He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alters things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?
Francis Bacon
In 1978, Scared Straight! won the Academy Award for the best documentary film. It followed a group of teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks who, as part of a new crime reduction programme, were taken to a maximum security prison to be threatened, humiliated and intimidated by a bunch of murderers and rapists.
The premise was that unruly youngsters could be terrified into becoming law-abiding citizens. The film reported that
Over 8,000 juvenile delinquents have sat on these hard wooden benches and for the first time they really heard the brutal reality of crime and prison. The results of this unique programme are astounding. Participating communities report that 80 to 90 per cent of the kids that they send to Rahway go straight after leaving this stage. That is an amazing success story. And it is unequalled by traditional rehabilitation methods.
You can’t really argue with that, can you? Juvenile judge, George Nicola certainly wasn’t minded to: in the film he said, “there is no doubt in my mind…that the juvenile awareness project at Rahway Sate prison is perhaps today the most effective, inexpensive deterrent in the entire correctional process in America.”
As a direct result of the film’s success, Scared Straight style programmes began to appear all over the US in the years which followed. The original film was followed by Scared Straight! Another Story (1980), Scared Straight! 10 Years Later (1987), and the TV movie Scared Straight! 20 Years Later (1999). The programme began to be adopted in parts of Europe including the UK and everyone involved eulogised its no-nonsense, quick-and-dirty approach to crime reduction.
Sadly, it didn’t work.
Back in 1977, even before the original documentary was aired, James Finckenauer, a professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice decided the statistics looked a little too good to be true. As Matthew Syed details in Black Box Thinking, Finckenauer’s investigation of the 80-90% success rate led him to discover that they were based on a the results of a questionnaire sent to the parents and guardians of children enrolled on the Scared Straight programme. The questionnaire asked four questions:
- Have you noticed a marked change in your child’s conduct since their visit to the prison?
- Has there been a slight change in their behaviour since their visit to the prison?
- Do you think another visit is necessary for your son/daughter?
- Are there any specific areas you think we might be of some assistance to you, or your son or daughter?
Obviously, observation of ‘marked’ or ‘slight’ changes is hardly objective. We don’t even know if the changes or considered positive or negative. The questions, and, of course, any answers given, are open to interpretation. More troubling, only those who responded to the survey were included in the results. If a 1,000 questionnaires were sent out and only 100 returned, can we really infer that 80-90% of positive responses constitute “an amazing success story”? All these results told us were that 80-90% of those who had returned questionnaires were largely positive. It tells us nothing about the efficacy of the programme, so Finckenauer decided to run a randomised controlled trial.
He split teenagers in danger of becoming criminals into two groups. One group was given the Scared Straight programme, the other was the control group who were not given any kind of intervention. Judge Nicola saw this as unethical. He said that the 100s of letters he had, all attesting to the success of Scared Straight, made such an evaluation unnecessary and he did he utmost to get the trial cancelled. But eventually Finckenauer managed to get his trial started. managed to get the go ahead. When the results were published in 1982, were conclusive: scared straight made its participants more likely to commit crime.
Finckenauer said, “People were so convinced in the success of Scared Straight because it seemed so intuitive. People loved the idea that kids could be turned around through a tough session with a group of lifers. But crime turns out to be more complex than that.” (Black Box Thinking, p.176)
As is so often the case, ideology trumps reality. In Scared Straight: The Panacea Phenomenon Revisited Finckenauer details what happened next. He was dismissed as a “dilettante” and his research caricatured as “meaningless statistics”. His findings were ignored and the programme kept on running, and even expanded, despite the evidence it didn’t work.
Is any of this starting to feel familiar?
Education has suffered similar victories of ideology over reality where teachers and policy makers have opted for intuitive, easy to understand ideas over the complexity of how children actually learn. Despite the fact that teachers’ judgements are entirely subject and dubious at best, we go with what feels right and damn the evidence!
The story of the research on how children learn to read has many parallels with the Scared Straight story. Daniel Willingham gives a potted history of the so-called Reading Wars in his book, When Can You Trust The Experts? Back in the old days before educational theorists got their hands on reading, teachers taught children to read by teaching the sounds associated with each letter or letter combination. This can be slow and was often painful, but it worked. Then in the 1920s a new idea, ‘look-say’ or ‘whole word method’ started to become fashionable. The idea was that children ought to learn to read the way adults do. Adults appear to read whole phrases in one gulp and they read silently instead of sounding out. Also, adults choose to read whatever interests them and are not confined to boring reading schemes. It makes intuitive sense that it would be quicker, easier and more fun to teach children to read like this. Children were encouraged to guess at meaning based on context, sometimes using accompanying pictures; boring phonics drills were dismissed as likely to put children off reading.
As Willingham points out, there were a couple of clues that these plausible-sounding ideas might not work.
First, written language is a sound-based system, not a meaning based system. Seeing the three letters d, o and g doesn’t tell you meaning. Letters signify sounds. If that weren’t true, then when I showed you an unfamiliar word – for example. “mielesta” – you wouldn’t just be uncertain of its meaning; you would also have no idea of how to pronounce it. Given that writing is sound based, teaching reading with a method that ignores sound seems risky.
Second, the theory encourages the teaching of reading based on the way adults read. On the one hand, you can see the logic: if you want to learn something, find someone who is good at it and try to do what he or she does. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that the expert did it that way when he or she was a beginner… Copying an expert reader is not necessarily a good strategy for beginning readers. (p. 15)
Notice Willingham’s tentative language: he’s acknowledging probability rather than certainty. In order to know the best way to teach reading we would need to run a trial. Jeanne Chall was engaged by the Carnegie Corporation in the 1960s to conduct a literature review of all the scientific studies to date to work out which was was best. In Learning to Read: The great debate, she decided the phonics method was superior. We all know what happened next.
In the 80s, whole-word reading reinvented itself as “whole language”. Like its predecessors, it dismissed phonics as boring and unnecessary and claimed that learning to read should be as natural as learning to speak. The science was ignored, ideology ran rampant. In 1997, the US congress asked the Department of Education to settle the matter and, drawing together a panel of reading experts, they published a report which echoed Chall’s 30 years previously:
Findings provided solid support for the conclusion that systematic phonics instruction makes a more significant contribution to children’s growth in reading than do alternative programs providing unsystematic or no phonics instruction. (2-132)
And further, phonics boosts reader comprehension for younger children:
Growth in reading comprehension is also boosted by systematic phonics instruction for younger students and reading disabled students. Whether growth in reading comprehension is produced generally in students above 1st grade is less clear. (2.134)
All in all, they conclude that while some children do of course work out how to read using ‘whole language’ some don’t. These are the students who will be labelled as ‘dyslexic’ and end up hating reading.
As far as evidence goes on support for systematic synthetic phonics (SSP), this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s mountains of the stuff! But, you can’t win arguments with evidence. As Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method, put it, “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.” In the UK using SSP to teach reading is now statutory. You can’t not do it. Except of course the curriculum is inevitably mediated by teachers’ values and there are plenty of folk out there to encourage dissent, folk who’ve produced their own evidence that the stuff they prefer is best. Anyone who uses terms like ‘barking at print’ is occupying the same territory as Judge Nicola.
When we get things wrong in aviation, planes crash. When we get things wrong in healthcare, patients die. Mistakes in legal system result in miscarriages of justice and ruined lives. But when we get things wrong in education, no one dies. When children leave school functionally illiterate we shrug our shoulders and say, It’s just one of those things. We did our best.
We didn’t: if a child leaves school unable to read, the school is to blame.
And if a child leaves Key Stage 1 unable to fluently decode, they’re unlikely to pick it up later. Their trajectory is utterly predictable. This is perhaps the biggest single problem I encounter in secondary schools. (Of course I know decoding is just the start: here are my thoughts on teaching reading comprehension.) It’s rare indeed to meet a child that cannot read at all, but for all too many reading is a chore so laborious and frustrating that accessing GCSEs is all but impossible. They can decode a word if you give them long enough, but reading comprehension depends on reading speed. If you read slower than 200 words per minute the tax on working memory leaves very little space for understanding and none for enjoyment. Decoding is not correlated with intelligence. Word recognitions skills depend on phenotypic plasticity, not academic ability; sometimes very bright students struggle to read, sometimes very weak students find decoding straightforward.
But, what do we do? Too often we consign struggling readers to bottom sets, give them a teaching assistant and take them out of lessons a couple of times a week and send them back, further behind and still unable to read. This cannot be acceptable. If we carry on doing what we’ve always done, we’re no different from doctors ignoring the research on germ theory or judges advocating failed crime prevention interventions.
I say all this not to make anyone feel defensive – though some readers will, of course, chose to feel angry instead of exploring solutions – my purpose is to say that we can do something about this. It’s not easy, and we may not be able to succeed with every single child, but to give up on any child is the very worst incarnation of low expectations. You can use the fact that I know very little about special education to dismiss this statement if you want, but I’ve met children for whom I thought learning to read would be impossible do exactly that. I’m not underestimating the profound difficulties involved, but how dare we decide in advance that some children cannot learn to read when we ignore the evidence?
I’d like to think all this will be enough to scare us straight, but I know it won’t be. That said, if a few readers have the courage to examine their prejudices, it’s worth upsetting those who appear constitutionally incapable of changing their minds.
*
For further detail and some very useful information have a look at the Reading Reform Foundation website, Susan Godland’s Dyslexia Demystified and Diane Murphy’s Thinking Reading site. And if you need it, there’s more useful research here:
- National Reading Panel
- Independent review of the teaching of early reading
- Teaching Reading
- Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children
If you’re still unsatisfied, then you can do no better than to read Dianne McGuinness’ masterful, Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us about How to Teach Reading.
“When children leave school functionally illiterate we shrug our shoulders and say, It’s just one of those things. We did our best.”
Actually, it’s sometimes worse than that: I’ve frequently come across instances online of teachers putting the blame for reading failure on parents, for (allegedly) not reading to their children enough as pre-schoolers (this claim is based purely on correlation studies). Indeed, this actually happened to a friend of mine (who in fact spent a huge amount of time reading to her child), back before the 2007 switch to phonics.
Excellent post, by the way!
Interesting as always, David.
There is much in this with which I can agree. Inevitable that there will be a however after that. The myth that phonics was not taught, during the past 40 years, in my experience, is wrong. There were advocates of alternative approaches, but, even in junior classes, individual needs demanded phonics teaching.
Children naturally ask “What’s that say”. Most would give the word, as a whole, with some then interrogating, perhaps the initial sound(s). It is important for learners to build a sight vocabulary, as this speeds up reading to a point where understanding comes from the text. Phonics is one fall back mechanism when an unknown word is encountered.
A bigger current issue, to me, is the quality and quantity of reading done in and through school challenge, as well as any outside. Too often, guided reading sessions, once a week, do not lead to continuity of challenge, eg to read independently to page x, so it can be discussed, so school organisation effectively slows the reader, to that which is practised. If no other reading challenge is created, inevitably the progress slows and the interest wanes. Community, Inc school, vocabulary can also have an impact.
I think there is a bigger issue in unpicking the reading dynamic, rather than total focus on phonics, which, by itself is causing a distraction from the whole.
My interest is in developing high quality readers, which I did, and we did in my school, always achieving 90%+ l4 at KS2.
Unpick the journey and the contributory factors, apply effectively at the right time, and we have a chance.
It’s only a myth if it’s not actually true. Even at this year’s Northern Rocks conference there was a sign behind the stage proclaiming it a “phonics free zone”. I’m not claiming it wasn’t taught, but that it wasn’t taught properly or well enough. How do I know? Because so many secondary school children cannot fluently decode when they arrive and (generalising from my own experience) when they are given a sustained SSP intervention, they can!
Hi David, did you mean Key Stage 1? I’m in Germany now and the family I’m with has a boy nearly 6, who’ll start school when he’s 7 i.e. end of KS1 age. (Sorry about the predictability of this point) There’s no pressure for him to fluently decode any writing. Writing exists in the world, of course, he sees it and has shown me how he can write his name. He knows some stories by heart. But can’t read, isn’t’ interested yet and it’s no problem here. He’ll be fine. For me the experiment you’re talking about possibly went wring with this “He split teenagers in danger of becoming criminals…” So, your a teenager and someone has implied, by including you in this programme, that you’re likely (because that’s what they’ll hear) of becoming a criminal. If I’d been put into that group instead of the ‘Gifted & Talented’ group, I’m sure I’m as capable as any of becoming a criminal because, who cares, adult authorities have already decided my path.
I did mean KS1 yes. In England phonics instruction is only compulsory in years 1 and 2.
There has since been many further RCTs and meta analyses of the Scared Straight approach. It definitely doesn’t work.
Excellent post, David, thank you.
A further myth held by the majority of adults, including teachers, is that phonics is ‘infant stuff’ (thought of as ‘baby stuff’ by older children who might be receiving a phonics intervention) but this is incorrect.
If literate adults encounter a new word when reading – that is not in their spoken language – they have to use some form of phonics to decode the word and come up with a pronunciation. Many adults will ‘skip’ a longer, more complex word, however, when reading privately, and still get the meaning of the word from the context – so not coming up with a pronunciation for new words usually doesn’t impede comprehension. Not coming up with a pronunciation, however, means that the new word cannot be absorbed into spoken language.
I suggest that ‘skipping words’ is endemic amongst our pupil-population but teachers and parents don’t realise it – or simply don’t think about it. Quizzing pupils about their understanding of the text doesn’t necessarily lay bare the ‘skipping words’ issue. The problem is this – many adults choose to ‘skip’ words when reading privately rather than decode them fully but they could come up with a pronunciation if they wanted to or were reading aloud to others.
Many pupils, however, cannot decode new words well enough or at all because their reading reflex is based on the multi-cueing reading strategies which can detract or weaken phonics code knowledge and blending application. Also, far too many people in the teaching profession think that ‘phonics doesn’t suit everyone’ or ‘that child has been phonicked to death and now needs something else and not phonics’. They think this rather than reflecting on the content and quality of the phonics provision and nature of the reading instruction to date – and because they think that phonics teaching should be done and dusted by the end of infants.
If pupils don’t have a solid enough foundation of alphabetic code knowledge and a good ‘blending’ skill (ability to ‘discern’ a word from its constituent sounds), then they are destined to do an awful lot of ‘word skipping’ anyway.
Worryingly, as you know from the three years of NFER reports commissioned by the Department for Education to investigate primary teachers’ views of phonics and the Year One Phonics Screening Check, it’s looking like most teachers whilst providing systematic synthetic phonics teaching may also be promoting multi-cueing reading strategies which teach word-guessing (including ‘skipping words’ to the end of the sentence to then ‘guess’ what an unknown word might be). Children can only ‘guess’ a word when they already know it in their spoken language so multi-cueing guessing strategies cannot expand their vocabulary. We’re not really clear as to the dominant professional understanding of reading instruction even in England where SSP is now statutory – but quite frankly it’s looking pretty dodgy and not necessarily research-informed!
This issue of life-long reading being dependent on some form of phonics decoding to result in pronunciation and adoption of new words to expand vocabulary is never mentioned as far as I am aware. We also need phonics application for life-long spelling. Thus, as you know, I promote phonics as ‘adult stuff’ and not ‘baby stuff’ and suggest that ALL teachers and assistants should be trained fully in evidence-informed reading instruction.
For anyone who is interested, a new international organisation has been formed recently to promote evidence-informed reading instruction, see the International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction (IFERI):
http://www.iferi.org
To second Debbie’s point: For ‘life’ reasons I’ve needed to learn German as an adult. As a student I had 4 years of German lessons inc.GCSE, tried so hard and finished convinced languages were just not for me. Not my thing. Picking it up after formal ed I was going down the same spiral till my bf got me reading kids books out loud in order to meticulously and patiently sort out my pronunciation of each letter/letter combination – didn’t actually take all that long! What it gave me was confidence in speaking aloud words I’d read, which I’d never had before (because people screw their faces up as they try to decipher) and things unravelled quite naturally from there. Guess you could call that phonics. He’s not had any training in teaching anything, but he’s a good ear for sounds and I personally found it valuable at that point in my own learning.
I’ve flagged up your post here, David:
http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=481&p=641#p641
Also flagged up on your own ‘thread’ here:
http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=429&p=642#p642
You are right about expectations. Our actions are determined by our beliefs, and if we believe it is acceptable for some students to leave school unable to read well, that is what we will get – despite the weight of scientific evidence that effective beginning and remedial instruction approaches can eliminate the problem.
Because whole language is part of the romantic zeitgeist regarding childhood, it continues to re-appear in various forms – the latest of which is a whole-language, 10-week remedial programme for secondary students that has an effect equivalent to three months’ progress. For this sop to reading failure, 180 schools will be recruited by the EEF to run a trial at a cost of £670,000.
I cannot yet get my head around the decision-making that says that children reading three or more years behind should be offered a programme that promises to move them ahead by a few months. I really can’t understand the thinking. In whose world could this be an acceptable use of resources – and what message does it send to these children?
I think there is a danger in fixating on the phonics/alternative approaches dichotomy and we must recognise how easily educators succumb to simplistic models and ritualisation. I agree to a large extent with Chris Chivers’ ‘The myth that phonics was not taught, during the past 40 years, in my experience, is wrong.’ but, of course, the proponents are right that there was a considerable drive to make ‘real books’ and other approaches, systems in themselves. Phonics, as an initial approach to reading (or rather simply decoding, since it’s not about comprehension) is NECESSARY, in English, Spanish, etc. but entirely INSUFFICIENT. (Actually it works better in Spanish than in nearly anything else!) Phonics in English is problematic past the initial stage, and when it was first introduced in our school, I had a fairly heated argument with the Literacy Coordinator about the fact that the morpheme ‘ed’ as a past tense verb ending was not the phoneme ‘ed’ to rhyme with ‘red’. Believe me, they were actually teaching this to children in Y1! I’m fortunate enough to have never had a child, in 23 years of teaching, leave my class unable to decode. Our reading focus has not been about how to sound out words, but how to analyse and interpret texts, and above all, because of the nature of the end of key stage tests, to WRITE about texts which raises that other problem with phonics; as an approach to writing, it’s pretty useless.
julietgreen: phonics provision as a ‘programme’ or ‘body of work’ is about ‘comprehension’ and I suggest that phonics plays a significant role to contribute to writing’. However, teachers can provide poor phonics teaching which isn’t sufficiently about comprehension – and there is woefully inadequate professional understanding about the role of phonics for spelling and vocabulary development (building up spelling word banks of words spelt with the same letter/s-sound correspondences involves some fabulous vocabulary which can enrich writing).
One of the biggest problems in the whole debate around phonics and reading/spelling instruction is that each individual seems to have a different notion of what ‘phonics’ or ‘phonics provision’ or ‘phonics programmes’ actually consist of. So, we aren’t even speaking about the same thing more often than not.
The treatment of ‘ed’ as a phoneme was part of the synthetic phonics programme, compulsory in KS1 as delivered in our school and no doubt all over the country by those who are ‘woefully inadequate’ in ‘professional understanding’. When programmes are made compulsory, people stop thinking critically.
Horatio Speaks: Don’t you find it mystifying that there is no funding available, no apparent interest, in researching the phonics programmes in their entirety that were benefited by the Government’s match-funded phonics initiative? As author of one of those programmes, and phonics consultant to another, the EEF has given me very short shrift when I enquired about possible research. My view is that this a complete lack of national joined up thinking and action.
I suggest that it is quite possible for ‘research’ in this country to go round and round like a hamster’s wheel. Schools can come up with their suggested intervention programmes and they qualify for research-funding – and yet it is looking like the content of these proposed ideas may be merely repeating what has been researched many times before – such as clones of Reading Recovery.
I argue that we need to build on what we know from research and leading-edge practice to date – not keep repeating the same patterns of flawed approaches such as the multi-cueing reading strategies underpinning Reading Recovery and its cheaper clones.
I agree with Juliet and Chris, among others. Of pcourse phonics works, at least in the early stages and, from time to time, or perhaps word to word, in more complex later circumstances. The beef I have is the idea that it works best as an exclusive method. Especially in English, it doesn’t and can’t. There are influential people insisting that synthetic phonics be used, to the exclusion of all other means, for up to three years. There are influential people listening to this insistence. When it has been tried, what we got was decoding without joy; children who could read words but chose not to. (A caricature, of course, but somewhere near the truth, whatever that might turn out to be.) Clackmannanshire and all that…
I suspect that the aforementioned truth will include the idea of horses for courses. Clearly, for example, pure phonics cannot be altogether successful at learning English spelling. Clearly, real books are a good idea. Clearly all of us use a variety of ways to read and spell, depending on immediate circumstances. We do not read ‘have’ phonically, partly because it cannot be properly done but mainly because we read it as a visual unit. We do read ‘Habbakuk’ phonically unless, perhaps, we are a biblical expert. Children need phonics, but they also need every other effective method we can find…
No one has, as far as I can make out, claimed that phonics should be the only instruction children ever get to help them read. I even linked to an old post on how I think we should teach comprehension.
Your lack of SEND experience aside (we really ought to arrange for you to visit at some point), I think you are right. There is a debate within Special education that risks determinism with children being defined as unable to do things such as read and arguing that teachers should focus their efforts on those things which are attainable and have the greatest impact on life opportunities, a kind of pragmatic functionalism. The exponents of this are people I respect greatly and the debate is a fascinating one, but I am very wary of deterministic approaches when it comes to deciding educational priorities. This is in part because it presumes a lack of potential that can be self fulfilling and also risks conflating hard to teach with hard to learn. I prefer an evidence informed developmental approach based on high quality formative assessment identifying incremental steps. What starts off as a journey towards visual perceptive skills and auditory discrimination development can end up with a child combining intellectual skills learned in isolation and applying them in reading. So I’d be very wary of deciding a ‘child can’t’, I’m much happier with a ‘child can’t yet’.
Simon, you sound like an eminently reasonable man. I would love to visit your school.
Excellent, perhaps sometime towards Christmas depending on how busy things are for us both.
Where are you?
Banbury. Pretty easy to get to by train or car.
David, I am sorry to have to confirm that there is a group, some of whom have, or certainly had, the ear of power and who insist precisely that exclusive synthetic phonics in the first three years of school should be mandated.
What nothing else whatsoever? That sounds a bit unlikely?
I’m assuming you mean exclusive SSP when teaching word recognition skills? What else would you have them do?
Hugo Kerr: From your posting above, and previous posts of yours that I have read, you appear to have an extremely limited and outdated view of what our SSP programmes in England consist of. One small example is your suggestion that ‘have’ is not decodable. The ‘exclusivity’ of SSP refers only to the avoidance of the multi-cueing reading strategies which amount to teaching children to get through books by guessing words using various cues rather than teaching them the alphabetic code well and the synthesising (the sounds) skill.
Of course children must appreciate, understand and internalise the alphabetic principle, and of course phonics works best in the very early stages of decoding. But text is a visual signal. It can only enter the cranium along the optic nerves (in sighted people). Decoding phonically should therefore be used with a view to leading to visual recognition of patterns and words as fluent readers, in fact, do it. ‘Guessing’ is not at all what I mean. It is well established that fluent readers use many strategies, depending upon textual demands. Children should be led towards this flexibility. I think we are only disagreeing about the rate.
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‘All in all, they conclude that while some children do of course work out how to read using ‘whole language’ some don’t. These are the students who will be labelled as ‘dyslexic’ and end up hating reading.’
I’m struggling with this blanket statement/ sweeping generalisation about the labelling of ‘dyslexics’.
I teach reading, through synthetic phonics, in a one-to-one setting. Many of my pupils exhibit dyslexic tendencies. My interventions have provided me with evidence that teaching the alphabetic code (although vitally important) is not a miracle cure to the profound difficulties some students have when decoding words.
I struggle when teachers present their own experience as evidence of anything other than the fact that they’ve had an experience. That’s the whole point of this post.
I’ve written more about dyslexia here: ho-is-dyslexic-and-why-does-it-matter/
Please read my comment again:
‘My interventions have provided me with evidence that teaching the alphabetic code (although vitally important) is not a miracle cure to the profound difficulties some students have when decoding words.’
Clearly, I have lit a fuse by including the word ‘evidence’, but note my careful use of the qualifier ‘some’ – and my deliberate avoidance of the label ‘dyslexic’ (I agree with you, defining the term has become so confusing that it is now largely devoid of meaning).
I am wary of the danger of passing on a strong suggestion, which is founded upon an unproven belief: namely, that a good, healthy diet of Systematic Synthetic Phonics from the get-go will rid the world of reading difficulties. I’m still waiting to see clear, comprehensive and thorough evidence of that (and, while I wait, I will continue collating and analysing the data from a steadily increasing number of my own case studies).
You haven’t lit a fuse: I’m just sceptical of how far we can generalise from your experiences.
Whilst, no education research will never provide cast-iron certainty, the evidence available on SSP is stronger than any evidence on any other education invention and so, in the absence of any conflicting evidence of any quality, I think the sensible approach is for teachers to ignore your case studies and tentatively accept the findings published.
There seems to be a lack of understanding that an integral part of my work is to equip children to accurately segment and blend words using sounds spelt by single letters and letter combinations.
There also seems to be an assumption that I am eager to publicise my findings. I have no such desire – because I am still searching for answers.
I am determined to carry on probing for the reasons why a significant (albeit small) number of children continue to experience reading difficulties in spite of intensive, prolonged and thorough phonics instruction.
Why are you talking at me in the passive voice? I don’t know anything about you or your work – I’m just responding to your comments. Sorry if you feel I’m making assumptions but, well, what else am I going to do? I guess you’re probably making a few yourself.
I agree that “a significant (albeit small) number of children continue to experience reading difficulties in spite of intensive, prolonged and thorough phonics instruction” and am delighted you’re investigating this. Do please let me know if your find anything useful.