What keeps me awake at night - Please read up on phonics, Mr Gibb
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20 April, 2012
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opinion
I'll tell you what keeps me awake at night - it's not Michael Gove, it's his sidekick, schools minister Nick Gibb: Mr Synthetic Phonics. Synthetic phonics is where you blend two letters together to make one sound. For example, it tells us that putting G and R together makes grrrrrr.
Mr Gibb loves synthetic phonics. He says that this is the only way to raise reading standards in England. Apparently he realises that comprehension is also important, but this doesn't quite make it into his rhetoric. So keen is he on the technique that he's launched a matched-funding scheme for materials. But cash-strapped primaries aren't rushing to take up his offer to buy stuff from the government-approved list.
Could this be because English primary teachers use systematic phonics comprising all methods of teaching and don't rely on just one strategy? After all, they're the experts. Perhaps these professionals would rather buy the reading materials their pupils need than the ones a politician says they should have. But Mr Gibb, phonics fundamentalist, keeps banging the synthetic phonics drum.
The method is important. But the evidence also shows that decoding alone is not enough. The US research cited by Mr Gibb actually warned against overemphasis on phonics. Not that Mr Gibb can have read all the evidence - it's enough to grab some gobbet that praises synthetic phonics and spit it out in a press release. He's very good at ignoring contradictory evidence or, heaven forbid, any evidence that actually praises what's going on in England.
The Eurydice report on teaching reading in Europe is the size of a meteorite, and yet it seems to have whizzed by Mr Gibb's window and splashed into the Thames without so much as a ripple. This vast analysis shows that teachers in England already incorporate systematic phonics into their teaching. The evidence also advises that what is needed is not more phonics, but more work on comprehension.
Mr Gibb even missed guidance in a government report that found effective reading programmes should not just focus on phonics, but should also be accompanied by innovative teaching practices that engage pupils in exciting lessons.
But will Mr Gibb listen? No. He'll continue to rant on like a Dalek, squealing "Synthetic phonics! Synthetic phonics!" He'll turn his ray gun on heretical local authorities where take-up of his preferred teaching technique has been low and scream "Exterminate!", while bewildered six-year-olds wonder why they're being asked to read pseudo words like "vap" and "osk".
But enuff! Thiss iz migh messidge to thu skools minnistuh: leeve teeching ov reedding to thu ekspurts!
The writer is a retired teacher from Peterborough. To tell us what keeps you awake at night, email david.marley@tes.co.uk.
Comment (11)
Some children learn to read with little help. Others require intensive rehearsal of the link between speech sounds and orthography. The evidence suggests that intensive, systematic phonics training will ensure that the vast majority of children are able to decode text accurately - an essential prerequisite for reading for meaning. Teachers 'incorporating systematic phonics into their teaching' might not actually be enough for many children.
In my experience, although teachers know a great deal more than politicians about the way children learn to read, they are not *experts* in teaching children to read. They aren't trained to be, and the methods they are trained to use are often based on a flawed understanding of the research. If teachers were truly experts, it's unlikely that 20% of the school population would leave school functionally illiterate.
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10:00
20 April, 2012
elsiepiddock
"while bewildered six-year-olds wonder why they're being asked to read pseudo words like "vap" and "osk"."
Or 'dalek'?
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11:07
20 April, 2012
maizie
Indeed. Pseudowords come into their own when it comes to proper names.
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11:20
20 April, 2012
elsiepiddock
The Eurydice report referred to in the article praised England for being one of just eight countries to have a system of reading specialists. These were set up under the Every Child A reader (ECAR) programme in 2008. The offical evaluation of ECAR (see TES article below) found that when schools had literacy specialists the key stage 1 results improved by between two and six percentage points. TES notes that the government subsidy for ECAR is ending just as England is praised for having literacy specialists in school.
The Eurydice report also praised the UK for requiring trainee teachers to pass a specific test in reading.
So, England is praised but the Government ignores this. Instead, it pushes only one aspect of teaching reading - phonics - which Eurydice found was already used extensively in England. It is comprehension where further work is needed - pointing this out is not devaluing phonics.
http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6133990
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13:06
20 April, 2012
Retired123
Anyone who has not heard the word "dalek" could pronounce it several ways: dalek with a short 'a' as in "cap", or "dale" with a "k" sound tagged on at the end, or "daylek". These three all conform to english pronunciation.
Professor Greg Brooks, an advocate of synthetic phonics teaching, has criticised the phonics test, "decoding is only one part of learning to read, and is not reading itself." I think that is what the writer of the article is saying - it's a pity that this message is lost on Nick Gibb.
Professor Brooks's critique can be downloaded here.
http://www.ukla.org/news/professor_greg_brooks_critiques_the_governments_proposed_decoding_test_for_/
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13:20
20 April, 2012
Retired123
Daleks are the muted remains of the Kaled people of the planet Skaro.
Is that K-ay-ld , K-ay-led or K-arl-ed? Sk-ar-o or Sk-a-ro or a tweek to Skaroo. Synthetic phonics will suggest ways of pronouncing Kaled and Skaro, but from talking with a Dr Who fan I would know how to read the words.
Daleks have been around longer than I have, are defined in the OED and the the name is often used metaphorically.
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13:34
20 April, 2012
LilyLilyRose
elsiepiddock - 20% of school leavers do not leave school functionally illiterate. The Department for Business, Innovation and Schools, "Skills for Life", found that 15% of 16-18 year olds did not reach the Level 1 threshold (ie the threshold of functional literacy) in 2011. Sheffield University 2011 found that 17% of 16-19 year olds "have poorer literacy...than is needed for full participation in today's society." The Leitch report (2006) found the figure for adults aged 16-65 was 15%.
The writers of the Sheffield report, despite assessing that 17% of young people had poor reading skills, summed up as follows: "most young people in England do have functional skills in both literacy and numeracy, and that those with the highest skills are up with the best in the world.” And Dr Jan Eldred, chair of the UK Literacy Working Group, said adults below the literacy threshold were not necessarily illiterate – they were at the lower end of the skills curve. Dr Eldred said it was wrong to say that Britain was in the middle of an educational crisis.
That is not to say that the figures for illiteracy are not worrying. However, to put all the blame on teachers as you do, is to miss other causes such as learning disabilities, severe educational need, inability to speak English, sustained absence from school and illness to name a few.
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13:45
20 April, 2012
Retired123
@retired teacher
"Anyone who has not heard the word "dalek" could pronounce it several ways: dalek with a short 'a' as in "cap", or "dale" with a "k" sound tagged on at the end, or "daylek". These three all conform to english pronunciation."
And the relevance of this comment is...?
You are apparently objecting to 6 y olds being exposed to 'pseudo' words when, in fact, English texts are awash with them. I point out that 'dalek' is a made up word and you chunter on about its pronunciation. Who cares? Fact is that it is a made up word which no-one turns a hair about.
According to UNESCO both the UK and the US have 100% rate of literacy. Don't trust 'official' figures.
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14:34
20 April, 2012
maizie
The relevance of the comment about the pronunciation of Dalek is that if this word was not known and appeared in a decoding test then it could be pronounced in several different ways. Which one would be accepted as the correct answer?
I'm not sure that English texts are "awash" with pseudo words - once made-up words appear in texts they have been accepted and actually mean something: "Wi-fi", "I-pad", are two recent examples. Dalek was once a made-up word but has been in around since the early 1960s. Quite a provenance. But "vap" and "osk" were made up for one purpose only - the phonics test. And as the Professor Greg Brooks, an advocate of synthetic phonics teaching, said: "decoding is only one part of learning to read, and is not reading itself."
The UNESCO definition of literacy is lower than the level of functional literacy defined by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (incorrectly called Schools in my post above). UNESCO definition is: "The ability to read and write with understanding a simple statement related to one’s daily life."
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17:13
20 April, 2012
Retired123
@retired 123
I stand corrected on the 20% but I can understand why 15% or 17% might still make feel nervous.
I don't think I did 'put all the blame on teachers'. What I said was that teachers are not *experts* in teaching children to read, which appears to be what the article claims.
Between starting school and the end of Y4 - fairly recently - my son (SA+) had nine teachers (not counting TAs). I had conversations about his difficulties with reading, spelling and writing with each of them. Only one appeared to have a good grasp of the processes involved in reading - she was a SENCo. The others all appeared to believe that if a child had learned phoneme-grapheme correspondences and you exposed him/her to print a sufficient number of times, reading would ensue. None of the teachers seemed to have the faintest inkling about the vast research literature on reading.
I'm not blaming the teachers, but I am blaming their training. Unless we were especially unlucky, or things have changed dramatically in the last couple of years, I don't get the impression that primary teachers in general know enough about reading. And I have heard the myth that if a child can't read by 11 it's too late to teach them from more than one source.
I appreciate that there might be factors preventing children reading that are beyond the control of teachers, but I find it difficult to believe that they are all *experts*.
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21:23
20 April, 2012
elsiepiddock
'make politicians feel nervous' [that's a correction, not an instruction]
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21:24
20 April, 2012
elsiepiddock