For me, this was the biggest news yesterday. Synthetic phonics is now thoroughly established as a serious educational policy option.
“Synthetic phonics” is a somewhat jargonic way of saying the sensible teaching of reading, based on the idea that despite all the deviations (in English especially) from the rules, letters stand for noises, and the way to read is to work out what the noise must be from the letters. To say that this is how to learn reading is to miss the point. The point is: this is reading. Seeing the letters “e l e p h a n t” next to a picture of an elephant (which is precisely what I did see this morning when channel hopping – in a TV show supposedly helping children to read) and guessing that therefore this assemblage of baffling squiggles must mean elephant is not reading. Reading means seeing those letters on their own, and knowing that they mean elephant.
A good way to get to grips with the background to this story is to read the latest newsletter from the Reading Reform Foundation, who have been agitating on behalf of synthetic phonics for many years now.
At the heart of this argument is not the value of phonics as such. Even the most diehard look-and-say people now concede that phonics is part of the story. But, say the RRF people, too many teachers – teachers who have only been following or agreeing with the guidance they have been getting from the government – believe in a mixed approach. In other words, says the RRF, they confuse children by urging them to combine reading with guessing. Should some version of phonics merely be included in the government’s literacy strategy (it already is), in among picture books, stuff about “word shape”, and so on, or should literacy be based entirely on phonics, properly done? The latter, says the RRF. Personally I find the RRF argument thoroughly convincing.
At lot of what is happening here is not really an argument about what works best (synthetic phonics has been proved to work best), so much as an elaborate exercise in giving a whole generation of fools a soft landing. Too sudden a switch from the wrong methods to the right ones would reveal at once how bad the wrong methods were, and make an awful lot of experts look very inexpert indeed. So, although they must surely now know that they are losing, these people are still digging their heals in and fighting every inch of the way.
Kudos to the government, for, better late than never, taking all this on board, to use an unlovely Blairite phrase. For this is classic Blairism. Once again, New Labour (this kind of thing being the New bit) are cherry picking one of the better things that some Conservatives have been saying, and ramming it down the throats of their own natural (Old Labour) supporters, who will put up with anything rather than have too serious a fight with their own front bench and thus let the Conservatives back in.
My favourite moment in all the media reportage yesterday about all this came when a newsreader (I think BBC but am not sure) was reading the phrase “synthetic phonics” out. Exhausted by the effort of reading “synthetic”, she then stumbled over “phonics”, and had to stop, and try it again. Eventually she got it right. Maybe it would have helped if she had had a picture to help her.
Well, no, it would not. She should simply have read it better.
61 years since the 1944 Education Act and we still cannot agree how to teach our children to read in their own fucking language !
How does any child leave school unable to read and write?
Mr. Teague,
Do you really have to ask? It’s all about the little dears’ self-esteem, don’t you know — can’t keep them back in school for a silly little thing like functional illiteracy! No, no, social promotion is the thing — otherwise their poor tender developing egos will get all bruised, and they’ll all grow up to be hoodlums. heroin addicts, and harlots!
Oh… Wait… Never mind…
Of course, in addition to “the system” there are the prime culprits, the parents, a.k.a. “rents”. Both my children (despite my son’s severe dislexia) are good readers. Both tell me that one reason they enjoy reading is because I used to spend an hour or more every day reading to them when they were pre-schoolers. By the time the started school, both were more than eager to partipate in what they saw as a fun adult activity. I can’t recall that clearly myself, but my mother claims that I could read quite well before I ever started school, and for much the same reason.
If parents rarely bother to read themselves, prefering TV for both entertainment and information, then why should children assign it any more importance than such rustic skills as building a fire without matches or calculating square roots using only pencil and paper. Perhaps a major reason why home schooled children (and to a somewhat lesser degree those in parochial and private schools) seem to do so much better than do those left to the public system, is that they have one important resource available to them: parents who give a damn about learning.
[Less anyone think that I was showing a lack of regard for certain aspects of education, I both fondly recall learning and am still perfectly able to produce both fire and square roots without “articficial” support. I rarely do either, however.]
Perhaps the “look-and-say” proponents were impressed by Chinese – there’s “look-and-say” learning if you like. The Japanese too – who have THREE sets of writing: two syllabaries PLUS Chinese characters.
And everyone knows the Chinese and Japanese are fiendishly clever. Therefore . . .
Recently on Newsnight there was an extremely well done segment on Synthetic Phonics and how its being used to bring 9 year old children up to the reading standard of 4 or 5 year olds. What was interesting was how the teachers tended to almost deliberately misinterpret Ruth Miskin’s instructions on how to use the educational equipment and methods and also how Ruth Miskin managed to completely shoot down in flames the nuLabour “educational expert” brought in by Newsnight to lend a negative ‘balance’ to the story.
Of course one aspect of the problem that seems to be being experienced here is that Synthetic Phonics is an American method and anything American is not ‘in’ with the trendy nuLabour set.
I’m sure that we are all familiar with BBC bias. I watched an interview on the BBC in which a senior member of the educational establishment was given a very easy ride and allowed to get away with merely conceding that phonics teaching methods may play a part in the future. However, did any of you see the reports yesterday on Sky? Below is a copy of the email that I sent to Sky. If I get a reply I’ll post it here.
To the editor, Sky News,
Dear Sir,
I was very concerned to see an erroneous news item broadcast throughout the day on Friday, 02/06/2005 which dealt with the teaching of reading in state schools.
The report presented phonics teaching methods as a new advance recently developed by educational researchers and piloted successfully in some Scottish schools. We were told that as a result of these advances, the government were considering extending these new methods to England and Wales.
One statement that I clearly remember from your news report was something to the effect that, “….more traditional methods of teaching reading, whole word recognition, picture association etc. had been found to be less effective than phonics…..” This isn’t the exact wording, but the word “traditional” was definitely used to describe the whole word recognition method.
The above is shocking, representing a complete inversion of the truth. I’m sure that you are aware that phonics teaching methods were universally employed up until the late 60’s early 70’s. Reading standards and abilities have shown a steady decline since this time when whole word recognition methods were introduced by an educational establishment increasingly driven by ideology rather than peer reviewed research.
To summarise:
It is a fact that Phonics was universally employed up until around 40 years ago.
It is a fact that after whole word recognition replaced phonics teaching and reading standards fell.
Your report gave the clear indication that phonics is the “new thing”, and that “traditional” whole word recognition is now seen as the cause of falling reading abilities.
This is the first time that I have ever felt the need to complain to a broadcaster as the above is such a clear example of very bad reporting. I would be interested to know if the writer of the item was a wet behind the ears, recent college graduate who genuinely believed the report and didn’t bother to do any research, or more sinisterly, did your reporter get the story from the Dept. of Education.
Yours Sincerely,
John East
I have been following this controversy ever since I heard a talk by a phonetics activist about 15 years ago.
She claimed that the phonics method not only helped with reading but also had beneficial effects in other areas of learning. I recently read that it has been established that the “look and say”(“methode globale” here in France) method of whole word recognition is totally fallacious in that the ability to recognise a word disappears precisly at the point where the individual letters cannot be distinguished!
I am a retired teacher of mathematics and in my experience new teaching mehods were invariably introduced without being correctly tested, not that those who proposed them were either capable of running a trial or would have cared about the results.
In the USA we had the same problem. The teachers replaced phonics with “whole word recognition”. And why? Because they were too fucking lazy to do the hard grinding work of teaching phonics. “Whole word recognition” was a whole of a lot easier — flash a picture, and a word for that picture, and demand that your students memorize both. Jeez, the modern state-funded teacher has got to be the most over-paid, laziest, least useful, and over-credentialed clown on the planet. About all they do, and all they want to do, is baby-sit. We should pay them what we pay the local 16-year old that baby-sits our kids. Say, $3.00 an hour.
Strophyx, you correctly say that parents have a role to play in teaching their children to read.
Here is an indication of the truely awful state of education in our country. My wife and I were told by the head mistress of the primary school that my 4 year old daughter would be joining in 6 months time that we should not attempt to teach her any reading. Apparently, we were likey to do more harm than good as our efforts may not be compatable with those to be employed by the school. I now realise that this useless teacher had obviously experienced difficulty in the past trying to teach whole word recognition to children who had previously been introduced to phonics by their parents.
John East,
By far the worst case of bias I have ever encountered in the British media was Sky News following the Dutch referendum this week. ‘No’ voters were actually referred to as ‘unwashed liberals with no plan for a future’ while EU leaders were, believe it or not, referred to as ‘noble’ and ‘tireless leaders striving for greater unity’ by the Sky News reporter. I can think of a lot of things to describe Phoney, “Stuka” Junckers (slow, ungainly and prone to being shot down by the British very easily) or even Schroder – but I’m afraid ‘noble’ is not one word I would use.
On second thoughts, I wonder if that spiteful article was inspired by Murdoch or just written, as many of their reports are, in the vague hope that it was in accordance with Rupert Murdoch’s wishes.
Some years ago didn’t some element of the US educational establishment propose that parents of pre-school children should be banned in law from attempting to teach their children to read because it messed up the plans of the educators to have everyone held back to the same stage of whatever their chosen method at the time was? In that case, although I agree that learning to read from learning the letters, as I did, is the most sensible way, I am a little disturbed that when some pedagoue was being interviewed about it on BBC Radio news she mentioned that synthetic phonics produced better results when used to the exclusion of other methods. That bit about the exclusion of other methods needs to be knocked on the head right away. Parents must always be allowed–encouraged even–to teach their own children to read by whatever method they wish
These experts who never bothered to make any tests as to the rightness of their theories, who adopted their ideas with a religious fervour, who have wrecked the education of two generations of our children should be called to account. They have committed a serious crime. Perhaps not a jail sentence but at least dismissal, loss of pension rights etc.
Similarly the activists who have created the aura of fear around the atomic energy industry and by so doing have caused huge step changes its costs by demanding outrageous safety standards have virtually guaranteed global warming. Their efforts have prevented the extended use of the safest and cleanest form of energy generation and increased its costs many times.
There seems to an irrational fault in human nature which leads individuals to pursue beliefs with religious intensity without much rational cause: nature curists,
new education theorists, greens, communists, and utopians of all flavours.
Of course Libertarians of this blog will guard against this!!
There are few things more unwelcome in institutions guided by dogma than competition. A great deal of the educational system aptly demonstrates this. I decline to write “the current educational system” since that restriction isn’t really appropriate. I know that my parents were actively discouraged from interfering with “the experts” 50 years ago. Luckily for my brothers and me, my parents were never the sorts to accept claims of expertise not backed by hard evidence.
I think this article and the subsequent comments miss the real point. We have an education system where funding is centrally provided and methods are prescribed from the centre and imposed.
No market forces operate, so education providers are not forced to compete – there is no survival of the fittest and the best methods.
Because the state both funds and provides education, it has an interest in defending its performance even if this means distorting the facts (for example exam results).
If a market system operated with funding coming from parents (perhaps through a voucher system, although this is only one of many posssible methods) then schools whch taught reading badly would soon get a bad reputation and either have to change methods or go out of business. I don’t believe in any centrally imposed method of teaching reading.
Why do we have to wait until it occurs to the vacuous Ruth Kelly to decide what method is best – and then impose it on everyone. I’m certainly far more intelligent and able to make these decisions for myself – I really don’t need her help.
10 out of 10 HJHJ, go to the top of the class. Your point should have been made earlier in this debate. The fact that it didn’t probably indicates the extent of the uphill struggle we have in front of us to sort education out.
My parents taught me to read before I started school, using what I suspect would be called the phonics method. I would sit on my father’s knee as he read the newspaper , and would be encouraged to spot individual letters and say what each sounded like. After a while, I could build up individual words and soon was devouring any reading material I could find.
When I started school the teachers refused to believe my mother when she said I could read, and tried to dissuade her from encouraging me any further.
Eventually another girl (whose parents had taken the same approach) and I were advanced a couple of years for reading, until the teachers decided that this was inappropriate. I suspect it was just to make their lives easier.
I think the lesson from all the comments posted is that parents do know best how to teach their kids.
I learnt to read using the i.t.a. (initial teaching alphabet), in the early seventies, and was perfectly capable of progressing to T.O. (traditional orthography) when I was about six. Myself, and everybody I grew up with never had any problems with literacy (spelling maybe). Yet children still leave school today functionally illiterate, now I am not saying that this is all down to not being taught phonics, but if phonics is able to help one more child in a hundred, then surely it is a system worth trying.
What? Chinese? It’s bloody tough to read, and I say this as a native speaker! I started learning chinese before english, and yet when I entered primary school(grade 1, IIRC) my standard of english was better than my chinese, and my first teacher was miffed when I would start reading whole passages out loud before she did.
My teacher asked my mother if she had been teaching me to read, but obviously my mother wasn’t responsible, because she couldn’t speak english, and my father , being chinese-educated, was poor at english. The only explanation they could find was Sesame Street and my own reading. My teacher was actually quite happy about this, but she did tell me to give others a chance, and got me to read only when none of the others could. Heh.
Back to the point…
Roman languages(like English) have an advantage in that at least the vowels give you some clue, some hint as to the proper pronunciation, and with enough exposure and experience, a reader can quite accurately pronounce a word by applying all the rules he has learnt intrinsicly, even if he might not know its meaning. The rules are there, and children would have to learnt those rules, albeit not as extensively as a scholar of the language.
But give me a Chinese word I have never seen before, and I won’t have the slightest idea how to pronounce it, and it would truly be a wild guess by looking at the component pictograms.
As somebody who knows a bit about phonetics, and having the experience of whole-word recognition learning through Chinese, I can say outright that phonics is a lot easier. English lends itself to this method very well, compared to Chinese, so why ignore it?
Given the sheer number of words in the Chinese language they have to learn, it was also one reason why more and more local children are finding it incredibly tough to master. I don’t think those who advocate the whole word thingy ever had a comparative study of large populations of people studying both languages at the same time, using de facto different approaches at the same time. The china/taiwan chinese and japanese don’t count, because their english, quite frankly, suck.
Because of my peculiar background(father’s a chinese teacher, while I majored in the english language, and we have had plenty of dinner talk over this issue), I have pretty strong evidence that english is by far much easier than chinese to learn, and this relative ease is largely in due to the roman alphabet and the associated pronunciation system which can taught through phonics.
TWG
My thanks to The Wobbly Guy – that was a unique and valuable insight. As someone who has seriously considered whether learning Chinese might be worthwhile… well, he’s reminded me how difficult it might be. None the less, his experience is extremely telling.
As for phonics, back when I was taught to read (making sense of the cave paintings by the smoky, flickering light of tallow lamps) there was no other way. Get it wrong and you’d be thrashed within an inch of your life with a stegosaurus tail.
The funny thing is that even “the stupid kid” (we were allowed to call them that in those days) never failed to learn to read by that method.
It’s true, the entire class wasn’t fully up to speed on the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by the age of ten, but even the most stupid could forge a note excusing themselves from P.E.
Phonics evolved because it worked. The alternative, because it was imposed as a doctrine in a strictly non-competitive, statist system, where theory mattered and reality didn’t, was a disaster for those without a natural facility (who will always learn however stupid their teachers).
The Wobbly Guy
Thanks for resurrecting my post on Chinese. Perhaps you could confirm that it will be unable to compete for the status of a world language until it is transliterated into latin letters. To me, the difficulties seem to be two-fold (at least):
This can’t happen until all Chinese at least understand, if not be bilingual in Mandarin. I know that the Chinese Government is trying to make this happen.
Some method must be devised for indicating the TONE of the sound used for same combination of letters – I believe there are four tones.
Am I right in supposing that Chinese and Japanese use latin-letter keyboards and the technology delivers a choice of characters?
Am I also right in supposing that the Chinese Government is a little cagey about accelerating changes to make pin-yin (the present approved transliteration) too precise because the response from the public would be, “Well, why are we learning all these characters?”
In fact, DOES the Government have a policy?
To get back on topic: Is there any evidence that the proponents of the Look-and-Say Method in the US and UK looked at the problem facing a Chinese learning to read and write?
I don’t know wobbly guy, but it sounds like he was learning to read and write Chinese in an non-Chinese environment.
I understand it’s comparitively easier to learn characters for children in China/Japan because the environment is filled with them and children (and adults) have constant exposure. People who learn in such environments tell me that they unconsciously learned a lot of characters and that they can figure out new characters when they encounter them in enough context. That is, if they see an isolated character on a flash card, they might have some vague idea about pronunciation (over 80 % of characters have some phonetic information) and meaning, but won’t know what it is, but if they counter it in the middle of a paragraph, it’s usually not hard to figure out.
On the other hand, I’m studying Vietnamese which dumped characters (a grass roots movement as opposed to government mandate despite myths to the contrary) and the Vietnamese speakers I know are very glad about that.
Finally, the site http://www.pinyin.info has some interesting information on characters and the nature of pinyin (written by word rather than syllable and with tone marks). It doesn’t yet have that much content in pinyin though (Vietnamese romanization worked because people spontaneously started using it a long time before it became ‘official’).
Ten years ago, my father was the first one to assert to me that chinese is actually a dying language, as are all similar languages that rely on pictograms, or rather, whole word recognition. While I think he was exagerrating, he did have a key point in that chinese was indeed tough to learn(as a teacher of it, he knew this better than most people).
Chinese will never be a world language because it simply takes too much effort to learn as a second language, specifically because of its characteristics. English has become the lingua franca because it’s easy to pick up(due to phonics, which actually applies to all other languages which were developed from the roman system).
Even if we dump the pictograms and use purely hanyu pinyin, there are problems, because many chinese words share the same sound, and even many combination of words sound exactly the same.
All China chinese already know mandarin(Putonghua), so that’s not an issue. And what many people do not know is that chinese dialects actually use the same written code as mandarin, except that they are pronounced differently. Credit to where’s credit due: Qin Shi Huang.
The 4 tones are already represented by 4 different diacritic marks above a vowel letter in the hanyu pinyin transliteration.
Yup. I used to help my father type Chinese test questions. We would enter the hanyu pinyin transliteration without diacritic marks into a sidebar, which then presents all the pictogram words with that sound with an associated number choice(0-9), and then press the number to select that pictogram. Pretty easy to use for common words, but when it comes to uncommon or rare words, whooboy…
It’s already very precise, but it really can’t get any simpler, because that’s what chinese is. And frankly speaking, I have no idea what the PRC wants because I’m not from China. But they have started instituting more english into the curriculum, and I’m kinda interested to see what effect it would have on the learning of chinese there.
I think they never quite understood that comparing the two languages, they would have to take into account the number of words learnt at each stage of development. According to my father, a chinese student in Singapore should have learnt 2000 different pictograms by primary 6(grade 6, age 12). Perhaps we multiply that by 2 for students in China, giving them 4000 pictograms/characters, since they are more wholly immersed.
Compared to English, I can quite safely say the number of words a child learns by age 12 would be far more than 4000. Perhaps this also explains why children who learnt through the whole word method are unable to read so many words; they’ve already hit the 4000 word(perhaps more) recognition limit. Any word which did not belong in that memory bank would go unrecognised.
Well… Singapore is, strictly speaking, not a chinese speaking country, but it’s prevalent everywhere anyway. Anyway, the environment I grew up in was indeed a chinese environment. Spoke chinese at home, watched chinese shows, read chinese books and comics, etc. It’s just that english was so much easier.
And that was before I entered school and had english as the medium of instruction for all other subjects. Hmmm… come to think of it, China chinese and Japanese students are probably better because their native languages were their medium of instruction. So you’re right in that immersion in an environment helps a lot, but when comparing the sheer number of words in English that one has to learn compared to Chinese/Japanese, well…
Regarding the 80% figure for phonetic information, that is so untrue. Mandarin developed as a separate dialect like all other chinese dialects, and they all developed starkly different sounds for the same words, for which the original sounds had long been lost. Therefore, the word-sound correlation is low.
TWG
Yes, thank goodness HJHJ has at last made the point that you’d expect to see front and centre on a libertarian site – the government has no business imposing ANY system for teaching reading on the whole country. The best way to teach/learn reading and writing English is an empirical matter. And it may change over time as technology changes. It may even change as English changes. It’s pretty obvious that phonics works better than whole word, but who knows what developments or improvements some imaginative teacher might make, or whether different children might do better learning in different ways, or whether someone will invent something that enables you to imbibe reading with your cornflakes. Apart from competition and the sifting of good methods from bad, the market offers innovation. Not the deranged Maoist innovation of experiment free theories imposed nationally, but the ordinary system of trial and error.
I’m happy to see that phonics is making a comeback in the UK.
My son has been learning phonics at a private school here in the US using Saxon Publishers’ system(Link), which involves coding words, with various marks to indicate length of vowels, silent consonants, and various letter cluster patterns. As irregular as English is, I expected a large number of words to be presented as sight words, but I was pleasantly surprised that Saxon had found a way to systematize most of the “irregularities,” and the number of unavoidable sight words was quite small. My son has just finished second grade and can handle any text with confidence, although he will sometimes get lazy and guess rather than sound out a word.
I’m happy to see that phonics is making a comeback in the UK.
My son has been learning phonics at a private school here in the US using Saxon Publishers’ system(Link), which involves coding words, with various marks to indicate length of vowels, silent consonants, and various letter cluster patterns. As irregular as English is, I expected a large number of words to be presented as sight words, but I was pleasantly surprised that Saxon had found a way to systematize most of the “irregularities,” and the number of unavoidable sight words was quite small. My son has just finished second grade and can handle any text with confidence, although he will sometimes get lazy and guess rather than sound out a word.
This is a great discussion folks and I know that my comments here seem a bit watery – but – from personal experience of having two kids use the phonics system in a primary school in Scotland over the last five years – IT WORKS – and then some!
My (now) seven year old was reading way above his level within a year of starting phonics at the age of five. The school called it “Alphabet Magic” – and it certainly seemed to be.
Get on with it government – yes, you’ve made a mess of it previously – but now’s the time to sort it out
When you buy something from a shop, generally speaking you don’t examine the method by which it was produced, or try to persuade the government to set regulations about how it is produced, in order to choose what to buy. You just evaluate the finished product. Broadly speaking, education should be like this – schools should be responsible to consumers who can go elsewhere if not satisfied with their product. Those consumers should not need to become experts in production methods (that’s the producers job), just to compare results. This is why any attempt to centrally impose methods on schools will not work.
It’s a simple concept, but seemingly not simple enough for Ruth Kelly to understand it.
Incidentally, the Wobbly Guy stated “Roman languages (like English)…” I don’t think this is correct, English is one of the Germanic group of languages (although with some clear influences from the Roman languages).
I’d like to second John Rippengal’s desire that the “educationalists” responsible for chucking out phonics in the state sector should be held to account. Who are they? Does anyone on this blog know? Let’s find out and expose them. I want names! Without accountability there’s no democracy, and since we’re certainly not going to get accountability from the Dept of Education, we’ve got to do it ourselves. Yes, we the public have no actual power, but outing these people might at least dent their complacency. I’d hate to think that they’d go into respectable retirement without some kind of public acknowledgement of the damage they’ve done to the country.
I’d like to second John Rippengal’s desire that the “educationalists” responsible for chucking out phonics in the state sector should be held to account. Who are they? Does anyone on this blog know? Let’s find out and expose them. I want names! Without accountability there’s no democracy, and since we’re certainly not going to get accountability from the Dept of Education, we’ve got to do it ourselves. Yes, we the public have no actual power, but outing these people might at least dent their complacency. I’d hate to think that they’d go into respectable retirement without some kind of public acknowledgement of the damage they’ve done to the country.
By “Roman languages” I think WG means a language which uses the Roman alphabet, unlike, for example, Mandarin Chinese.
Yeah, the Romanic and the Germanic branches are different, and I got them mixed up. After some checking, I found that the Germanic languages used runes before converting to the Roman alphabet, and English evolved after the switch. Seems important, but then again, maybe not.
The key point is this: the chinese have recognized through trial and error that a child at 12 years old can only remember 4000 pictograms(a high end figure), including their meanings and vocabulary, and are not expected to know how to pronounce a word they have never seen before.
English speakers at age 12 have to remember about the same amount of vocabulary(I think), but their reading/pronunciation skill is expected to have progressed to the point where they should be able to read out loud any new word regardless of whether they had seen it before or not, or even if they know its meaning or not!
Here’s a good link I’ve found on this issue.
http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/reading/whole_language_lives_on.html
Looking back, I can’t see why many of the problems they found with the phonics approach in those days(basal readers, mechanistic drills) can’t be solved by using authentic texts as the whole language proponents argued for. The use of phonics along with authentic texts, like short plays, short snippets of movies with transcripts, etc go a long way towards developing correct speaking and reading habits. But the use of whole language itself to teach reading, with its close associations of pronunciation and spelling, is a very bad idea.
TWG