can in the teach-test environment (or TV quizzes and the like) isolate words and demand that people less powerful than ourselves at that particular moment tell us how to say them or indeed what they supposedly mean or what ‘part of speech’ they are. In fact, outside of these odd situations, this is not how we use words. We use them in textual contexts. One crucial part of learning how to read for meaning is ‘getting’ how these contexts hang together in phrases, sentences, lines, paragraphs and whole texts. The added complication here is that the way we do this in speech is often very different from the way we do it in writing. There are many writing-modes that need to be figured out so that we can read-with-meaning the thing we think we’re reading. This takes a lot of practice and immersion and talk.
Stephen – if a person cannot ‘lift’ the words off the page (say what they ‘are’), they are not going to comprehend them either (understand what they ‘mean’).
It is possible to deduce, intuit or ‘ferret out’ the alphabetic code without direct instruction as many of us have when not taught explicit phonics – but, as teachers, it is a duty to ensure that each and every learner is taught the complex English alphabetic code and phonics skills for reading and for spelling – this is all the more important because the English alphabetic code is so challenging.
It is ludicrous to suggest that people who can decode words – known and unknown – automatically and fluently are not aided in comprehension compared to those who struggle with lifting the words off the page – but this will be limited to the level of their spoken language in either case.
You are making the assumption that the only obstacle preventing children from lifting words off the page is a child’s lack of ability to decode phonically. I have sat with my own children many times, hearing them fail to lift words off the page precisely because they tried to lift them off phonically – and only phonically. Obeying instructions to stick with the word immediately in view, being ‘good’ by not reading ahead and guessing from context, not able to remember whether it was a ‘tricky word’ or a ‘red word’ or whether indeed they would be able to decode it…led them into all sorts of difficulties.
Meanwhile, teachers who deal with the casualties of the new phonics regime, do indeed relate how some children need interventions of a non-phonic kind because it’s not a lack of sounding out that is giving them difficulties.
I hear an enormous number of children sounding out because they spell their names when they ask me to sign their books. I have yet to hear a child sounding out who does not break the rules of sounding out letters like ‘b’. Might it not be possible, I wonder, that sticking the schwa after all such letters gives them as much difficulty as help, when it comes to blending? Yes, they’ve been told not to 500 times…but whaddyaknow, they keep on doing it. Hmmm…
Good morning!
Michael,
I’ve understood from your previous comments over the years that you think phonics is one important element of learning to read. Despite opposition to what you call an overemphasis (can’t help thinking of Miranda’s mum!), you believe it has a place in the mixed methods approach.
And yet your language about phonics here is entirely negative. You talk of ‘obeying’, sticking with, and having to read words ‘immediately’ when applying phonic knowledge. There’s a peppering of ‘not’ in what you write. You repeat ‘difficulties’ and you rise in a crescendo from ‘casualties’, ‘regime’ and ‘rules’ to your point about children being told ‘not to 500 times’.
You’re not keen on my saying that things are not controversial when you think they are. But it seems to me that the opposite is true for you. We can create controversy just by saying things are controversial when they needn’t be.
I can hardly believe you have sat with your own children, listening to them struggle, trying to use phonics to read in the way you describe. I’m amazed you didn’t jump in with strategies to support them. I don’t think anyone would endorse your approach.
It’s important to set that record straight because encouraging children to use phonics to read real books at home can and should be a positive experience.
I have sat with my own children many times hearing them successfully lift words of the page with pleasure, precisely because they have lifted them off phonically. They have enjoyed the process of working out the word and have boosted their own reading confidence, knowing that they did it accurately, without me, without adult help. Confidence is good for literacy, for reading. Successful decoding is perceived to be pleasant because feeling confident is pleasurable. They want to do more.
My children don’t stick with the word immediately in view because there are no such rules to obey.
They and the children I work with often use the letter patterns they know to get as close to the pronunciation of the word as they can and then use the sentence to precisely identify the word, if they know it, refining their pronunciation as they do so. It’s great fun and exciting.
If I don’t encourage them to guess, I find that they don’t do it. As I’m teaching decoding, it’s illogical to encourage them to guess. If they do, and guess correctly, I never know! If incorrectly, I prompt them to focus on letter/sound correspondences and try again. If necessary, I step in and help.
But there’s nothing in any SSP programme that I’ve ever seen that suggests a child is ‘bad’ (I’m assuming that’s the opposite of your ‘good’) for guessing.
I don’t find there’s anything negative about learning and applying phonics. And I can say that precisely because it’s true.
We read many varied and interesting real books at home alongside the decodable texts from school. This is in much the same way as my parents read real books at home with me alongside non-real and non-decodable school readers. The shift isn’t gigantic for me and mine. The real books immersion is as much a feature as ever. But, with the focus on phonics, my father and I note how much more quickly and accurately my children have learnt to read and, crucially, become independent readers.
With our real books, I simply encourage children to work out the words that they can, and I help them with the words they can’t. It’s not black and white, it’s many shades of all sorts of lovely colours and we progress in waves, to ever more complex language.
– I usually lead the reading but it’s a shared experience. If they want to take part, they do.
– Some words they read automatically because they’ve already committed them to sight.
– Some they decode fairly swiftly and only just audibly.
– Some take a little time to decode, but no more time than pausing and reading ahead to guess a word from context.
– Some they decode almost accurately and tweak pronunciation with context to help them (wind is a good example).
– Some I decode aloud for them where the code is complex and still beyond them just now.
– Many words and passages I simply read aloud for them without decoding at all.
We unpick many supposedly tricky words. A favourite of yours is ‘was’, but children I work with know immediately that it’s not tricky at all = w = /w/; a = /o/ (as it does in swamp, wasp, watch, wander, waddle, swan and so on) and s = /z/ (as it does in many, many cases – thousands of plurals alone: dogs, bears, houses, thousands!). Explaining how pronunciation has changed over time is another part of the picture; it’s satisfying to know why something is irregular.
Children love oddities!
I still read to them often and I’m sure that something of the ‘whole language’ approach is at play when I’m doing this, probably with a good measure of automatic alphabetic code recognition. I’m reading words and they are seeing them in print as they sit on my lap or by my side – tricky to squeeze four children on one lap but we always have a pretty good go! I’m absolutely sure that they absorb words in print and language generally this way, as learner readers have done for decades.
I certainly don’t force them to un-absorb anything, but there’s simply no need to guess.
There is nothing negative afoot.
I don’t let them struggle or get into difficulties as you seem to have done. It isn’t necessary and I’m sorry that you had such experiences with your own children, trying, unnecessarily, to stick to an imagined phonics regime. It doesn’t need to be like that.
Your story reinforces for me that we must do more to explain just how the teaching of phonics can work at home and at school. We need to do much more to explain that phonics is part of a body of knowledge about language that can help children learn to read quickly and with understanding. I find parents are receptive, and it makes very good sense to maximise on the teaching of phonics in school by encouraging our children to put their newly acquired knowledge to good use at home.
I am constantly reminded of the value of phonics by my own children who are very much winners of the focus on phonics for teaching accurate decoding …
Yesterday, while out walking with family visiting for Christmas, my son who turned seven in May, arrived breathless from an exploration of the undergrowth, waving a crumpled sign in his hand. Before I could read it, he announced,
‘Due to random acts of violence, the telescope has been removed!’
In his eyes, practised and skilled at decoding as he is, the print dissolves in a flash and he has only to concentrate on meaning. He was intrigued by the idea of acts of violence, wondering what on earth they might be, and was utterly dismayed that he’d missed out on a telescope opportunity! The sign was barely in context as it had come far adrift from its post but, as ever, he saw it – he read it.
I’m not sure he understood ‘Due to’ and he’s heard ‘random’ many times but probably still doesn’t know what it actually means. However, his effortless decoding enabled him to understand as much of the words on the sheet as his existing level of comprehension would allow – and he got it.
I find it amazing he reads with such ease but I’m ever mindful that whole classes of Year 7 children where I have previously taught in White City, Hackney and Stockport would have been equally intrigued by the meaning but would have needed more than triple the time to decipher the writing, if they could do it at all.
All best wishes for a harmonious 2016.
Jacqui MB
If I were you, I would avoid jumping to conclusions about the precise details of what I did or did not say or do with my children. Perhaps best to leave that to me. All I offered were broad outlines. Of course one element I missed out were the hours spent dealing with whatever materials the school sent home.
Michael,
You described extremely negative experiences of incorporating phonics strategies when reading at home. I stand by what I said. I am sorry that your experiences were negative and, in the interests of balance, as a fellow parent of numerous children, I feel it’s crucial to explain how phonics can be incorporated very helpfully and positively in the home. My truth is valid and as important to post as yours.
I’m delighted that we agree that teaching phonics can be flexible – it is! And dynamic. We agree totally there. I feel like we’ve made progress.
The only point of real disagreement we have is that you believe my approach differs significantly from other (what you like to call) phonics enthusiasts.
You’re not quite right.
Debbie has consistently advocated a two pronged approach to teaching phonics. Her second prong, ‘incidental phonics’, very much describes my flexible approach at home.
I don’t teach children to guess at all. That is fundamental and consistent with SSP programmes for the classroom and at home. This is probably the most important point of all.
You say that I’m describing an approach that encourages different cues for reading.
Not at all.
If the reading of a particular word or phrase isn’t automatic and has to be worked out, I encourage the child to decode using only phonics.
I said that I am aware that children absorb phonic patterns and memorise whole words as they follow my reading. I don’t explicitly teach them to do this but it happens. Debbie recognises that this is how many expert readers have learnt to read. I’ve heard her say this often. She encourages parents to share real books with children to promote a love of reading just as I’ve described; she, and I, are not against absorption. We’re not absorption denialists.
However, Debbie and I both agree that absorption alone isn’t enough. We both agree that phonics should be systematically and explicitly taught in schools and consolidated and reinforced at home.
Let me be clear.
I teach phonics systematically (with dynamism and positivity) in focused phonics sessions, much as I would teach any other body of knowledge or set of skills. I want my children to be taught this at school as accurately and thoroughly as possible, covering simple and complex code.
As a parent, I practise reading for pleasure with my own children, consolidating and reinforcing phonics at home as appropriate and with a flexible approach – if they tackle an unknown word, they decode it from left to right, but if they want me to decode it, I do, and if they want me to just read, I do. I play all of this by ear to strike just the right balance.
Whenever I read aloud to my children and they’re looking at the print (remember, sometimes they just look at the ceiling!), I acknowledge that they absorb whole words, parts of words and plenty of phonic patterns (some new, some previously taught, and probably with a error or two thrown in) and this is very much part of the process. I don’t stop this or discourage this at all. I don’t think I’m being too bold to say that I think Debbie would agree.
What I don’t do is teach children to guess in order to read a word, a phrase or a sentence. I don’t ask them to do this. I ask them to decode right through the word from left to right instead.
I’ve seen the damage that the guessing habit causes too often in too many children of different abilities in the different schools I’ve worked in.
All in all, with the added layer of SSP knowledge and strong decoding skills, my children are better equipped to read faster and more accurately than they would have been without. They’re better equipped to go on to read more books, more quickly and with more independent enjoyment. They don’t guess. They read. And boy, do they read!
I’m very glad that I learnt enough about phonics in time to ensure that my own four children have more skills and more understanding than I did at the same age.
I’m bothered that I didn’t learn in time to better help many students I’ve taught over the years. But I have to look forward.
Best wishes,
Jacqui
As Pat Stone and others have figured out, the closer we get to talking directly to phonics experts and enthusiasts, the more we discover that emphases and approaches are in fact quite different. If you have the time or energy you might like to compare what you have written here with what Debbie writes and what Gordon Askew (govt adviser, I do believe) has written below on his blog. (Pat cites it elsewhere in this debate.) Your flexibility seems completely at odds with what Gordon is recommending. The consequence of this is that when we focus on what a given phrase means (‘first, fast and only’) or whether the supply of a rich diet of literature has been ‘diminished’ by the emphasis on phonics, we get multiple answers. Or again, when Debbie writes that ‘reading’ has improved (as evidenced by the Yr 2 tests) what does she mean? What can it mean? How has it been shown?
Anyway here’s Gordon for you:
“Recent ‘evidence’ that the government’s emphasis on phonics does not appear to be impacting on reading standards overall, despite clear improvements in outcomes for the Y1 Phonics Screening Check, is being leapt upon by detractors as a clear vindication of what they have believed all along: that the emphasis on phonics is too narrow and schools should return to a mixed strategy approach to reading.
However such a simplistic misinterpretation seriously distracts from the real issues and will lead us yet further away from the universal achievement of fluent reading which we all want for the country’s children.
There are two far more important issues flagged up by this apparent lack of impact. It is these which need to be tackled if we are to reach our ambition, as we so easily could.
The first issue lies with the administering of the screening check itself and suggests that in some schools improvement might not be as great as superficially appears. At present far too many schools in England see the outcome of the check as a gold star to be won (or not) by the school. Consequently many teachers prime children very specifically for the check and push some to achieve a minimum ‘pass’ even if this does not reflect their overall skill level. Sadly they do not relate these outcomes to the future reading success of individual children. That is to say, they do not see the statutory check for what it is, a mechanism for screening to find out which children have not yet learned the core reading skills they need. Consequently they do not begin to appreciate the great harm they do by trying to make children seem better than they are. (Please refer to my earlier posts on the Phonice Screening Check.) If issues with phonics are not identified, or not considered important, then the children concerned will not be given the urgent catch-up with Systematic Synthetic Phonics they need if they are all to develop as fluent readers.
To remedy this would need two things:
– for teachers far better to understand the real purpose and value of the check
– for schools’ administering of the check to be much better moderated and validated
This last could perhaps most easily be achieved by giving Ofsted the responsibility, as a required element of every inspection, to themselves retest a sample of children from the previous Y1 Screening. Depending on the timing of the inspection the same children should do as well again if not better. If children do not at least consistently replicate earlier results, the school would be highlighted as not having administered the check appropriately and this would be clearly identified as a key area for improvement.
The second issue is one I have already discussed at length on this blog: that even where schools are improving their teaching of discrete phonics, too many continue to teach children to apply multi cueing strategies when actually reading, during specific reading practise and when reading across the curriculum. It is no good looking for phonics to impact on reading overall when children are not in fact taught to apply it as the strategy for decoding unknown words. Instead many continue to be taught alternative strategies which let down the least able and least confident learners. (Please refer to my earlier posts: ‘Your guess is(n’t) as good as mine’ and ‘A litany for failure’)
So when the detractors call for a return to multi strategy teaching of reading they are actually referring to the status quo in many schools – the strategy which in fact leads to the outcomes we are currently getting.
In answer to the initial question: it is not phonics that is failing to impact, but much of current teaching, which claims to value phonics but does not. I do not blame teachers for this. They are committed and conscientious professionals who want the best for their children. Unfortunately however too many of them are being mislead about how best to achieve this.
I was very fortunate recently to find myself speaking at a phonics conference alongside Damian McBeath, Executive Headteacher over a number of Ark Academy Primary Schools. Damian clearly shares my unshakable commitment to developing ‘real’, enthusiastic readers (please see my earlier post ‘Phonics AND the love of reading’). However he also truly understands the importance of phonics taught to the exclusion of other less reliable word reading strategies, but within a context which equally prioritises the development of vocabulary and comprehension. I said to him, and meant it, that if I were thirty years younger I would dearly wish to work for such a head. If, over the whole profession, we had far more of the understanding Damian has, then we would have virtually all mainstream children reading fluently and confidently well before they leave primary school. Moreover, most of them would be well on the way to becoming readers in the fullest sense. Then we would see the true impact of phonics.”
This is how Gordon intros his blog
“Blog by Gordon Askew. Now (largely) retired. Currently part time Phonics Adviser to DfE. Former primary headteacher, consultant, lecturer, inspector and phonics trainer.”
He and Debbie both advise DfE – I don’t know how many others there are, dozens, probably.
Are there any alternatives to SP / SSP fanaticism advising govt? I don’t think so.
I can’t understand why they have so much advice for us as well?
They make us have daily phonics lessons in rec year 1 and year 2 and onwards into KS 2,3,4, infinity and beyond.
They make us have a phonics screener
They make us have certain resources, training, advisers
What more do they want?
Actually, phonics is a busted flush. It ain’t working and the DfE know it.
There’s a remarkable woman with immense probity who advises the government on which phonics schemes are worth buying (and worth receiving a govt subsidy for) and one of them is the one she wrote. In effect this means that she recommends that the government tell schools to buy her scheme and then the government subsidizes the schools to buy it…and she receives some of that dosh herself! Isn’t this called a ‘conflict of interest’?
Thank you for posting this, Michael. Brilliant. I will take time to read this – all of it – later. I can’t wait! But I have to feed a few guests first…
Here we go again. Jacqui says
“I teach phonics systematically (with dynamism and positivity) in focused phonics sessions, much as I would teach any other body of knowledge or set of skills. I want my children to be taught this at school as accurately and thoroughly as possible, covering simple and complex code.”
What is this simple and complex code? I have asked many times.
Calling things we all know by other metalanguage serves to mystify something which is not mysterious at all. But if it is not mysterious, we don’t need them to advise us.
Who decided, and when, that knowing letter sounds is now to be called ‘alphabetic code’?
And where is the demarcation between simple and complex?
People are being bamboozled by this nonsense. People at DfE are certainly bamboozled.
Our taxes are paying for our own bamboozlement.
To save you or anyone stopping here time, here’s the key passage from Govt expert Gordon Askew:
” too many [schools] continue to teach children to apply multi cueing strategies when actually reading, during specific reading practise [sic] and when reading across the curriculum. It is no good looking for phonics to impact on reading overall when children are not in fact taught to apply it as the strategy for decoding unknown words.”
So, Jacqui, with Gordon, it’s phonics, only phonics, first, fast and only and ‘across the curriculum’. None of your multi-cueing strategies here, thank you very much.
The bullet they / we will all have to bite is that children who can’t read have not been taught. It is not a matter that they have been taught wrong – it is that they have not been taught at all.
Whatever has been applied to them, whatever they have been made to do, they have not learned i.e. they have not been taught. And after year 2 this state of affairs is likely to continue for them.
If we really care, we will give every child that needs it time with a specialist reading teacher using whatever methods she can make to work, so that they don’t get past years 1 and 2 not reading, however much it costs.
Tinkering with the general curriculum, blaming the previous key stage(s) will not make a ha’porth of difference.
“There’s a remarkable woman with immense probity who advises the government on which phonics schemes are worth buying” There’s more than one -not all women though.
The govt want cheap. Cheap as poss. Phonics sounds cheap to them. It’s been sold to them as a bargain.
Proper trained teachers with proper beautiful books in beautiful surroundings, that we would want for all our kids? No thanks.
Thanks again, Michael, for posting this. I’ve had chance to read it now my guests have left.
I can’t comment on the validity and quality of Y1 testing. I’m in no position to agree or disagree with that. However, I do agree with what Gordon says about ‘only’ phonics, which I explained to you at length (for a change!) in a previous post.
I see multi-cueing strategies undermining accurate reading frequently. I’ve just this minute posted to Stephen about exactly that with an exemplification of how I find inaccurate decoding affects comprehension.
I liked it when you said I was flexible – I like to think I am! – but I think you’re referring to how I incorporate phonics at home with my own children during reading for pleasure. It is flexible and dynamic but it’s still not about multi-cueing. I agreed that absorption of whole words and phonic patterns takes place when I read aloud to my children if they are looking at the print when I read. However, I don’t teach the learning of whole words as a strategy. I teach decoding for reading words until they become automatic. As I said to you before, I like to unpick even ‘tricky’ words like ‘was’, precisely because I don’t think they are that tricky at all. This is very much along the lines of Debbie’s ‘incidental phonics’ approach. I find this enables the children I teach to read more words, more language and so more books sooner and with a higher degree of accuracy, satisfaction and pleasure.
I do teach children to apply phonics ‘as the strategy for decoding unknown words’ when we read real books for pleasure at home (if they want to have a go) and ‘during reading practise’ [I won’t say sic – and I hasten to add that it’s your sic on Gordon, not my sic on any error of yours – because I know I make plenty of my own errors when typing so quickly!] of decodable texts brought home from school; that’s my most golden of golden principles.
Let’s work it out. Let’s be accurate. Let’s not guess. We don’t need to.
For the classroom, I think systematic synthetic phonics is essential with a commitment to teach the full code from simple to complex alongside encouragement of interest in and love of real books.
I’m not sure I’ve been saying anything very different from the key points made after all.
But I still think we had started to find important things we agree on, you and I!
All best wishes, Jacqui
PS I’m very pleased I’ve managed to produce a shortish post. I’m making progress.
Hi Tom,
As both you and Stephen Krashen refer to the Clackmannanshire research (Stephen on a related thread via his collection of articles seemingly arguing against the need for systematic synthetic phonics), I thought this might be of interest to some people:
http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=170&n_issueNumber=59
By the way, the vast majority of children reaching or exceeding the benchmark for the Year One Phonics Screening Check are reaching or exceeding level 2 in the Year Two national reading assessments (although these are teacher assessments and not standardised reading tests because many teachers and the teachers’ unions object to ‘tests’ preferring to use their subjective ‘assessment’ of children’s reading). These latest figures show a rise in Year Two reading alongside the year on year rise in children’s word-level phonics check. Whilst Michael and Stephen write as if it is a fact that children’s decoding capacity does not affect reading comprehension.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/focus-on-phonics-vindicated-by-results
Can you explain to us what you think this means: “a rise in Year Two reading” ?
These nitty gritty questions are never answered, Michael
Was it test scores on this test?
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/439482/Sample_ks1_Englishreading_paper1_promptanswerbooket.pdf
And what is being compared to what, in terms of what you describe as a ‘rise’?
Regarding: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/focus-on-phonics-vindicated-by-results
The claim is that performance on reading tests is better now that there is more emphasis on teaching phonics. There was a clear improvement in the percentage of 6 year olds doing well, and a modest improvement for 7 year olds.
It depends on the kind of test that was used. Tests given to young children are usually heavy on word attack, word recognition type subtests, which are really tests of phonics, and light on genuine reading comprehension subtests. I suspect that the test given to 6 year olds was more phonics-heavy than the one given to seven year olds.
But I don’t know. The background information linked to the article did not contain any detail about the nature of the reading tests.
That is just a press release from a Govt minister, known for bending the truth. It is not evidence.
I reread Debbie Hepplewhite’s comment and see now that there was no standardized test, but that the evaluation was actually the teachers’ subjective assessment. This might have been based largely on performance on phonics tasks.
“By the way, the vast majority of children reaching or exceeding the benchmark for the Year One Phonics Screening Check are reaching or exceeding level 2 in the Year Two national reading assessments”
This is blatant obfuscation.
There is no link between phonics screening check results and year 2 reading. See the Govt’s own information here. Phonics screener results have improved – year 2 reading HAS NOT. Nobody will follow you, Debbie, if you keep putting out this nonsense. Teachers are intelligent people.
This first page also states that girls continue to do better than boys. Are people not teaching phonics properly to boys? Does phonics work better on girls? https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/463002/SFR32_KS1_2015_Text.pdf
And can I have it clarified here: what is the ‘reading’ that is being tested here? Reading words out loud? Comprehension? A mix of both? If a mix of both, what loading is there between one and the other? Are all the tests across England the same? If it’s teachers doing the testing, are the results factoring in the pressure teachers are under to ‘prove’ that the methods are working? Ie to fudge the results so that they are in less danger of being turned into an academy? (David elsewhere has of course been quite eloquent about how useless teachers own testing is. Perhaps this applies here too?)
If it’s going to be claimed that the reading tests at yr 2 show that reading has ‘improved’, I can think of at least two ways in which that can be interpreted: good readers got better; poor readers learned to read. Or, indeed, something more complicated: the kind of readers who were good (in previous pre-phonics eras) are now better; the kind of readers who were not good (in previous pre-phonics eras) are now learning to read thanks to phonics.
Do the stats show these things? (provided we all know what ‘reading’ means in this context).
Reading assessment in year 2 – for reporting for KS1 SATs. This is what happens in all the schools I know about, in London. I am aware that some places outside London do different things.
It is perfectly legit to just write what level you think a child is and leave it at that. But nobody does.
Actually, as of next summer, levels will no longer be used. But tests are coming back…
Teachers of year 2 children will have a good ball park idea of children’s levels and will assess their reading using bought-in test materials – comprehension type work. If they do well at the level 2 papers (they call them papers) they will be able to have a go at a level 3 paper.
They will also ask the child to read a book and will count how many words were read accurately and note their fluency and how they talk about what they have read. These books are kept locked away for the rest of the year and have not been seen before – they are levelled and are kept from the days when there were official books to read for SATs from Govt.
The school will be moderated by advisers from the local authority plus teachers and literacy experts from other schools, to make sure people are comparing like with like, and may be invited to help moderate other schools.
LAs provide training, guidance and assistance to make sure schools know exactly what they are doing.
I will offer outside to anyone who says teachers cheat on this. I have never seen anything but the utmost professionalism from teachers in this process. They are awesome.
I do not interpret the “simple view” of reading as asserting that mastery of phonics is the only prerequisite to successful reading. I interpret the simple view as insisting that mastery of phonics is necessary (but not sufficient).
Evidence against this assertion, as I have pointed out, includes studies showing that intensive phonics does not produce better results than lighter phonics programs on tests of reading comprehension.
Another way to investigate this is to use multivariate analysis, which allows us to determine the impact of predictors independent of the effect of others. In our study of predictors of the PIRLS test given to ten year olds in over 40 countries, we found that access to a library was a very strong predictor of scores on a test of reading comprehension, but the amount of direct reading instruction was not. Also, the percentage of student in each country given time for independent reading in school was a positive predictor, falling just short of statistical significance. These results are consistent with the idea that reading for meaning is the real predictor of reading ability while instruction is not.
Krashen, S., Lee, S.Y. and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is the library important? Multivariate studies at the national and international level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 8(1): 26-36. (www.sdkrashen.com, under “free voluntary reading.”)
Hi Stephen,
Please can you describe what you mean by ‘basic phonics’ provision.
Reading comprehension can never exceed language comprehension – the issue is how well – fluently, automatically, comprehensively – children can lift the words off the page.
Read Jacqui Moller-Butcher’s description of prevalent word-guessing. Do you think that word-guessing is really preferable to accurate word-reading? Do you think that children who habitually resort to word-guessing and guess some words incorrectly are more likely or less likely to extract the precise meaning from comprehension (we know that children can ascertain the ‘gist’ of the text even with word-guessing – including sufficiently to still achieve in reading comprehension tests).
Do you think that children are more likely to enjoy reading or less likely to enjoy reading if they struggle to lift the words off the page?
If they struggle to decode and they are less likely to enjoy reading, they are less likely to read and then we have the ‘Matthew Effect’ described in detail by Keith Stanovich – an extremely renowned researcher.
If children cannot decode new words accurately to come up with a pronunciation (new as in not in their spoken vocabularies), they are unable to increase their spoken language through literature even if they can deduce the meaning of the new words. Do you think this is a desirable state of affairs?
In England, many thousands of children are now enabled to lift new words off the page that would not have previously been able to do so from less phonics teaching. In the pilot phonics check in 2011 in 300 schools, the national percentage of children reaching the benchmark in the check was 32%. In 2015, the national average percentage was 77%. In 753 schools, 95% to 100% of the children achieved or exceeded the benchmark. Those schools will still have weaker readers than others, but any children with impoverished vocabularies are enabled to access books accurately and with more confidence. No doubt they can also spell and write better to express themselves and this will no doubt have a huge effect on their self esteem. Are you suggesting that this move to more intensive and comprehensive phonics provision in England leading to such an increase is not a good thing, is neither here nor there – rather than a good thing?
To conclude, no-one is suggesting for a moment that exposure to spoken communication and a rich array of literature should be diminished – but phonics proponents work hard to ensure that every single child can lift the words off the page to enhance their ability to read independently and to encourage children to develop their own love of reading – which in turn will open up a whole new world as we all know.
“no-one is suggesting for a moment that exposure to spoken communication and a rich array of literature should be diminished” – It really doesn’t matter whether anyone has or has not ‘suggested’ it. What we really need to know is if it has or has not been diminished in the real world. Some of my students have suggested that it has. I don’t know.
It has
I refer you to the government’s own information which states that teaching phonics has improved children’s ability to pass a phonics screening check, but has made no difference to children’s reading ability.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/463002/SFR32_KS1_2015_Text.pdf
Reading ability will depend on a child’s vocabulary once they have the ability to decode. So of itself increases in decoding will take a long time to feed through to show as increased reading ability.
This description depends on a view that ‘possession of vocabulary’, ‘ability to decode’, and ‘reading ability’ need to be lined up in sequence and that such ‘skills’ (if that’s what they are) are hermetically sealed off from each other. In my experience, reading books with children, alongside them, leaving gaps and spaces for them to talk, scribing for them, encouraging them to write as well as read, these ‘skills’ stop being quite so distinctly separate. This is not mysterious. As adults there are words which we half-know, or think we know – at all levels – semantically, phonologically and graphically. In fact, a good deal of poetry works precisely because of these ‘clouds’ of meaning, sound and appearance of words.
I realise I might be missing some nuance, but what would you say this suggests? http://i0.wp.com/www.learningspy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015-12-30-at-11.06.36.png
And this? Just read the blue boxes.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/463002/SFR32_KS1_2015_Text.pdf
Have a look at this.
It is an explanation from an adviser to Govt of why SSP is not impacting on reading results.
It is absolutely incredible.
Apparently, schools are not meant to help 6 year olds pass the screener. It is meant to catch them out in what they can’t do. That will tell the school where their teaching has been at fault.
Then, when children know all their phonics, they are not being told to use them, and are being allowed to use other methods for themselves. It’s like they will forget how to ride their bikes if I give them a turn on my boat.
I would just laugh, but these people are advising Govt. They need to be challenged in public.
http://ssphonix.blogspot.co.uk
If I said that what I do doesn’t work, because the children are being taught something else, imagine the ridicule.
Across David’s last three blog posts about phonics, several people e.g. Debbie, Stephen, Pat, David, me (etc) asked questions of people who had made assertions, or asked for – at the very least – clarifications and got no answers. Looking back over them, I can see that some of them are crucial to the argument. Some of them involve questions about what is actually going on in classrooms – as opposed to what people say is going on, some of them involve definitions, some of them involve statements which purport to prove something. Some of them involve apparent contradictions or disagreements between people who say that they agree with each other.
Just to clarify – I have appeared as ‘IFERI’ in a posting above but I did not know that this would happen as I thought I was posting under ‘debbiehep’. I’ll sign the bottom of any future postings just in case that accidentally happens again.
To clarify, there is no disagreement with methodology between Gordon Askew and myself. If anyone thinks there is, please provide the exact feature of provision where anyone thinks there is a contradiction and I’ll do my best to address that.
Reading levels have gone up over the years at level 3 for Year 2 – but it is not entirely satisfactory that ‘reading’ is teacher assessment for Year 2 national assessment. Nevertheless, according to that teacher assessment, reading and writing levels have risen since the advent of the Year One phonics check. This is according to official figures.
I agree that there can be ‘downsides’ to national testing such as teachers overdoing one aspect of teaching compared to others – but if children are practising more blending and able to decode a bank of new words with increasing accuracy and efficiency, it defies belief that anyone would consider that in itself to be a ‘bad thing’.
Regarding phonics provision leading to reduced language comprehension and experience with literature, If this is the case in some schools, then this is a matter for teacher-training – but, ironically, I am arguing the case for phonics provision to be beyond the ’20 minutes per day’ that many teachers think is the expectation as that is inadequate for pupils to apply and practise their phonics skills and for vocabulary enrichment and extending to text level work. However, what phonics lessons ‘look like’ depends on the content of the phonics programme and the practice of the teachers – because many teachers are not providing phonics lessons with sufficient practice time for the children – and I do think it is concerning that teachers feel they need routine activities with pseudo-words – and over-use of mini whiteboards is concerning too.
However, on balance, anyone who thinks we aren’t doing a better job of teaching children to read if they are better at lifting the words off the page without a plethora of guessing strategies, is mistaken. The findings of the body of research are clear that multi-cueing reading strategies can be damaging for at least some learners (many – including articulate children), and such strategies can lead to children with weak reading profiles, and we may well have an epidemic of children who stall out with their capacity and enjoyment of reading when reading words that are not in their spoken vocabulary. Re-read Jacqui Moller-Butcher’s excellent descriptions of real children’s reading habits and how to support children in their reading for the best effect. Talk to teachers in secondary schools who describe their worries at how many children cannot access the texts at secondary level and who are disaffected with school, and who have damaged self-esteem as they know nothing about the reading debate and how they have been mis-taught or not taught to read well enough. They are in danger of thinking that they are less intelligent than others and this is soul-destroying and life-destroying.
Debbie H.
1. “Reading levels” – what was being tested here? Reading words out loud? Reading passages of text out loud? Reading comprehension? All three? In what proportions? Have teachers being testing according to a standardised test? Over the years the test was administered have the same things been tested? i.e. is it ‘like for like’? What has improved? Everyone’s level? A ‘mean’ level?
2. “reduced language comprehension and experience with literature, If this is the case in some schools, then this is a matter for teacher-training ” – Well, it might be. It might also be to how a school chooses to organise itself so that all pupils can pass the tests that the government is asking it to do. Some schools may find that it cannot provide a literature-rich environment for Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 pupils. This may appear to be confirmed by the instruction ‘first, fast and only’. Might not books left lying around ‘confuse’ the pupils looking at them – according SSP arguments? the teachers/school leaders say. I have heard Nick Gibb passing that on as a piece of wisdom for teachers.
3. ” I do think it is concerning that teachers feel they need routine activities with pseudo-words – and over-use of mini whiteboards is concerning too.” I think you’ll find that teachers feel that they need many ‘routine activities’ to ‘deliver’ the phonics programme. Of course they do. There is a test. The test is how the teachers and the schools are being assessed and evaluated. The scores in the test is what is used. Teachers are well-intentioed people who want to do best by the children and best by their schools. That’s why they teach to the test. One of the most unpleasant aspects of the present test-crazy regime in schools (in all years) is the way in which teachers are vilified for teaching to the test by the very people who are in favour of the tests.
4. On the matter of Jacqui’s descriptions of being out and about with her children, or reading with them, my own experience of doing the same with mine, and comparing that to what is going on schools, I will admit to being confused. In the actual, specific moment of reading the Gruffalo with, let’s say, a three year old or four year old, or in the actual specific moment of looking at a cereal packet, or writing down a story that my child is telling me, I will of course of course of course be using ‘multi cue strategies’ with that child. The child may well be leading the show: telling me, asking me, remembering, inventing all sorts of things. Now, on the one hand I’m hearing that this is ‘confusing’ and ultimately wrong for a child to be doing these things. (I don’t agree). And on the other, I’m hearing how this is all fine.
As it happens, ultimately it doesn’t really matter what SSF proponents say, parents and carers will go on reading non-phonically regular books and texts with their children and children will go on asking their carers about these texts and telling their carers what is or might be written there. This will go on happening. In fact, many children who are described as ‘learning to read’ by schools are sitting at home using keyboards and writing down things on e.g. BBC websites, or reading what it says on websites such as YouTube. Much of this will enable them to figure how text works in a variety of different ways.
Hi Debbie – you most certainly are not under any obligation to answer my queries in my last substantive post, can you say one way or the other if you will be/won’t be?
Debbie.
Did you read Gordon’s blog? It is about how the year 1 phonics screener is not impacting enough on year 2 reading levels. He is effectively saying that too many children are passing the screener because they have been taught what they needed to know in order to pass. He sees this as some form of cheating. Does he want children who have not been taught anything to do the test? Can you people see what you are doing to our children and teachers? You have persuaded Govt that everyone should be taught discreet phonics lessons. But teachers can’t be trusted to do it, so we must have a test to aim for. Then we do the test and Gordon says too many pass – we must be cheating. And you agree with him and publicise his views. It is a shocking attitude you have to the teaching profession. You are spreading the poison too, that year 2 teachers cannot be trusted to report their children’s reading levels properly, so they must be wanting to cheat too, their unions are complicit in this. This is disgraceful from someone who has the ear of the DfE and secretaries of state for education. If we teachers are cheats and liars, you need to call us out on it properly. But you have what you want – Yr 2 testing is coming back.
And are you still talking about guessing? I can’t believe this. What you call guessing could apply to every and any reading activity. I see cat. I decode the sounds c/a/t/ and then, in putting them together, I ‘guess’ ‘cat’. I can remember doing this as a child. Once I’d ‘guessed’ right a few times, I knew. That gave me confidence to go on and ‘guess’ some more
Why will you never answer my questions about the books you use and the metalanguage you seem to have invented, simple code / complex code? I found out today that others call it initial code / extended code. Why SP / SSP? Different people even have different definitions for the Ss in SSP. Do you expect sensible and intelligent teachers and school leaders to ignore all this?
Why will you not answer my questions about the ‘cumulatively decodable’ ‘books’ you use? Are you ashamed of them?
If you and your IFERI board of directors, including Professor Sir Jim Rose, for goodness’ sake, continue to insinuate to government that teachers are incompetent at best and cheats at worst, and that highly trained, hugely experienced expert teachers who get results, just teach guesswork, I will never stop coming back at you.
There is a sub-text and an undertone to everything I have read or heard of yours. I wonder who you are really talking to, who is your audience? DfE procurers of education. I wonder what you are really saying? Teachers don’t know what they are doing. Let me sort them out.
I will put my mortgage on this next:
If we really want to eradicate illiteracy from this country, we need to give every child who comes out of year two not reading at the appropriate level, their own specialist reading teacher. There is no way that you will be able to prevent some children being in this position. You could be firing expertly taught SP / SSP at every reception and year one and two child for all their waking hours for three years, including at weekends, and you will still have some who come out of year two, not reading well.
I despair when I see children in year 3,4,5,6 who can’t read well enough. I weep when I think that they have to come to school every day and fail. Every day. Every day they have it rammed home to them that they are failures. And you are telling Govt that SP / SSP at age 4,5,6 will prevent it. You are giving the govt the excuse to leave these children in misery.
We should give these children each time with a specialist teacher. If we are serious about eradicating illiteracy, this is what we will do.
I don’t really care about the phonics / real reading idealogical battles, who gets the funding and who doesn’t, who gets the ear of the secretary of state. I care about the children I see standing in front of me every day. And I am not going to let you tell me, or tell Govt that I am lying when I say I and many people like me can help them.
Do you really think the govt cares a fig about our children? Do they buggery. We should be ganging up on them, helping each other to help the children.
Pat, I’m running out of time to answer, so sorry, but I did want to suggest that I think you might not be as at odds with Debbie (and me) as you seem to think.
You say in your post that you teach children to decode /c/ /a/ /t/ and then ‘guess’ cat. That’s not what I’d call guessing; to me that’s decoding. Teaching guessing as a reading strategy is when you do the opposite and discourage children from decoding letter/sound correspondences – and you say use the picture, use the first letter and guess the word etc. This makes children feel good about reading at first – I can understand that – but the problem with this approach is that, later, it means many children mistakenly read words like scarcely as scratchy, fringe as frig and refrigerator as refresh. These are actual examples and I have an ever increasing bank from children I support (not my own children here) which are guessed with a few letters and a lot of hope, but not decoding skills, from left to right, right through the word. It causes quite a problem for comprehension for many children right through primary and secondary, and that’s the reason it’s raised so often.
Words that have been learnt so well that they are recognised immediately aren’t decoded for the sake of it. In your example, you say that once they’ve guessed (blended?) cat a few times, they know it. Yes! I agree!
Applying phonic knowledge to decode and blend sounds to read words is what you’re doing, isn’t it? It’s certainly what you described in your ‘cat’ example. You seem to be seeing the jump from the slightly separated sounds of /c/ /a/ /t/ to the pronounced word cat as the guess. I certainly don’t see that as a guess but as decoding.
Aren’t we, in fact, using the same approach? Apologies if I’ve got all that wrong.
Best wishes,
Jacqui
I don’t teach children to decode and then guess. I never use the word guess. Never. I never ask a child to look at a picture and then guess. Never.
I was stating that any and every aspect of reading could be labelled ‘guessing’ if we like. Anything I learn moves along a continuum from totally unknown to known in all circumstances. The closer I am to the unknown end the more what I do will seem like guesswork. The closer I get to known in all circumstances, the less it will seem like guesswork. What it really is, from one end to the other, is deductive reasoning.
If we continually go on about word word word then there is little to discuss apart from the guess / decode dichotomy.
If we are allowed to think for a minute about phrases, sentences, paragraphs and books, there is more scope for thinking about what is really going on in real reading.
Think word, and decode makes all the sense.
Think book? Is decode, decode, decode the be all and end all? Nope.
From a real life year 1 teacher
https://andanotherfewthings.wordpress.com/2015/12/30/am-i-actually-doing-this/
Thank you for posting this link. I think it’s a great post which gives an insight into classroom reality and I found it very positive. Best wishes, Jacqui
And, Debbie. I have done many trawls through your videos and talks. You always say research supports SP / SSP, but then never show us any? You never mention the titles or authors or give references to this research. Where is it?
Earlier on this thread, asked for evidence by skrashen you posted a link to a press release from Nick Gibb. Is that the best you can do? It’s laughable.
Pat – you are sounding increasingly aggressive and winding yourself up about my work as an individual – there is no need for this. If you go to the Reading Reform Foundation site at http://www.rrf.org.uk , you can find links to research and information there. If you go to Susan Godsland’s site at http://www.dyslexics.org.uk , you can find plenty of references there, if you go to the International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction at http://www.iferi.org , you can find links to references there.
Further, governments in the USA, Australia and England have made their decisions and policies based on their scrutiny of a body of research, it is not for me as an individual to have to reprove everything and certainly I don’t have to provide research references to you as individuals.
Look at the work of people such as Professor Kevin Wheldall, Professor James Chapman and Professor Bill Tunmer and others who are steeped in research and are more than qualified to summarise the findings – look at the references they provide in their papers and check out their professional reviews of, for example, the research on Reading Recovery and its multi-cueing reading strategies.
Check out historic documents such as the Rose Review which provides plenty of research references.
I am prepared to clarify worries that people have regarding practice in the schools – indeed, I share some of these worries although often for different reasons. I am prepared to explain about the Simple View of Reading as a model put forward by the Department for Education as a ‘useful conceptual framework’. If you want to question the statistics from the phonics check or the Year 2 reading and writing standards, take that up with the DfE. To my knowledge, the phonics check results have risen year on year, and level 3 at Year 2 has risen in recent years. Look at the graphs and statistics yourself rather than implying, indeed stating, that this is not the case.
Debbie H.
Ah. I see. You get to appoint yourself as the one who decides the agenda of what we are allowed to discuss.
You don’t get it do you? I am not promoting a scheme or a way of working. I actually work with real live children every day and teach them to read. But you reject that out of hand and tell people lies about what I do. What you say threatens my professionalism and my livlihood.
I don’t wind myself up.
You wind me up with your constant harping on that what I do, all I do, is teach children to guess.
If you were able to promote your schemes without denigrating my work, I would not bother with you.
Pat – I don’t know you and I don’t know what you do in your teaching.
Are you are a Reading Recovery teacher and you don’t like me drawing attention to the reviews of RR research which challenge the methodology of RR?
Is it that you are a teacher who specifically teaches multi-cueing reading strategies and therefore any time I draw attention to the worries about teaching them as an approach being potentially damaging to at least some children that you take this as a personal comment about you and your teaching?
I am not ‘denigrating your work’ but I do actively draw attention to the worries about Reading Recovery and multi-cueing reading strategies – often.
Are you aware of the Science and Technology select committee of 2009 that criticised the then government for its promotion and funding of Reading Recovery as a significant part of the ‘Every Child a Reader’ initiative? The conclusions of that inquiry were that the government was wrong to roll out Reading Recovery and that RR was not in line with the recommendations of the Rose Report which the government had accepted.
Are you going to take this up with the politicians who drew these conclusions?
Are you going to challenge Professors Chapman, Weldall and Tunmer for their reviews of RR research?
Read Dr Louisa Moats’ comments about multi-cueing strategies in the paper below. Are you going to challenge her knowledge and understanding of the body of research on reading over the past four decades or so?
http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=509
I’m genuinely sorry that you feel so personally attacked by my postings – but I am even more sorry for the children who do not get taught well enough not because teachers aren’t trying their very hardest at all times (I know they are), but because they may not be fully knowledgeable and aware of the full findings and implications of research.
Many teachers working their socks off with multi-cueing reading strategies may be oblivious to the consequences on children’s reading profiles including their longer term profiles. Secondary teachers such as David Didau are likely to be more aware of these consequences than the dedicated early years and infant teachers.
Many teachers working their socks off to provide the kind of phonics teaching they’ve been led to believe is ‘what they should do’ may be unaware that we need to move on in general terms in professional development for phonics provision nationally.
All schools need to achieve the kind of phonics decoding levels in 753 of our schools. It is achievable when people know how. But teachers also need to understand more fully that multi-cueing reading strategies which detract from phonics and dilute phonics will not serve many children well enough and may be doing them a grave disservice.
As much as that might offend your feelings as a hard-working teacher, it’s a fact.
Debbie
There are nearly 5 million children in UK primary schools. Reading Recovery has never been available to more than 12,000 at any one time, a very small fraction. And yet you continually blame RR for all that you think ails. The major finding in Australia for why RR did not revolutionise nationwide literacy levels was that it did not reach enough children.
Where are the thousands of ex RR teachers queuing up to tell you how terrible RR is?
Why don’t you carry on promoting how great your SP / SSP is? Fine. Go ahead. You have what you want. You have daily phonics lessons in FS and both KS1 classes, moving into older and older classrooms. You have the phonics screener check. You have formal testing coming back to end of KS1. RR has never had such blanket coverage in UK.
And yet you still continually denigrate RR. Why? You have what you want. Now run with it and stop telling me that I don’t do what I do and that I do do what I don’t do.
Put your considerable energies into strengthening what you have, and stop slagging my work.
Pat – I don’t work in Australia so I can only report on descriptions from people who do work in Australia and New Zealand and that includes researchers, teachers and specialists for learning difficulties. Reading Recovery and the methodology that underpins RR (the multi-cueing reading strategies) in the main prevail in Australia and New Zealand – and this methodology has led to huge concerns and low levels of literacy for a huge number of people in Australia and New Zealand.
In our context in England, what is concerning is that the weakest learners may be provided with multi-cueing reading strategies and phonics may be diminished for them as a consequence because multi-cueing will be strongly added into the mix. In England, I suspect that phonics will be increased in content within RR provision in that we have had the Rose Review, the promotion of the Simple View of Reading and the official push for systematic synthetic phonics.
When I have approached the RR national leader for a link to the literature which describes officially ‘how’ RR might have changed in light of the research findings and the Rose Review and promotion of SSP in England, I drew a blank and no link could be sent to me. I was told, ‘Why would we provide this information when we have a one year Master’s course to train teachers’ or words to that effect. In other words, no transparency. In contrast, as you are familiar with my work, you will find total transparency about methodology, content and guidance through freely available, no charge, material.
I can appreciate that you are angry with me as you see me as denigrating the methodology you support, but, as I suggested earlier, you therefore need to take this up with those people who have more direct experience with the consequences of RR in their countries and who have more direct experience with research findings. I have found more than ample literature to support my own findings that multi-cueing strategies for guessing new and unknown words damages children’s reading reflex and it is the very weakest children who tend to resort to guessing leading to many errors and detracting from phonics application. You have read Jacqui M-B’s description in earlier postings of children’s wild word-guessing – guessing should not be taught or encouraged.
Debbie H.
Hi Debbie
Any chance of you answering my queries too?
Hello again, Debbie. If there were any chance you might be able to answer my queries in my last substantive post on this thread, that would be great. Pat suggested that the first question on my list was one that you wouldn’t answer. (She suggested that when I posted it up earlier, so that’s a few days now you haven’t answered it.) As I said, you’re under no obligation to me or anyone else here. However, on that matter of the first question about ‘reading levels’ and the test that determined these, you were making a big and important statement. I believe it’s one that the government make and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it being recycled in many places.
As you can see, on that one matter (there were others) I was trying to drill down into exactly what questions were being asked of the children, whether these questions were universal, the same as before in the comparison being made and, if they involved both reading aloud and comprehension, what proportion?
My point in general here is that the tests may well have been reliable AND valid. Hurrah. On the other hand they may well have been neither. Boo. Either way, I really think we need to know, don’t you? I mean you wouldn’t want to be citing research that was in any way problematic – or, the technical word for that – dodgy.
Can I help you? There are claims that the improved pass levels in the year 1 screener is leading, has led, to improved reading levels in year 2. Nick Gibb said so in the link that was sent as ‘evidence’ to skrashen, your poor friend who thought he was getting into a serious discussion and gave links to his own academic papers and books. I felt so sorry for him. The Gov.uk website said that there had been no improvement in yr 2 reading levels in 2015. I posted a link to that.
The year 2 levels in question are from teacher assessment. Assessment like I described earlier – not the same in every school. Nobody except the schools and teachers themselves and their borough LA moderators really know how levels were decided. We must take their assessments with a pinch of salt. Until it suits us to use them.
This is tricky because year 2 teachers and their unions have been accused of not wanting to have formal testing. These accusations imply either that someone wants to cheat or that someone is not up to the job of teaching – formal assessment would catch them out – or that teachers are too soppy to put their kids through a proper robust and vigorous testing regime, enemies of promise that they are.
So, on the one hand, year 2 teacher assessments are being used to make it look as if the year 1 screener is improving year 2 reading. And on the other hand we are not supposed to be going about acknowledging any validity in the teacher assessments.
But never mind, because in 2016 formal testing is coming back to year 2.
This will be very tricky indeed because the tests are meant to be hard at first so that not enough children pass and then the Govt can give out orders for the next year’s teaching and the next year more will pass and the Govt can claim credit for sorting out these shocking lazy teachers.
But if the reading test is hard, the results will not help to show that the phonics screener is improving reading.
Get out of that one.
And what did the teachers test? Reading out loud? Comprehension? Both? In what proportions? In the same proportions across all tests? In same proportions from one year to the next?
Different in every school. It is ligit to just give a level from what the teacher knows of the child, having worked with them all year. There doesn’t have to be a test at all. But common practice is to give level 2 paper. If they do well, they are offered a level 3 paper. And they read aloud to their teacher or a key stage leader or someone else decided by the school – a book they will never have seen before. The words read out loud accurately are counted and the child will be asked questions about the book. All these factors of reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension from the test paper will be juggled together and the teachers will decide on a level. The paper itself will give a level. Me and my colleague always laugh – If you get 6/20 points for example that might mean 2C. But if you get 7/20 points that will be going into 2B. That’s why they don’t just rely on a test paper. 2B used to be the holy grail, but it’s 2A now.
All this is very high stakes for teachers and schools. They have to get percentages of 2B and level 3 etc based on how the kids came out of foundation stage. And these year 2 levels will dictate percentages for KS2 SATs. School managers spend half their lives dealing with all this. And you might be getting a picture of what teaching to the test might mean. I know kids in year 1 and 2 who never do art, music, science, can’t use scissors, draw like 2 year olds… never have a story read top them just for the sake of it…They never miss phonics though, whether they can read or write already, or not.
And… levels don’t exist anymore. Now it’s statements that tell us if a child is average etc. for year group. I don’t know how test results will be reported.
I expect David Didau here will have to point out to Debbie therefore how unreliable all this is. (David posted here a few weeks ago on the unreliability of teacher-testing for a variety of reasons.)
Is this really, honestly, really, really, really true: what you wrote: “I know kids in year 1 and 2 who never do art, music, science, can’t use scissors, draw like 2 year olds… never have a story read to them just for the sake of it…” ???
Secondary schools and their Tweeters and edu bloggers spend a great deal of time muttering to each other that primaries inflate children’s levels (called lying in other places) – they don’t -and how they have to deal with this and are on a hiding to nothing because their results have to be based on % predictions from KS2 SATs. Of course, from one end of the school to another, the children are liable to change, move on, new ones come in etc – but the %s stay the same. If you do well, you have to do better next time.
Primaries will do anything to hit their targets (and not lie!) so that they can’t be forced to academize. Secondaries have nearly all fallen into the academy trap already.
Some people see the way out as becoming a famous edu-blogger and then get picked up to swan around Whitehall bigging up your own pet projects. Education is becoming a branch of showbiz.
It’s shocking for all of us. And for the kids. We should be ganging up on the Govt together. As I keep saying, they don’t care if our kids can’t read. That’s peanuts to them.
At primary yr 6 my daughter was a level 5c, so they made her sit level 6 Sats which she found too hard and was upset. Now (aged 14) she is predicted some As and A*s for her GCSEs so they are giving her A* papers to do which she is finding too hard and getting fed up.
Yes – true. They might get music, art, science, making things once a year, so not totally never but seldom enough for it to be never really. I know kids who miss PE to be taken for intervention – phonics. I have seen them get changed, then get taken to intervention, then brought back in time to get changed back. They cried. And so did I. I have threatened to murder anyone I see doing this after Xmas. It’s the only way. Story time at the end of the day happens if it is ordained by management that everyone has to do it.
This one for Jacqui B: You wrote:
“I liked it when you said I was flexible – I like to think I am! – but I think you’re referring to how I incorporate phonics at home with my own children during reading for pleasure. It is flexible and dynamic but it’s still not about multi-cueing. I agreed that absorption of whole words and phonic patterns takes place when I read aloud to my children if they are looking at the print when I read. However, I don’t teach the learning of whole words as a strategy. I teach decoding for reading words until they become automatic. As I said to you before, I like to unpick even ‘tricky’ words like ‘was’, precisely because I don’t think they are that tricky at all. This is very much along the lines of Debbie’s ‘incidental phonics’ approach. I find this enables the children I teach to read more words, more language and so more books sooner and with a higher degree of accuracy, satisfaction and pleasure.”
The more I read this passage, the more mystified I become. Not, I hasten to add, about what you are doing, say you’re doing or think you’re doing. I think, as adults, we do a lot of that. What I’m mystified by is that your children might be doing and whether you think there might be any mismatch between what you think you’re doing and what they’re actually doing.
So, when we’re reading with small children, they are in many ways a ‘black box’. We do stuff with them and to them and then other stuff comes out in the form of their talk, reading and writing. However, these are symptoms rather than consequences. Inside, they are doing many things that we don’t have access to. So, to be specific, you don’t know and can’t know exactly cause and effect as you’ve described it. You don’t know and can’t know (and, I hasten to add, neither can I) whether the phonics teaching you describe is the bit that gets the given effect, as opposed to the multi-cueing you say they’re not doing. After all, you’re not in control of their eyes or brains. They might be doing stuff that you don’t know they’re doing. To take one example: you or I might try as hard as we might like (I don’t, but we’re talking about you), to get a child to decode a word, but the little sod might be secretly letting their eyes drift along the line to pick up a syntactical clue to help him/her. They might even dissemble: pretend they’re doing one thing rather than another, particularly if you appear to favour one method rather than another.
In short, I don’t believe that what you’re describing as hermetically sealed different processes are like that when seen from the child’s point of view.
Hi Michael
Happy 2016!
Sorry to confuse and mystify. Not intended.
My answer might crash David’s site – and I was doing so well with my last short post! You might need a snack break halfway through but I hope you’ll see that I’ve written this genuinely, carefully, as sensibly as I can with actual practice in mind, and with no attempt to annoy you.
All best wishes
Jacqui M 🙂
I can see your point. I think you’re right. Mostly, when children read alone or aloud to me, I don’t know for sure how they are reading – I don’t know exactly what is going on in their minds at the point of reading. Very true.
But, without the benefit of scientific expertise of my own, I still try to know and try to work things out about their reading habits and processes so that I can try to help them. That’s what teachers do.
For example, if a Y6 child reads a few pages of the first Harry Potter to me fluently without errors, however they’re doing it, I can deduce that they don’t need much help with the decoding. I wouldn’t interrupt or insist on any sounding out of any words they’re reading fluently and accurately.
And, as you say, they might, at a speed faster than lightning, be reading ahead (and back) (and back and forth) to guess lots of words that they can’t really decode. They might be doing this for words they can decode but don’t understand. They might be reading fluently only using whole word recognition; they might have memorised the 12,000 individual different words that are used in the first Harry Potter and be using sight memory for every word they read. They might be using pictures (on the pages there are any… not so many in HP) to guess lots of words too. And they might be using just the first letter of each word plus all of the above to guess words that they can’t fully decode.
If they’re doing all of this, and not making mistakes, they don’t need a firm grasp of phonics, I agree.
On the other hand, they might, in the main, have a very firm grasp of phonics and be reading mainly using phonic patterns that they have been taught explicitly and those they have absorbed from watching me read and from their own reading.
If they are reading fluently, I can’t know which of the above they are doing when.
But, common sense tells me that if they are reading back and forth in order to use context to guess words that they know but can’t decode effortlessly, it’s going to take deciseconds longer than effortless decoding and that sounds like hard work to me. All those deciseconds soon build up and if that’s what they’re doing, I can’t know for sure, but it also sounds like a good reason for finding reading non-pleasurable and choosing to play computer games and watch films instead. If that’s what they’re doing, I don’t want them to. I want to intervene and give them a more efficient strategy for recognising words they already know. That is very difficult to do in retrospect when I don’t even know they’re doing it, as you say. The only symptoms might be slow reading speed and a dislike of books.
Better to try to rule that one out at the outset.
If they are reading back and forth to guess the meaning of words that they know they don’t understand, I do want them to do that – if they want to too! I’d hope that they’re doing this voluntarily due to curiosity and not because they have to, and so I don’t think that this would impact on their reading for pleasure. I’d want to let them get on with that. Again, I won’t know they’re doing it but if they are it can only help comprehension in the long run. Nothing to change there.
If they’re reading fluently because they have committed 12,000 words to memory and they are able to recognise 12,000 words on sight as whole symbols without any phonic knowledge (implicit or explicit) then, if I knew, I’d be impressed but I’d also think they might be defying natural laws. Again, I don’t know for sure, but common sense tells me it’s unlikely. I think the human brain can only cope with a few thousand symbolic units.. but what do I know? Don’t answer that!
I can be fairly sure that they aren’t relying on pictures in the first Harry Potter so that rules that cue out.
They might be using initial letters and all of the above multi-cues to read. I just don’t know. However, if they are relying only on first letters with sight recognition of a few thousand words and reading back and forth over sentences to work out the other 6000 words or so, I can be pretty sure that they’d be exhausted! Again, another possible hidden cause for disliking reading and so one I’d want to rule out if at all possible during early teaching of reading.
We might, inadvertently, actually be unpicking some valid reasons for the old problem of getting children to read for pleasure here… interesting.
Therefore, I think that good readers (it’s safe to say that reading isn’t exhausting for good readers) really must be using a lot of automatic phonic knowledge to read a lot of what they read, coupled with a good bank of words they’ve committed to sight but with only a relatively small amount of reading back and forth to work out meanings of unknown words, phrases or sentences (unless it’s a jolly complex, like the phonics debate!). Eye-tracking data should tell us how much a good reader typically looks back and forth over a text. I’ll look into that.
However much we use sentences and context to work out meaning, I don’t think good readers are reading back and forth in order to recognise words (or to realise they don’t recognise them) in the first place. That’s pretty instantaneous for skilled readers. We can just think about our own practice for that. I never use a sentence to decode a word – I know immediately if I can read it aloud and if I know its meaning. I also know whether or not I can read it aloud (after a second or two’s thought) but don’t know its meaning.
I never, ever incorrectly guess a known word for a known word or a known word for an unknown word and I don’t make up words for words I don’t recognise either.
So why do I think skilled readers are using a lot of phonic knowledge? I’m not going to give you a link to research because I know it’s pointless. I love an observation, so here’s one.
My husband’s name is Jens. Every single literate English speaking person (without any exception in the 25 years I’ve known him and he says for the years before too) on sight of his name, pronounces his name as Yenz (/z/), not Yens (/s/). We aren’t surprised by the ‘y’. However, automatically, they pronounce the ‘s’ as a /z/.
Try it on someone!
In Denmark, the name is actually pronounced as /y/ /e/ /n/ /s/ with a soft ‘s’.
Adult English readers/speakers seem to instinctively know that ‘s’ is pronounced /z/ on the end of a word when following the phoneme /n/. One thing I do know is that they aren’t reading his name from sight memory, they’ve often never seen or heard of it before, yet they all pronounce it in this common way. Why do they opt for /z/ over /s/ for the letter ‘s’? This must be, I think, implicit phonic knowledge learnt through exposure to texts if not taught explicitly. Around half the time, the letter ‘s’ represents /z/ in English words, and it certainly does so often when ending a word following the phoneme /n/ – mens, hens, pans, stones, canes, tins, ribbons……..and many, many more besides. This means that the letter ‘s’ is as regularly a representation of /z/ as it is /s/.
Interestingly, you (Michael R!) often ask why ‘was’ isn’t ‘woz’ when you’re being provocative about SSP to ‘prove’ English is too irregular for words. Few readers are conscious of their knowledge of the code and yet they decode unknown words following the pattern, learnt somehow.
So, I say again that I’m guessing that if the reader is reading a chapter of the first Harry Potter to me fluently, they are probably relying a lot on phonic code learnt by osmosis or learnt through explicit teaching that has become automatic and intuitive, or both. I doubt very much that they’re relying only on the other cues, if they’re fluent and largely error-free.
However, if a Y6 reader does not read fluently to me and they misread words I can start to infer what they might be doing that causes them to make mistakes.
I need to, really, if I’m going to help.
If they misread five words in five sentences I can look at the words they have misread and try to work out what they are doing, at what is going wrong. They solider on but it’s not as pleasurable to misread five words in five sentences as it is to read five sentences accurately. The mistakes cloud understanding and make the process that bit more non-pleasurable.
From keeping careful records, I’ve noticed that most of the mistakes of the children I work with follow a pattern. The first, middle and last letter are usually common in the word from the text and the misread word. They match consonants more frequently than vowels. The matches are more usually simple code graphemes (single letters) rather than digraphs or trigraphs.
Hmmmm… this tells me something. I’m no scientist; this is no research project and I might be wrong. I can’t know for sure, but it gives me something to go on.
I think it tells me that they see the word as a whole and match it to their bank of memorised sight words. I don’t think it tells me that they’re using the rest of the sentence for clues because the words would be closer in meaning and grammatically plausible, and they usually aren’t. The clue for me is in the matching letters. It tells me that they are using some letters – usually spread out through the word and not, for example, just the first three – but aren’t using the alphabetic code fully to decode the word from left to right, as I think good readers do with ease. Of course, I could be wrong but it’s a gamble I have to take if I’m going to help, and in my case, parents usually agree it’s at least possibly right and they’d like me to act upon it.
So, now my options are:
I can teach the child to guess again. If that’s what I think they’ve done the first time, I can ask them to do it again. And again. Until they get it right. (This isn’t especially positive.)
Or, I can ignore their errors and let more reading put the habit right by itself. (This is also a gamble. It might work and I’d say it probably does, in the end, for some children. However, it’s a gamble because they might never read enough for this to happen, they may go off reading completely through frustration or they may just continue to use the same approach – or a mixture of all three.)
Or, I can ask them to decode with the existing phonic knowledge they have. They might not have enough knowledge for the words in question and so I can teach them the explicit code they need to decode the words they have been unable to read so far. (I’d then have to look more closely at the misread words to look for patterns – to deduce which phonic patterns cause this Y6 child problems.)
Or, I can read it for them and hope they’ll learn it by sight. I could add it to a pack of sight words for the child to take home to learn, but with 20 errors in 40 sentences, this is soon going to be unwieldy.
I want to try what I think is the most efficient method to help the child read more accurately as soon as possible, not in five years’ time.
And so I’m teaching SSP for ‘re-learning to read’ for children for whom mixed methods hasn’t worked well enough.
And I teach SSP for first learning to read to try to avoid the Y6 child’s problems – problems that affect a very large number of children – in the first place.
When teaching SSP, I know that I might have to re-teach the same element of code lots of times if it is irregular or return to the element of code for more practice if it looks like another element of code and so is confusing – lots of children initially struggle with b p d as a simple example. After all, a chair looks like a chair if it’s upside down or turned around and these three letters look like the same letter in three different positions, but, with time and practice, it can be taught. Some children will get this quickly and some slowly, just as they do in maths right from Reception, when learning to read music, and in other subjects on the curriculum at different points in the school career.
Not much about teaching is easy or linear.
I know that I will have to cover a lot of code if I am to teach children the simple code through to the complex code. However, as fast as I teach it, many commit at least some of it to memory and it becomes part of their tools of automatic recognition. I don’t doubt they are learning whole words as they go – as fast as I can unpick ‘was’ for them, they learn it by sight, but I still find opportunities to teach the code because it’s more than useful for them to know that in English when ‘a’ follows ‘w’ it is often pronounced /o/ – wasp, wander, watch, wallow (I don’t give those examples for you, Michael, I know you know them well by now!).
And so, Michael, in some ways I think you are right. It’s important we admit when we touch on common ground. I really do agree that I don’t know for sure what the children I work with are doing when they read. I am very aware that I know very little and I know you know lots, and I say that genuinely.
I also know that hundreds of the children I have taught in secondary schools at opposite ends of the country, from all sorts of backgrounds, arrive in Year 7 reading inaccurately and slowly and guessing incorrectly, artificially limiting their overall comprehension of the important stuff – sentences, passages, whole texts.
Again, I can’t know for sure (what can we know with certainty?) but it seems to me that many of these children already dislike reading completely and, by then, are too embarrassed or too angry or too something to want to try to improve their reading. For many, five more years are spent struggling. This state of affairs has been a problem in our schools for a very long time.
Therefore, it’s essential to get the early stuff as right as we can, even though we can never know anything for sure.
You say you’re confused because I’m a phonics enthusiast and yet I describe reading experiences that include what you call multi-cues.
I’ll try to be clear:
I’m saying that we should teach children to use phonics to decode unknown words so that they don’t incorrectly guess words in the way I have described when they read. If they use guesswork to decode/read the unknown word and they do so incorrectly, it will automatically stop them from using context to deduce meaning of the real word.
That is an opportunity lost.
I’m saying that in order to better equip and support children to read than they have been in previous decades, they should not be taught to use multi-cues to decode/recognise/know they don’t recognise words on the page. They should be taught first and only to use phonics to decode when they are first introduced to print until much of the code they learn becomes automatically recognised. As reading of some words becomes automatic, we should continue to teach children to use phonics to decode unknown words accurately until the act of reading becomes a virtually unconscious reflex.
Therefore,
For gleaning meaning of already decoded but unknown words, phrases and sentences, I do encourage children to use different strategies (reading back and forward in a sentence and considering the whole text if appropriate, general knowledge, guesswork as necessary, all the things you mentioned and more). You call this multi-cueing for reading, reading for meaning. I agree.
But not for decoding.
Debbie
I don’t need to take up anything you decide for me with anyone you decide for me, thanks.
When people like me ask for evidence that what you advocate is scientifically proven, and ‘evidence-based’, as you claim, we expect to see comprehensive charts of figures, statistics, analysed data, descriptions of the methods you have used etc. The jargon now is ‘Show me the metrics.’
Like this: http://ilc.ioe.ac.uk/rr/documents/Reading_Recovery_in_the_United_Kingdom_and_the_Republic_of_Ireland_2013-14.pdf
There is 40 years of world-wide RR evidence. Being very sensible, they collect data about every individual child, and always have done. SP / SSP would do well to start gathering such data.
You won’t find a single word in this report that denigrates SP / SSP, by the way.
You are imposing your beliefs on all UK primary schools, expecting our tax monies to be spent on your systems. We want to know what evidence you are using to persuade the Government.
What we don’t expect is ‘literature’ and endlessly repeated and reworked statements from members of committees and groups you have set up, that do little more than denigrate other people’s teaching. That is not science.
Show me your metrics.
This new tack that if a child is allowed to use their own brain at all, and think for themselves now and then, then that will eradicate their SP/SSP learning, is actually a sad indictment of SP / SSP itself. How can it be possible that real deep meaningful learning can be knocked out of my brain by something supposedly inferior? You are hoisting yourself by your own petard there.
I just explained all this to my husband who reads and writes for a living. He is not a teacher.
Here’s what he said,
“I don’t understand all this phonics, but I can see that the government will go for it, because it’s cheap. They don’t really give a f*** if children learn to read or not.”
More husbad wisdom. I just had hysterics:
“I started off on this story about a stupid chicken who thought the sky was falling on him and moved on to War and Peace not very much later. I was really worried about that bird.
Great story that – it has everything, a lovable character in danger. You get exactly the same in War and Peace, but with more words.”
I have been doing some research.
Turns out the most strident SP/SSP fanatics work / have worked in tiny little village schools with tiny classes of white British middle class children. Not that I reckon OFSTED, but they are in failing or not very good schools to boot.
They are also all in bed with each other, with Govt advisers, with commercial scheme publishers. Check out which ones in league with each other have honours or recommend each other to lists of edu providers.
Ordinary teachers are killing themselves to respond to these people. It is shameful.
(I mean the ones who’ve spent time having a go at me at least.)
Charlatans.
Yep. Nothing they do is good enough. All their work from being 4 or 5 years old has to be marked and someone tells them how it could have been better. Teachers are ordered to do this. Imagine as adults in our daily lives, our daily work that everything we do someone tells us how it could have been better. Imagine it. Every single day. There would be nobody left standing.
Re: daughter – I have 2 clever ‘uns. One liked the academic work. One didn’t. We were on our own, so I could never upset them too much – nowhere to turn. We would always subvert, take the piss, laugh at the homework. There is always something to laugh at. If they got fed up we did it between us. Or not. I let them off if they didn’t want to do it. It’s a game, and I always let them know this. Who says we have to know everything we will ever know by the time we are 18? Stop now, come back later if you like. What would your Dad say
Maths was best – doing investigations to find a formula. We argued murderously until midnight every time over that stuff. But we found the damn formula!
I think learning in maths should involve a lot of arguing – sorting out the concept verbally. They have to be free to start shouting and challenging what we say. And we need to shout back.This is not of course allowed at school. It should be.
But if it it really is too much, tell the school you don’t want it.
It’s nice you two are finding lots to chat about but my blog isn’t the place for it. I appreciate you adding to the debate but any further off topic ranting will be deleted. Thanks
Michael Was about to apologise for saying maybe too much about Daughter’s work. Not my business. Sorry.
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