There's nothing to decode: testing six-year-olds on phonics is a sound way to ensure they can read
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3 average rating | Comments (5)
Last Updated:
13 February, 2013
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News
Abdul, seven, sits reading a story aloud - he reads "nuzzled", then stops and re-reads the sentence: "For a long time she spoke to the elephant until he grew calm and nuzzled her with his trunk." He thinks it must be a nice thing to do but looks up to his teacher and says: "What's nuzzled?"
Abdul loves the story of The Hunter by Paul Geraghty. He loves the new words he has decoded: "rasped", "trying in vain", "tottering" and "mighty tuskers". He re-reads the story lots of times and ponders over his favourite phrases.
Children's books often contain words that children haven't heard - may never hear in everyday speech - and every new word is a potential nonsense word until they have read it and learnt the meaning.
Children who can work out new words have the world of books before them. They become so good at decoding words that they are able to read, understand and enjoy any book they want to read, whether fiction or non-fiction.
Learning this way can be both effective and fun - you only need to see the short programme on it made at Elmhurst Primary School in Newham.* Children here come from diverse backgrounds, and many have English as an additional language.
The pupils love to read, and perform well in all aspects of literacy - success which is underpinned by a strong foundation in phonics. Ofsted's recent report Reading by Six shows how a systematic approach to phonics, along with a language-rich curriculum, is a model for success.
It is because we see such good results from this approach that we support the Government's proposal to check children's decoding skills at the end of Year 1. We are worried by what we see as the flaws in the arguments of people who oppose this.
One recurring argument is that young children need to use context as well as phonics in their reading. If this means that children should use context to understand what they read, we agree. We also agree that readers occasionally have to use context to help with pronunciation as well as with meaning, as, for example, in "Keep your dog on a lead" and "The pipe was made of lead", but such examples are fairly rare, and even here, it is helpful if readers can use phonics to narrow down the choice of pronunciations to "led" or "leed".
They also need to identify several words without using context in order to identify one word through context.
The way that the argument is worded, however, suggests that children should often use context (and even pictures and just the initial letters of words) to work out what words are rather than what they mean. If so, a common interpretation of the old "searchlights" model - rejected with good reason by Sir Jim Rose when he led his review of phonics - is still alive and well. What Sir Jim recommended instead was that children should be taught to use phonics as the "prime approach" to reading.
We like the way this is summed up by Charles Perfetti, a psychology professor who has researched language learning at Pittsburgh University: "The hallmark of skilled reading is fast context-free word identification. And rich context-dependent text understanding," (Journal of Research in Reading, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1995). Although English has a complex alphabetic code, children can be taught to work out what most words are by decoding them phonically, and this is surely the most efficient way of lifting the words off the page.
It does not stop children from enjoying reading, or from using context for comprehension purposes and for pronunciation decisions of the "lead" type.
It has also been suggested that a word needs to be in children's spoken lexicon in order for them to be able to work it out. We disagree. Abdul, the pupil mentioned above, could work out words that were not in his spoken lexicon. Children who can do this are still free to ask someone about meanings or try to deduce meaning from context, and they can then add these new words to their oral vocabulary, as we adults also do when we read a word outside our lexicon.
In fact, many words are unfamiliar to young children in their written form - the children have to translate them into their spoken form before they know whether they know them. Surely, then, the inclusion of non-words in the screening check is no big deal, especially if they are presented as the names of imaginary creatures. Many syllables in multisyllabic real words are the equivalent of non-words - children who can't read "tas", "des" and "per" can't work out "fantastic" and "desperate". In any case, might children not encounter non-words in their text-reading - for example in Michael Rosen's poems Bips and The Smeenge or Roald Dahl's The BFG?
Learning how to read is a great leveller - all children can have access to an education whether or not they have free school meals or have English as an additional language. And because non-words are equally unfamiliar to all children, they are a fair way of checking that children have the potential to work out pronunciations for any new printed words without adult help.
The unions have described the belief that synthetic phonics is not being taught in schools as a "pervasive myth". If they are right, then synthetic phonics is being taught in schools, so whatever else children are learning about reading, they should all be learning to decode. They should therefore not be fazed by the requirements of the screening check.
Ruth Miskin and Jenny Chew are literacy trainers; Shahed Ahmed is headteacher at Elmhurst Primary in Newham, east London
*The Teachers TV video - Applying a Systematic Phonics Scheme can be found at: http://bit.ly/hE1Xga.
Comment (5)
I so agree. I have seen so many children fail at reading because they don't have the skills to decode any word. They come to me at Year 7 and 8 desperate because they can't read, so school becomes a horror for them. They are in fact functionally illiterate - they can get by through what they hear and what they guess but they always feel that they are clinging on. I teach these children to read using systematic phonics and then I have to build their confidence back up - which isn't easy. None of these children couldn't learn to read they just weren't taught. So for them every word that they couldn't read was a nonsense word. But we need to stop all this nonsense and just teach all children to read.
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9:48
18 March, 2011
rabbitpatch
Miskin and co are completely wrong to suggest that more testing of 6-year-olds will help to ensure that more of them learn to read better, or that teachers who oppose the new tests also oppose to the use of phonics. It is perfectly possible to be in favour of better teaching but against more pointless testing.
There is probably not a single KS1 teacher in the country who is not already keenly aware of, and worried about, which of his or her pupils are not learning to read as well as they ideally should, and could do with much more help than they are able to give them. If Miskin and co were really interested in improving reading standards, they would be using their kudos with Gove to get more individual help for them, instead of advocating yet more pointless testing.
It is hard to fathom why they believe this extra hassle to be necessary. It won’t help more schools to adopt phonics, because Ofsted reported recently that all schools in England already use them. The children who still fail to learn to read are not doing so for lack of phonics, but because English has, in Miskin’s own words, a ‘nightmare alphabetic code’.
But like all phonics evangelists, Miskin, Chew and Ahmed are increasingly claiming that the complex English alphabet code is not really much of a handicap in learning to read, because not many words have unpredictable pronunciation. But that is simply a lie.
At least 103 pairs of common words have just one spelling, such as ‘read, lead, row’ which have to be pronounced differently in different contexts. Hundreds more are what Miskin calls ‘red’ words which contain one or two variably pronounced letters, such as ‘dream, dreamt; swan swam; gone done’. (See Sight Words page in www.EnglishSpellingProblems.co.uk) All of those have to be learned not just with phonics, but by ‘a rather circuitous route’ as Miskin put it in 2008.
Of the 185 English spellings which English uses for its 43 sounds, 69 are phonically unreliable (see http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2009/12/reading-problems.html). These act like spanners in the workings of the English spelling system (found, round, sound – soup; mad, man, ran – many). They leave many children extremely confused and make the teaching of reading much more challenging than in other languages.
The phonics test at six is pointless not only because it would measure much more how much parents have helped, rather than what schools have done, although it is likely to be used for judging teachers. It would not be a reliable indicator of how children will cope with the trickier words which need ‘working out’ rather than mere decoding, words like ‘tough, rough, cough, plough, through’ .
That’s why children with a wide vocabulary find learning to read much easier than ones with a small one. In English, becoming good at ‘working words out’ is as important a part of learning to read as learning to pronounce the main English spellings, such as ‘a, e, i, o, u, ca, ce, ch’ and ‘tion’. Just learning to do the latter, i.e. phonics, is a very long way short of becoming a proficient reader of English.
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8:08
19 March, 2011
mashabell
"It has also been suggested that a word needs to be in children's spoken lexicon in order for them to be able to work it out. "
I don't think that's quite the argument.
It would be better to say that children with a small lexicon (in English) are likely to find it harder to acquire knowledge of (English) phonics. I feel I encounter this quite a lot with children at an early stage of learning EAL: firstly in cases where many of the words used during the teaching of phonemes are unfamiliar to them, they find it hard to access the teaching. Perhaps more importantly, they don't have the same ability to measure their own performance in synthesising: the English first language child who puts C-A-T together and sounds out "cat" will know instantly they've been successful; a learner who doesn't already have "cat" in their lexicon will not.
There’s then a knock-on in terms of the child’s ability to employ decoding strategies in reading.
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9:25
21 March, 2011
stevedonohue2
I have no doubt that phonics can be supportive of reading; my concern is with the claims that are being made that it is appropriate for all, and especially for children learning English as an additional language. Anecdotal evidence, as provided here, is not a sound basis on which to base policy and expend large sums of money in developing screening tests of 6 year-olds that may not be capturing valid data.
There is a scandalous dearth of research on this particular area. In their analysis of peer-reviewed studies that focused on bilingual learners and compared synthetic phonics approaches with whole-language and non-phonics based teaching, Purewal and Simpson (EAL Reading: Research and Policy, NALDIC Occasional Paper 23: 2010) found only five carried out between 1998 and 2008. They also included the influential Clackmannanshire study in their purview, even though this does not focus on bilingual learners. All six supported the efficacy of phonics in relation to decoding, none of them provided statistically significant evidence that phonics improves reading comprehension, which is the important measure. Supportive, but not sufficient.
EAL learners do not necessarily follow the same learning trajectory as monolingual English speakers. For example, they are likely to have smaller vocabularies in English, so being able to decode a word will not necessarily mean they can match the sound to the meaning. If tested, they may be equally as likely to rhyme 'cow' with 'flow' as 'now' but current proposals for the inclusion of non-words in tests suggest that such a match, though phonically correct would be marked wrong.
Further, EAL learners may already come with developed literacy skills in their first language and a top-down approach, focused on meaning, may be a more effective route to reading comprehension for them.
The point is, we don't know because successive governments have been more interested in rhetoric than evidence, especially when the evidence, as here, is messy and complex.
We should not be looking to give phonics any special status in teaching children to read, it is merely one of the tools that good teachers draw on when they consider the child in front of them in the round.
As Robin Alexander reminded us, teaching is not about recipes but repertoires. We can be reasonably confident that reading also isn't a recipe, it's a meal, and the ingredients that go into making it nourishing should be varied, well-balanced, and enjoyable.
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16:07
22 March, 2011
FranKmonaghanOUNALDIC
It is an outrage that Ruth Miskin and Co are making HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY selling schools their very, very expensive phonics scheme!!! It is a further outrage that we the taxpayers have to pay out twice in matched funding? How much profit has she made this year?
Talk about conflict of interest! Surely it is not right that she is Gove's advisor on English and that policy concerning our childrens' education is driven by self interest and greed. What a sad and sorry state of affairs!
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11:32
13 February, 2013
ms_kitka