Dr Jennifer Buckingham: Focus on Phonics - a report recommending use of an annual phonics check

[Susan Godsland]

Thrass programme developer Alan Davies stated in a press release (Jan 08):

(T)here is no need to look for a new model of early reading to replace the ‘Searchlights’ model...It is wrong to believe that synthetic phonics is the ‘best route to becoming skilled readers’, as stated in Jim’s report'... 'Parents need to understand and use four 'searchlights' for reading with their children: a 'Word Recognition Searchlight', a 'Phonics Searchlight', a 'Context Searchlight' and a 'Grammar Searchlight', as set out in the National Literacy Strategy that the UK Government abandoned in 2005. The Government's new synthetic phonics programme, 'Letters and Sounds', focuses on the 'Phonics Searchlight', an approach which is inadequate for both parents and young children’

Another quote from a Thrass spokesperson:

The best phonics method is not solely Synthetic Phonics (as championed by British Prime Minister David Cameron) but Analytic AND Synthetic phonics, AnaSynth Phonics (a.k.a. Keyword Phonics), starting with pre-school children discussing the pictures, words and text in books, with their parents, grandparents and nursery teachers, giving them the opportunity to read more and more words by sight before they start formal schooling''

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Blogger, Greg Ashman, writes about 'post-truth' via his 'Filling the Pail' blog:

PISA, the phonics check and ‘post-truth’

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2016/1 ... ost-truth/

...So let’s consider this: What is post-truth?

Is it those punks who gatecrash the party and challenge traditional education research?

Or is it writing about the PISA data in order to utterly dismiss it as in the AARE blog? Is it using this data to make an argument about equity that the data doesn’t support? Is it post-truth to ignore the biggest story of all in the PISA data – that a greater use of inquiry learning is associated with worse PISA science scores – in order to try to make political points?

Perhaps post-truth is characterising those who disagree with you as being racists because they happen to point out that a country that was behind Australia in the last TIMSS assessment, and that has fewer resources at its disposal, has now outperformed Australia?

Is it post-truth to note that, following the introduction of a phonics check in the UK, reading comprehension improved – a simple empirical fact? Or is it post-truth to dismiss the idea of a phonics check as being about controlling teachers?...

In Australia, those who are promoting the introduction of a year one phonics check are now experiencing the backlash of various detractors - just as we experienced in England and continue to do so!

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Further developments - Dr Jennifer Buckingham and Minister Simon Birmingham participate in a radio interview, hosted by Leigh Sales, about the NAPLAN results in Australia:

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2016/s4591936.htm

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Yet another piece on developments focused on educational standards in Australia - in 'The Australian':

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationa ... ae4714f818

Phonics as hot topic as ministers meet

by Stefanie Balogh

The push for a Year 1 phonics check to ensure children don’t fall behind as they build their reading skills is a top priority of the Turnbull government as education ministers meet today to discuss school reforms.

The Education Council gathering in Melbourne will focus on the best ways to lift teacher quality and student performance amid warnings the nation is facing a crisis after an onslaught of disappointing international and domestic test results exposed a 20-year academic slide.

Liberal and Labor states, with the exception of Western Australia, have joined forces with federal Labor to urge Canberra to continue funding the final two years of the Gonski needs-based arrangements.

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham wants a new deal from 2018, arguing there is an inequitable system in place made up of 27 different political funding deals.

Despite the standoff over Gonski funding, today’s meeting is expected to concentrate on education reforms.

Senator Birmingham wants the focus on how to target funding to lift performance.

He has proposed a suite of reforms, which would be linked to the big stick of funding to get the states on board, including a phonics assessment, breaking the industrial stranglehold on teachers to reward performance instead of time served, new subject specialisations of maths and science for primary teachers, and more rigorous accreditation of initial teaching of tertiary courses.

The proposal for a “light touch’’ standardised assessment of Year 1 reading, phonics and numeracy has so far met with a lukewarm reception from the states.

Schools expert Jennifer Buckingham said “a Year 1 phonics check is quick, simple and cost-­effective’’.

“The only way we can know for sure if schools are teaching phonics effectively is to assess what children know at this critical stage in learning to read,’’ the senior research fellow and director of FIVE from FIVE project at The Centre for Independent Studies said.

Annandale Public School principal Dace Elletson knows from personal experience how crucial literacy is.

“I didn’t start reading until I was 12 and now I’m the principal of a school,” he said. “For me, it’s really important because I know what it is like to struggle.”

The school, in Sydney’s inner west, is one of 20 across NSW involving 320 students using the new MiniLit program to help Year 1 readers get back on track.

Evidence for Learning director Matthew Deeble will today announce a partnership with the NSW government to independently evaluate the program, which focuses on teaching key reading elements such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

This article has been flagged up by a THRASS representative regarding the position of the THRASS Institute to the phonics check:

https://www.bera.ac.uk/bera-in-the-news ... -knowledge

Press Release – Children “can pass phonics test without extensive phonic knowledge”

15 September 2016

The government’s assessment of early reading, taken by hundreds of thousands of five- and six-year-olds in England every year, is not testing what it is supposed to test, research has concluded.

The phonics screening check, introduced by the coalition in 2012, is failing to assess the full range of phonic knowledge which the government-designed national curriculum says pupils should have.

Detailed analysis of the words which pupils have been asked to read in the check, alongside the pass mark, shows that youngsters can get through the assessment with only basic phonic knowledge, rather than with a full understanding of the phonics curriculum.

The article features comments by Dr Solity who has a specific approach to the number of letter/s-sound correspondences introduced in explicit teaching:

Some pupils, then, are struggling with reading having wasted too much time being drilled on less frequent GPCs, it is argued.

Dr Solity said: “This is not an anti-phonics argument. It is absolutely clear that children need to be taught phonics, and systematic synthetic phonics in particular.

“What we are questioning is whether it is worth teachers spending a great amount of time making sure pupils learn all 85 GPCs, rather than concentrating on the most frequent ones and then building pupils’ vocabulary.”

He added: “Reading standards are more likely to be improved, and literacy difficulties prevented, through teaching a small number of high utility GPCs and devoting the time currently spent teaching low frequency GPCs, to developing pupils’ language skills and vocabulary knowledge.”

“Is the Phonic Screening Check a Major Cause of Pupils’ Difficulties in Learning to Read?” is being presented to BERA by Dr Jonathan Solity on Thursday, September 15th

.

Interestingly, Dr Marlynne Grant provided a guest blog posting for IFERI and the UK Reading Reform Foundation about Dr Solity's approach compared to an approach involving more comprehensive coverage of the English alphabetic code which you can read about here:

The Optima Reading Programme by Dr Jonathan Solity: Does it Provide Optimal Results? A Paper by Dr Marlynne Grant

http://www.iferi.org/the-optima-reading ... nne-grant/

[Dick Schutz]

With friends of "Systematic Synthetic Phonics" like THRASS and Dr. Solity, the BERA paper should be "Is Misunderstanding of the Alphabetic Code [Phonics] Screening Check a Major Cause in Children's Difficulties in Learning to Read."

Counterfactuals in the BERA paper:

-- A "Screening Check" is a screening check, not a test.

--The purpose of the Screening Check is to identify children needing further instruction in how to handle the Alphabetic Code.

--The Check does not purport to "measure the full range of phonics knowledge" (whatever that might be).

--Pupils do not need "vocabulary knowledge to read pseudo-words.

--Instructions for administering the Check permit "alternate pronunciation" consistent with local dialect.

--The Framework for the Check relies on Consonant/Vowel patterns, not on Grapheme/Phoneme Correspondences.

In short, THRASS and Dr. Solity erect and attack a straw man. Incidentally, neither THRASS nor Dr. Solity have offered any evidence that children taught with their programmes can read all the words on the Screening Check.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Thanks, Dick, for your further observations!

And here is Jennifer again - this time a radio interview via soundcloud.com:

https://soundcloud.com/moretothepoint/d ... -pisa-2015

Education crisis! Australia’s PISA 2015 results are catastrophic says Dr Jennifer Buckingham.

This is the introduction to the radio interview:

Once again the PISA (program for international student assessment) results have been released, and the news for Australian students is bad. We now have more lower performers, and less higher performers, and the overall trend is down. Dr Jennifer Buckingham is a senior research fellow for the Centre for Independent Studies and recently contributed an article to the Australian Financial Review newspaper, discussing the results. The news for Australian education is that despite our best efforts over the last 10 years to reform and improve, the strategies have largely not worked. There are still wide variances between the states, regional and metropolitan areas and socio economic demographics, and some of the numbers are just downright disturbing. I caught up with Jennifer to discuss just how bad this really is, why it happened and what we can do about it.

To find out more about the PISA results, you can check out the report that was released by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) by visiting their website at www.acer.edu.au

And to find out more about research and resources for reading, as published by the Centre for Independent Studies, you can visit their website at www.cis.org.au

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

For anyone who is interested, I've added the link below about England's 2016 Year One Phonics Screening Check results as more information has been uploaded:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic ... ign=buffer

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

In The Conversation:

Explainer: what is phonics and why is it important?

by Hua-Chen Wang

https://theconversation.com/explainer-w ... tant-70522

The efficacy of phonics as a method of teaching has been debated for several decades, and has recently come back to the forefront of public debate.

This time, the focus is on the phonics check – a screening tool designed to identify early readers who may be in need of intervention, and provide some indication of how successful current phonics teaching methods are. The UK has been using the Phonics Screening Check (PSC) since 2012, and now there is a push to implement a trial of the same check in Australia. This has raised some concerns.

So what’s the fuss about phonics?

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

This is a truly fantastic development - the announcement by Minister Simon Birmingham of an expert panel to inform the Education Council mid-2017 regarding a phonics check and maths assessment.

I've started a new thread to announce this news and cross-referenced it:

http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... 1321#p1321

Congratulations to all concerned with developments in Australia including the DDOLL network!

DDOLL = Developmental Disorders of Language and Literacy Network