Research from the University of Bristol is suggesting that phonics, as a means of teaching reading, is of no more effect than other methods, such as whole word methods. Professor Jeffrey Bowers, from the University of Bristol, has said that despite "widespread consensus in the research community" that the reading method (phonics) is preferable to meaning-based approaches, there is a lack of "empirical evidence" to suggest that it leads to better outcomes. Is this correct? Should we just throw phonics out and let teachers once more have free choice? I believe that your answer will depend on what you mean by 'works'. If you want way to make sure that your child learns to both read and spell to a high standard, to read and write challenging material, then yes, phonics works. If you want to raise a child for the modern, entertainment driven culture where the need to be able to read is minimalised - then use whichever method you like. Remember though, that although many accuse the reading method debate of being hijacked by political parties, it always will be. Reading is political and history tells us why. If you can keep people illiterate, then they can be easily deceived: they cannot read to discover the truth. I am not a university lecturer, or a politician, just a plain, simple, practitioner with over 30 years experience of teaching phonics. However, if my knowledge of university lecturers is right, they usually have very little practical experience of teaching, tending to be rather insulated and divorced from real life. In addition, I have learnt through experience that in many disciplines in life - be it medicine, education or the like, 'evidence' is not to be trusted. Statistics are fine as far they go, but the 'results' are very dependent on the interpretation of those statistics and a thorough knowledge of the factors considered in their collection, as all research is limited. My own personal experience tells me that I would not want to stop teaching phonics. I will tell you why. My Background I was trained in the late 80's/early 90's, when natural language methods were the vogue. Our lecturers shared their delight in the work of such as Marie Clay, and declared this to be the NEW way forward. We students were filled with hope and enthusiasm. I spent many hours on the phone to my mother, an infant school teacher in the heart of London, in a very deprived area, extolling the virtues of the NEW way and decrying her old fashioned methods of look and say flashcards. She had been taught in the 50's when 'look and say' had been heralded as the NEW method and phonics (though not very well understood and not always well taught) was on the way out, having held sway in the 40's. She too had become disillusioned with 'Look and Say', finding that it went so far, but not far enough as the child's capacity for memorising new words was eventually exhausted. She was at the stage of wondering why the older teacher in the room next door when she first started teaching, had better success. She now knows that the method this teacher was using - one that had not been introduced to my mother's cohort of students - was the phonics method. All that my mother remembers, is that the infant children in the class next door were reading and writing to a high standard, while she struggled to teach these subjects. BUT, because she had been taught the NEW methods, the staff were (foolishly) keen to learn from HER! However, she instinctively knew that the method I was acclaiming was not the solution. Whole Language Methods Marie Clay has been heralded for her work with reading recovery. She studied how children who learned to read easily learnt, and tried to apply that to help those who were struggling. The term 'emergent readers and writers' developed around this time - meaning that the skill was in the child, and all that had to happen was that a way should be found to help it 'emerge'. It resulted in children desperately struggling to 'read' and being rewarded for their ability to guess, though it wasn't put like that. It was called using 'skills'. It involved managing to ’read’ the text by looking at the pictures and using context and meaning. At no time, was any method introduced to the child to enable him/her to know for sure that s/he has said the right word. Similarly in writing, children were left to find their own way to write, which in practice resulted in classes of seven year olds filling pages with 'writing' that was undecipherable, and being rewarded for 'writing'. Maybe this is not what Marie Clay meant by her method, but it was sure the way it was put into practice at ground level, by inexperienced teachers. Any nay-sayers were dismissed. Clay was a psychologist and her mantra was 'it's all in the child' and that is what drove her work. Supposing she is wrong and it is not all in the child? What then? Putting theory into practice In college it sounded good. Until I was faced with a class of inner London children in 1991 and the Oxford Reading Tree Biff, Chip and Kipper books, and I realised that our utopic ideas were of no use. I had to use the scheme provided by the school and I had had no training in its use. Furthermore, the children in my charge had little literary experience before entering school. I was starting from rock-bottom - in year 1. My children had only started school in the preceding term. I tried - I honestly did. I wanted to make whole language methods work. I was convinced it was the right way. After one term I had to admit defeat. Yes, a few children were learning to read, but I was concerned about the rest - especially those whom I had quickly recognised as being potential remedial cases. These children were simply play reading: looking at the pictures and guessing what the text said. Sometimes they got it right, but in my mind this was not reading and I could not see how these children were ever going to make the necessary quantam leap into readership. Thankfully, the pressure for results was not as keen in those days as it is now, but I still felt acutely embarrassed by my lack of progress. Being young, I did not stop to think about asking the other teachers. I realised later, that had I have done so, I would not have found any better success. The Junior department had long given up hope of the infant children reaching their doors able to read. I expected chidlren to be able to read, whatever was put in front of them, whether there were pictures attached or not. Was that too much to ask? Later I learnt that some children learn to read despite the method being used: they find structure for themselves - but often cannot explain it - but you can see them applying it as they read. A solution I desperately looked for help and scoured the ads in the TES - a newspaper in those days. I found the advert for a phonics spelling scheme - a very simple approach that I could understand - no complicated language to learn. I began. The programme presumed that the children would know the sounds of the letters of the alphabet. I didn't know them myself. We learnt together. The children loved chanting 'AY says 'a', Bee say 'b' adding a new sound each day. And then the wonder as we started to build cvc words (though we didn't worry about calling them that). The children were so proud of their achievement. Better still I had parents of children with older siblings coming to me saying, 'What are you doing? My child is reading better than his older brother/sister,' or others new to the school 'He didn't get taught to read in his last school - this is amazing, he's making so much progress. ' The success was not just in reading - by the end of Year 1, these children, who had started at rock-bottom, were writing an A4 page of readable writing. The phonics programme had given them confidence to write - they enjoyed writing and they were blossoming. Meanwhile the head was ecstatic and decreed that phonics be used across the school. I was still young and rather bewildered, as I genuinely though that you sent your children to school to learn to read and yet - here were parents expressing surprise that I was teaching them to read! It is only with age that I have learnt the reasons why. Meanwhile, my mother had been sacked for trying to teach her class in inner London: she gave too much direction and she should have been letting the skills emerge. The result: 60 children in one classroom - aged 7, playing with sand and water all day with no direction from the teacher. This was the age of chronic teaching failure: thousands of children were used as guinea pigs for an experiment that failed them. Something had to change. These children are now in their 30's - an age group in which so many, I am finding, do not like to read, or consider themselves deficit in this area. These adults are now the parents of our primary children. The phonics battle Thankfully, while I was only just discovering phonics, others like Mona McNee, who had devised a phonic system of her own as schools had failed her Down’s Syndrome son, were busy campaigning for it to be brought back into schools. They faced a long hard battle and were very unpopular. Whole language experts accused them of just teaching 'decoding' without teaching meaning. For me, I found that as we decoded, we made sense of what we read. I didn't expect the children to decode words that were not in their vocabulary - not for a long time, at least. The children were delighted that they could read and it made sense to them. The decoding was a means to an end: as a word became familiar, it seemed to become a 'look and say' word and, over time, with a good reading scheme with a limited vocabulary, more and more words fell into this category. BUT, when they met a word they had not met before they did not have to guess - they had a sure-fire method of working it out - by themselves - without a picture to help. This must be reading. What good is context if you do not know what the individual words say? Does Phonics work? It depends what you are looking for. For me - it does the job perfectly. I have always found that where phonics fails, it is because the teacher has not studied the learner and matched the way of using phonics to the child. There are many ways of teaching with phonics - not all of them are helpful. Find a method that works, and make it work. Know your children inside out - individually - and tailor the method to the child - not the child to the method. Having taught children from Reception, right through to GCSE and beyond, and I can see the evidence. Children taught well by phonics leave the competition standing. The secret is in that little word ‘well’! Other posts you might like: How to teach phonics effectively How to: get the best from Letters and Sounds How to: help your Y1 class pass the phonics test
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WelcomeHello, I'm Lilibette, qualified teacher (B.Ed Hons). I have taught phonics in mainstream education, followed by have home-educated my two sons to 18, and am now a private tutor. Categories
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