Please give any thoughts, criticisms (not many) or praise.
‘Explain, with examples, the contrasting approaches to the teaching of reading that you have experienced whilst on school placement and throughout the module. How do speaking and listening support the development of literacy skills? ’
Language is a major part of what makes us human and separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. It gives us the power to imaging, lie, joke and plan. With language we are able to think, and express, ideas and concepts that aren’t real, and talk about objects and occurrences that aren’t there. Bancroft (1995, p. 48) says this is because language uses arbitrary symbols; “there is no necessary connection between the symbol, be it word or gesture, and the object or idea to which it refers”. This is an important aspect of language as it also gives us the ability to write. Writing is not natural; it is a distinctly human form of communication. As Stephen Fry (2011) said “Writing was not invented for the purposes of writing love poems, or novels, or prayers, but actually for the rather more mundane purpose of taxation and accountancy.” This is a rather dull birth for something that can produce such emotion and passion, but it can help us to explain why the use of written language can be so hard for children to learn. Writing was born from necessity, as a tool to be used, this means that it is not innate, but a skill to be learnt and developed. Anyone can make marks, call it writing and find some meaning in them, but being able to take marks on a page you had no part in the creation of and make sense of, or read them, can be extremely tricky.
By the time children leave school they should be able to read, write and do simple maths. These are the skills which successive governments have promoted over the years, and with good reason. These are basic life skills that in our society and culture it is nearly impossible to get by without. Many policies have been brought out on how best to teach these core topics, (insert references later), but recently the teaching of reading has been top of the list to get right. The Rose Review (2006) was commissioned by the government in 2005 to look into the teaching of synthetic phonics as best practise in schools. The recommendations made by the report have been the major cause of the government’s stance on the mandatory teaching of synthetic phonics in schools.
Major research programmes across the globe conducted by England’s Department for Education and Skills (2006), the American National Reading Panel (2000) and the Australian Government, Department of Education Science and Training (2005) shows that the use of systematic phonics programmes for the teaching of reading are more effective than non-systematic or non-phonological programmes. Graaff, S. D. et el (2009) define systematic phonics programmes as “those programs in which prespecified sets of phonics elements such as simple grapheme–phoneme correspondences and onset and rimes are taught sequentially.” This means that synthetic phonics falls into this bracket. The move to mandatory synthetic phonics was a controversial one and there have been many researchers, like Wyse and Goswami (2008), against the decision because of the lack of evidence supporting it.
It is true that none of the major reports concluded which programme of phonics study was the best but the teaching of synthetic phonics is certainly not causing any harm. Assessment data from the primary school I was recently placed at shows how much of difference phonics is making with the reading ability of pupils. There are pupils on every phase of the ‘Letters and Sounds’ programme in every year throughout the school. The year 5’s and 6’s did not have phonics in key stage one, so some are now having to take phonics lessons to catch up with younger higher ability readers.
Research evidence summarised by Oakhill (1995) also proves the positive relationship between phonics skills and reading ability but there is some discussion on which way the relationship goes. Does phonics support reading or does reading support phonics? Or is the relationship much more complex?
The school I was placed in takes great pride in its phonics provision for all of the key stages. In key stage one there are twenty minute phonics lessons every day and the children are taught by a separate teacher for each stage. There is a very good spread of children in all of the stages and many of them are at a level far below where they should be. This is because of the high amount of speech and language difficulties that many of the children have. The area surrounding the school is high in deprivation and many of the children come in not being able to speak coherently or never having seen a book. The importance of the link between spoken language and reading ability is stressed by Riley (1999) who talks about how recognition of words and rhymes in speech is essential to being able to pronounce individual phonemes and blend them to form a whole word. This is recognised by the DfES (2007) programme ‘Letters and Sounds’, which includes many speaking and listening activities. It can hardly be expect that a child who cannot say the words and phonemes correctly can read or write them as well.
The letters and sounds programme is primarily based on teaching the children to read through the identification of graphemes and their corresponding phonemes. This is a ‘bottom up method’, where the child has to decode the word by recognising the letters, any grapheme phoneme correspondence (GPC), then blending the phonemes to make the word and hopefully get meaning from it. A lot of what I witnessed was aimed at the children learning specific digraphs and trigraphs. Each session would focus on one particular phoneme or grapheme and engage the children with a variety of activities involving words which contained said sound and spelling pattern. There are many phonemes with more than one grapheme, and vice versa, so the session would either focus on one or all of the different patterns. This is not the only method taught by the ‘Letters and Sounds’ programme, there are also a number of tricky words that just need to be learnt.
Even though we teach synthetic phonics so that children can decode what they read, words like “was” and “said” cannot be broken down into easily recognisable phonemes. These words need to be learnt, so at the start of every phonics lesson the children read through a bank of ‘tricky words’ together. The repeating of these words every day is aiding them in whole word recognition techniques, described by both Oakhill (1995) and Riley (1999), as committing the word to the child’s lexicon. This stores the word as a logogen so that the word can be recognised on sight and meaning taken straight from the memory store. This is similar to, but not exactly, the top down approach to reading. In this method children are taught to take meaning from the text, pictures and expectations of the book. Although this is a good way teaching very early readers, young children find far easier to pick out individual words instead of letters and sounds, it does mean, as Oakhill (1995) states, that the child will need to remember around 50,000 words to read almost fluently. This does not mean we should not encourage prediction, as fluent reading involves both orthographic and whole word awareness, but there is a real need for children to decipher words phonologically.
To be able to teach what is relevant to the child’s learning it is necessary to have some way of assessing their reading ability. This can really only be achieved by listening to the child read in paired or guided reading. On placement I observed the teacher taking guided reading sessions with different ability groups, listening to each child read and prompting where necessary. Solity and Vousden (2009) say there is some controversy over the use of reading but schemes but the school uses a mixture of reading schemes and ‘real’ books to facilitate learning. The reading scheme is taken home or read with an adult in school where as the ‘real’ books are used to foster a love of reading in school. To assess the reading ability of pupils the school uses the “simple view of reading” proposed by the Rose Review (2006) to plot where pupils reading ability stands and make informed decisions on what to work on next.
There are many different theories and ideas about how to teach reading. Years of research has been conducted by psychologists, education practitioners and governments on how the brain learns to read, which method supports the child best and what brings out the best results, but there are still many different schools of thought on what is right. It has generally been accepted that phonics provides the most effective route to learning to read, but which phonics programme is best, no one knows. Phonics has to be backed up with comprehension because there is no point being able to read what you cannot understand but there are still many methods of teaching this. The most effective way of teaching, and what I have witnessed in school, is to use a combination of different methods that fit best with your class. There is not one method that fits all so judging what is right for the class and the individual will bring out the best results.
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