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Examining the evidence on the effectiveness of synthetic phonics teaching: the Ehri et al (2001) and C.Torgerson et al (2006) meta-analyses by Rhona Johnston, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Hull

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Examining the evidence on the effectiveness of synthetic phonics teaching: the Ehri et al (2001) and C.Torgerson et al (2006) meta-analyses
Rhona Johnston, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Hull

Introduction

In a recent article, Castles et al (2018) have concluded that there is insufficient evidence as yet to determine whether the synthetic phonics approach is superior to the analytic phonics approach, citing the meta-analyses of Ehri et al ( 2001) and C.Torgerson et al (2006).

Studies of synthetic versus analytic phonics teaching

The experiments comparing the effectiveness of synthetic versus analytic phonics teaching by Johnston and Watson (2004) were carried out on children in their first year of school (equivalent to kindergarten in the U.S.). Johnston and Watson’s (2004) synthetic phonics approach was taken from the method used in Austria, as described by Feitelson (1988), where sounding and blending was introduced at the start of reading tuition. Children learnt to read and spell very much better when taught by the synthetic phonics method compared with the typical analytic phonics method used in Scotland.

When the UK Education Select Committee recommended to the government that it consider introducing the synthetic phonics method into schools in England, it referred to it as ‘phonics first and fast’. A later introduction of sounding and blending means that other methods are used first, approaches which often undermine the synthetic phonics approach. Therefore, in order to examine the evidence supporting the effectiveness of the method, only studies where the synthetic phonics method was introduced in kindergarten should be examined.

Meta-analyses of phonics teaching

a) Ehri et al (2001)

It should be noted that Ehri et al’s (2001) analysis compared synthetic phonics programmes with those containing unsystematic phonics or no phonics (page 400), not analytic phonics, which is systematic. They did compare the effect sizes for synthetic phonics (d=0.45) and larger-subunit programmes (d=0.34), which was not statistically significant. However, in the UK analytic phonics is taught at the grapheme to phoneme level, after establishing an initial sight word vocabulary, so it is not a larger subunit approach in the early stages. In Scotland, the approach traditionally progressed to teaching sounding and blending at the end of the first year at school. In our research, the defining feature of synthetic phonics was that sounding and blending should be taught right from the start.

An examination is made here of all of the kindergarten studies using synthetic phonics included in Ehri et al (2001), with the exception of one study that did not measure word identification so cannot be directly compared to Johnston and Watson’s (2004) experiments (see Table 1). It should be noted that two of these studies carried out phonological awareness training prior to teaching participants to read via synthetic phonics (Blachman et al, 1999; J.Torgesen et al, 1999, see Notes 1 & 2). These studies have very low effect sizes at the kindergarten post-test. When these data are included (see column 3) the mean effect size is low (0.28). A different picture emerges at the next post-test, after synthetic phonics teaching had commenced, see column 4. When these data points from these two studies (see column 5) are used, a mean effect size of 0.49 is found.

The two studies by Johnston and Watson (2004) comparing synthetic phonics teaching with the analytic phonics approach used in Scotland yielded large effect sizes (see Table 2); these studies were not included in the Ehri et al (2001) meta-analysis. In the Clackmannanshire study (Experiment 1), over a 7 year period the effect sizes for word identification versus chronological age increased year after year (Johnston, McGeown and Watson, 2012).

Table 1 Effect sizes for word identification scores from kindergarten synthetic phonics studies included in Ehri et al (2001); synthetic phonics versus little or no phonics teaching

Table 1

Table 2 Effect sizes for word identification scores from Johnston and Watson’s (2004) studies comparing synthetic and analytic phonics teaching

Table 2

b) C.Torgerson et al (2006)

This meta-analysis was designed to compare synthetic with analytic phonics teaching, so included only 3 studies; it also deselected any studies which were not randomised controlled trial studies (unlike Ehri et al, 2001). They included Experiment 2 from Johnston and Watson (2004).

However, one of the studies included was an unpublished one that had an incorrect implementation of the synthetic phonics method (50% of the taught words were silent ‘e’ words, which cannot be accurately blended by initial readers). Furthermore, C.Torgerson et al (2006) put into the analysis the post-test data from the trained items, where there was a difference favouring analytic phonics, not the data from the untrained items, where there was no difference.

C.Torgerson et al (2006) also included the J.Torgesen et al (1999) study, but put in the kindergarten data from when the children were largely being taught phonological awareness. At this stage, the embedded (not analytic) phonics control condition included a lot of word reading, whereas the PASP method did not. It can be seen that when the children were exposed to the synthetic phonic element of the programme, the effect size in favour of the method was much greater (see Table 1).

We have published our critique of the C.Torgerson et al (2006) meta-analysis in our book Teaching Synthetic Phonics, and the relevant section can be read online, page 14:
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=WOOICwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA14

Conclusions

The US National Reading Panel meta-analysis reported in Ehri et al (2001) included studies with a late implementation of synthetic phonics teaching, an approach which is not compatible with the method used by Johnston and Watson (2004). Even when the studies of synthetic phonics that started in kindergarten were examined, two of them were found to have a late introduction of sounding and blending for reading as phonological awareness was taught first. In both cases, the introduction of synthetic phonics later on led to a very large increase in effect size. No study in this sub-analysis self-identified itself as having an analytic phonics control condition. Furthermore, the comparison in the meta-analysis between synthetic and large subunit phonics does not encompass the analytic phonics approach used in the UK for the initial teaching of reading.

A close examination of the C.Torgerson et al (2006) meta-analysis shows evidence of multiple errors in the selection of the studies to be included and in the selection of the data entered into the analysis. The number of studies included was also too small to allow for a meaningful meta-analysis.

It cannot be concluded that these two meta-analyses showed evidence against the superiority of the synthetic over the analytic phonics method.

The synthetic phonics method as implemented in our studies involved, right from the start of school, children learning a small number of letter sounds and using that knowledge right away to sound and blend the letters to find out how to pronounce unfamiliar words. They
then rapidly learnt more letter sounds and continued to use the strategy. We found that these children had much better reading and phonological awareness skills than those taught either by analytic phonics, or by analytic phonics plus phonological awareness (Johnston and Watson, 2004, Experiment 1, the Clackmannanshire Study). Unlike broad-based meta-analytic comparisons, there was strict control of the new printed words used to teach all of the groups compared in our studies, so issues of pace of print exposure between studies do not arise. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that the early rigorous start of synthetic phonics teaching led to the children making increasing gains in reading ability compared with age long after the intervention ended (Johnston et al, 2012).

References

Blachman, B., Tangel, D., Ball, E., Black, R., & McGraw, D. (1999). Developing phonological awareness and word recognition skills: A two-year intervention with low-income, inner-city children. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11, 239–273.

Castles, A., Rastle, K, and Nation, K (2018) Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Vol. 19(1) 5–51.

Ehri et al (2001) Systematic Phonics Instruction Helps Students Learn to Read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research,71, No. 3, pp. 393–44.

Feitelson, D (1988) Facts and fads in beginning reading: A cross-language perspective. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Johnston, R.S and Watson, J. (2004) Accelerating the development of reading, spelling and phonemic awareness. Reading and Writing, 17 (4), 327-357.

Johnston, R.S, McGeown, S, and Watson, J. (2012) Long-term effects of synthetic versus analytic phonics teaching on the reading and spelling ability of 10 year old boys and girls. Reading and Writing, 25, part 6, 1365-1384.

Johnston, R. and Watson, J. (2014) Teaching Synthetic Phonics, 2nd edition. Sage (Learning Matters): London.

Torgesen, J., Wagner, R., Rashotte, C., Rose, E., Lindamood, P., Conway, T., & Garvan, C. (1999). Preventing reading failure in young children with phonological processing disabilities: Group and individual responses to instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 579–593.

Torgerson, C., Brooks, G., & Hall, J. (2006). A systematic review of the research literature on the use of phonics in the teaching of reading and spelling (Research Report RR711). U.K. Department for Education and Skills. Retrieved from http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/14791/1/RR711_.pdf

Notes

1Blachman et al (1999) ‘From February to May (Semester 2) of kindergarten, treatment children participated in 41, 15 to 20 minute phonological awareness lessons (adapted from the shorter, 28 lesson program used in Ball and Blachman, 1991), delivered over an 11 week period to small, heterogeneous groups of four or five children. Classroom teachers and their
teaching assistants were responsible for teaching all of the lessons. Each lesson followed the same daily format: (1) a phoneme segmentation activity (called say-it-and-move-it) in which children learned to move disks to represent the sounds in one-, two-, and three phoneme
words spoken by the teacher, (2) a segmentation-related activity, such as grouping words on the basis of shared sounds (e.g., hat and hot go together because they share the same initial sound), and (3) one of a variety of activities to teach the letter names and sounds of eight letters (a, m, t, i, s, r, f, b).

Grade 1, for the treatment children ‘Instruction in phoneme analysis and blending skills….Children were taught to pronounce as a single unit a consonant (continuant) followed by a vowel. To begin, the teacher represented this strategy on the board as follows:
The teacher pointed to the first letter, and the child was taught to produce that letter’s sound and hold the sound until the teacher’s finger reached the second letter. When her finger touched the second letter, the second sound was produced and held. With each successive practice opportunity, the length of time between sounds was decreased until the two sounds were pronounced as a single unit. By adding final consonants (initially, stop consonants) and
pronouncing the whole word, a set of real words was built (e.g., sat, sam). Words containing new short vowels were also introduced in this manner.’

2J.Torgesen et al (1999) PASP (Phonological awareness plus Synthetic Phonics) condition. Started in Semester 2 of Kindergarten. ‘This group received the Auditory Discrimination
in Depth Program as developed and outlined by Patricia and Charles Lindamood (1984). The program provided explicit instruction in phonemic awareness by leading children to discover and label the articulatory gestures associated with each phoneme. This discovery work was followed by activities to build skills in tracking the phonemes in words using mouth-form pictures, colored blocks, and letters to represent the phonemes in words

‘War and Peace in Reading – Time for a Truce?’ by Sir Jim Rose

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Some children we teach imprint indelible memories. One such was Raymond. He was a ‘blitz of a boy’ fashioned in the mould of Charles Causley’s, ‘Timothy Winters’. For him, school was not always a pretty sight. During a story writing lesson, he asked: ‘‘Sir, how do you spell peace?’’ I said, ‘’Do you mean as in a piece of pie, Raymond?’’ He said, ‘’No. I mean like when ‘me’ dad says: turn that bloody telly off and let’s have a bit of peace.’’ This was almost 60 years ago when I was a ‘rookie’ primary teacher and Raymond was one of 40 children in my class of nine-year-olds.

While much has changed markedly for the better in primary education over the years it seems that peace has yet to break out over how best to teach young children to read and write. In the never-ending ‘Reading Wars’, the noise of battle is sometimes akin to those repetitious adverts on the ‘telly’ that numb the brain: once described by a teacher colleague as ‘stereophonic porridge — cold grey and coming at you from all directions’. For hardworking, dedicated primary teachers much of this debate must come over as a Tower of Babel, especially when they look to research for help only to find that it, too, often points in opposite directions.

On the face of it, two recent papers by Greg Brooks, seem to be another attempt to stir the porridge in Australia and in England. The first argues forcibly that Australia should resist the temptation to introduce a version of the Phonics Screening Check (PSC). The second is one of a brigade of papers in a recent book edited by Margaret Clark, a long-standing critic of the Reading Review (Rose 2006), who seems to be stuck fast in an unreconstructed, Plowdenesque view of primary education.

Australia is debating the value of a Phonic Screening Check for their schools and is wisely drawing upon rich seams of national and international academic expertise and professional practice to inform their decisions. This paper therefore focuses upon the papers by Brooks and Clark in the case of England. In passing, however, it is perhaps worth saying the PSC is turning out to be an exceptional initiative, not least, by providing a very strong incentive for schools and teachers to verify their judgements and keep children’s progress in phonics under review.
Since it was published, I have spent much time reminding critics, first, about the remit of our 2006 Review and, secondly, on explaining what it did not say to those inclined to believe everything they read in the press, as well as those with vested interests be they ideological, or commercial.

I agree with Greg Brooks in that many who take issue with the 2006 Review have either not read it or have chosen to ignore its key recommendations which, for example, set phonics in the context of a powerfully enriched primary school curriculum that prioritises literacy, with serious attention given to developing spoken language and attentive listening alongside reading and writing. ‘If they can’t say it they can’t write it’ has always seemed to me to be one of several obvious reasons for fostering ‘oracy’ from birth, as a precursor for literacy and much else. How many times and ways does the message that: ‘high quality phonic work is essential but not sufficient for teaching children to read’, need to be parroted before it sinks in?
I part company with Greg Brooks when he takes issue with the Reading Review on the grounds that it overstates the case for synthetic phonics and conflates it with systematic phonics. So, what does the Review actually say on that score? It says:

‘‘Research, inspection and leading-edge work of settings and schools may inform best practice. However, findings from different research programmes are sometimes contradictory or inconclusive, and often call for further studies to test tentative findings. While robust research findings must not be ignored, developers of national strategies, much less schools and settings, cannot always wait for the results of long-term research studies. They must take decisions, based on as much firm evidence as is available from a range of sources at the time, especially from replicable and sustainable best practice”

Greg Brooks applies a sleight of hand by ignoring the first, specific remit for the Review, notably, to make a judgement about: ‘What best practice should be expected of early reading and synthetic phonics?’

Even though the research in 2006 may have been inconclusive the requirement was to make a judgement, not to sit on the fence. Ten years on, I would argue that the research is now far from inconclusive, rather it amounts to an even stronger case for synthetic phonics.

By any reasonable definition ‘synthetic phonics’ is systematic, that is to say, it must be taught directly, regularly and incrementally according to a planned progression that takes full account of children’s different but developing abilities.

Moreover, ‘inconclusive’ seems to be an outcome to which educational research is particularly prone. What are teachers expected to do when research accrued over years at considerable expense comes to no conclusion and they have to teach something as crucially important as reading? One obvious response to that question is to take ‘proven practice’ (R. Slavin 2016) into account and that, too, was written into my remit as ‘best practice’.

Greg Brooks and one of his colleagues, Carole Torgerson had a different answer. If memory serves, having themselves already conducted a review of research on phonics, they wanted to spend another four years at considerable expense on a randomised control trial designed to settle the matter on synthetic phonics. This was because their review had found in favour of systematic phonics but was ambivalent about the primacy of synthetic phonics over ‘analytic phonics’. In my view and that of other members of our Advisory Group so doing risked kicking the can down the road for another four years thus paralysing action in schools and teacher training.

Contrary to Greg’s reflections on the run up to my Review, we spent a great deal of time, especially in schools, observing the teaching of reading, including a very helpful visit to the famous Clackmannanshire Project. We saw most, if not all of the leading-edge, published reading programmes in action and attended teacher training events. We also had the benefit of an HMI survey designed to inform the Review, plus numerous meetings of stakeholders, such as, parents. Though unacknowledged by Clark and Brooks, all of this is set out in the Review.

Prior to the Review I had also taken part in HMI exercises reporting on what turned out to be a flawed ‘Searchlights’ model of reading in England’s National Literacy Strategy, as well as directly observing the teaching of reading in projects overseas, including the USA and Europe.
In consequence, we reported that:

‘Having considered a wide range of evidence, the review has concluded that that the case for systematic phonic work is overwhelming and much strengthened by a synthetic approach the key features of which are to teach beginner readers:

  • grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences (the alphabetic principle) in a clearly defined, incremental sequence
  • to apply the highly important skill of blending (synthesising) phonemes in order all-through a word to read it
  • to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell
  • that blending and segmenting are reversible processes.’

In the case of phonic work, it is very clear that for any programme to be successful, first and foremost, it must be systematic. That is ‘square one’. This much at least seems to be common ground with Greg Brooks but less so it seems with Margaret Clark.

Judgements about synthetic phonics therefore covered one, albeit hugely important, aspect of the remit.

Greg Brooks admits that he is theoretically disposed to accept synthetic phonics as the front runner when compared to ‘analytic phonics’. He writes:

‘I was convinced then, and still am, that theory suggests that synthetic phonics is more coherent than analytic phonics as a strategy for young learners working out unfamiliar words.’

So, the question seems to be: ‘Synthetic phonics works in practice but does it work in theory?’ Fair dues – Greg is working on it.

He will no doubt take on board the spectacular success of England shown in the latest PIRLS data as reported by the BBC: ‘Northern Ireland and England are in the top 10 of the world’s best primary school readers in global rankings.’

And, reflect on the comments about the Phonics Check in the DFE report – Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) National Report for England December 2016:

‘The present PIRLS findings provide additional support for the efficacy of phonics approaches, and in particular, the utility of the phonics check for flagging pupils’ potential for lower reading performance in their future schooling. Additionally, the correlation between the phonics check and PIRLS performance also potentially bodes well for England’s pupils’ average performance in future PIRLS cycles, as 58% of pupils met the phonics check expected standard in 2012, whereas this has increased to 81% in 2017. Pupils who met this standard in 2012 had an average PIRLS 2016 performance of 587, compared to the overall average of 559.’

Perhaps we should remind ourselves that wars have winners and losers and in this phoney battle over phonics; the risk is that the real losers will be children, especially those who struggle to learn to read and of whom much more needs to be said than can be covered in this paper.
Today, as I write, the BBC is commenting on this year’s imminent OFSTED Annual Report, as follows:

  • More than 100 schools have not improved in the last 10 years, education watchdog Ofsted is expected to say.
  • The annual report by the Chief Inspector of Schools being released on Wednesday is expected to show that 130 schools have failed to record a “good” inspection since 2005.
  • It is reported that of the 20,000 schools in the country, 500 of those for children of primary age and 200 for over-11s have failed to make the grade.
  • However, 90% of all primary schools and nearly 80% of all secondary schools are rated good or outstanding, the report will say.

Clearly the rising tide of reading success in England is a cause for rejoicing but it is not lifting a worrying minority of boats that are firmly stuck in the mud. We need to keep working at it. Given that we know so much about ‘what works’ to secure high standards of reading in schools – perhaps we should now pay more attention to that other crucial piece of the territory and ask: what works to best effect in teacher training?

Jim Rose
13.12.17

For further information and discussion, please visit the forum here.

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

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Recently Dr Jonathan Solity reported on his critical analysis of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check.1 This has thrown a spotlight on his own programme for teaching reading, which was developed first as ERR (Early Reading Research), later known as KRM, and currently as Optima.

Having watched the video on the Optima website (2016) (2) http://optimapsychology.com/find-out-more/introductory-video/ I was struck by the many similarities to the systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) teaching with which I am familiar:

  • Whole class teaching
  • Results showing no gender differences or vulnerable group differences
  • Key skills of synthesising and segmentation
  • All achieving success from the start i.e. from Reception
  • Successful with low achievers and high achievers who are stretched
  • Pacy
  • Works on writing as well as reading
  • Use of modelling
  • Little and often teaching in daily doses
  • Very similar teaching each day with a little bit extra added (cumulative)
  • Establishes love of books and literature
  • Complete engagement
  • Increases confidence and enjoyment
  • Parents are impressed as they see structure and progress

Optima video from cris on Vimeo.

On the video, Solity stresses that Optima is underpinned by psychological theory. But Optima does not have the monopoly on incorporating psychological learning theory into its teaching:

For example, one of the government approved SSP programmes* (3) lists the following:

  • Whole class teaching
  • Reinforcement and repetition are built in
  • Use of active recall – students are encouraged to make active attempts at recall
  • Oral work
  • Interactive teaching which engages the children rather than them having to work individually on work sheets
  • Lively teaching. The lesson has a good pace, which helps to manage behaviour and focus students’ attention
  • Multisensory teaching. It integrates what you see (letters) with what you hear (sounds) and what you do (articulating sounds and words, clicking fingers, phoneme fingers, robot arms, manipulating sound and syllable cards, writing sounds and words from dictation)
  • Frequent rehearsal on the ‘little and often’ principle
  • Develops fluency and mastery in learning which is vital and will ensure later success with reading comprehension and writing composition
  • Direct instruction (modelling) is used: I do, we do together, you do.

*Sound Discovery Manual, p4 (3)

The Optima video claims that its programme is ‘different from everything else around’ – so what are these differences? It appears to differ from government approved SSP programmes with regard to the following:

  • Lack of decodables
  • Teaching High Frequency Words (HFWs) as sight words
  • Teaching fewer grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs)

Decodable Reading Books

It is not clear whether Solity has conducted research to justify his decision not to use the sort of decodable reading books often used now with SSP programmes. In these books a high percentage of words (average of 81% in the SSP study reported below) embody only the GPCs so far taught, with divergences in the few remaining words being explicitly taught.

One longitudinal study of SSP (4) compared outcomes with and without decodable reading books (http://bit.ly/2coAoKP ). The study showed a gain of an extra 5 months of reading age for a cohort of 85 Reception children when decodable reading books were introduced for the first time, and when other teaching variables remained the same. Subsequently in following years 433 Reception children used decodable reading books as their first experience of reading books for themselves alongside a SSP programme, using the phonics they had been taught. Over time these pupils were able to demonstrate an impressive start and sustained attainments, even those from vulnerable groups.

To give further information on this study: Grant reported on whole cohorts of Reception children being taught synthetic phonics over an eight-year period. At the beginning of the study, during one year, the whole cohort of Reception children was not given decodable reading books, but continued to use the Oxford Reading Tree books employed by the school at that time, which were based largely on look-and-say and whole language principles. The 90 Reception children achieved an average of 12 months ahead of chronological age for reading and 17 months ahead for spelling at the end of Reception. The following year decodable reading books were written and used for the first time. 85 Reception children averaged 17 months above chronological age for reading, a gain of an extra 5 months of reading age compared with the previous year. Averaged over 6 years with SSP and decodable books, 433 children were 16 months ahead for reading and 17 months ahead for spelling. (4, p18) Cohorts of these Reception children were tracked through to their KS1 and KS2 English SATS where comprehension and writing as well as decoding skills were assessed.

There is other supportive evidence for the use of decodable reading books, for example, the work of Juel and Roper/Schneider, 1985 (5) as referenced in: http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=469 (6). In addition there are the summaries of research into decodable text discussed in: http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=554 (7).

Teaching HFWs as Sight Words

Optima proposes teaching the 100 most frequently occurring words in English as whole words by sight, whether or not these words can be read using the GPCs already taught. “These were taught as whole words with no reference to any phonemes within the words …..” (8) (Shapiro and Solity, 2008). The 100 words were based on word lists and “determined as the optimal number by Solity, McNab and Vousden, 2007 (9); Solity and Vousden, 2009 (10); Vousden, 2007 (11)”.

The practice of learning HFWs by sight is in direct contrast with the view of the psychologist and researcher Professor Diane McGuinness (12) and with the government’s advice (13):

“Research has shown, however that even when words are recognised apparently by sight, this recognition is most efficient when it is underpinned by grapheme-phoneme knowledge”. “What counts as ‘decodable’ depends on the grapheme-phoneme correspondences that have been taught up to any given point”. “Even the core of high frequency words which are not transparently decodable using known GPCs usually contain at least one GPC that is familiar. Rather than approach these words as though they were unique entities, it is advisable to start from what is known and register the ‘tricky bit’ in the word.” (13, pp 15-16).

Diane McGuinness (12) has pointed out that introducing multiple strategies (such as learning HFWs by sight) at an early stage of reading instruction will be “mutually contradictory and will confuse rather than assist young readers”. (http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=112&n_issueNumber=51)

The dual system of reading instruction proposed by Optima would not meet the DfE revised core criteria which defined the key features of an effective systematic synthetic phonics teaching programme (13). The Department strongly encouraged heads and teachers to consider the revised core criteria when making decisions about the quality of commercial programmes and the suitability of them for their particular schools and settings. The first of these criteria was ‘phonics first and fast’ as a programme’s prime approach to decoding print.

Optima follows an explicit dual route to reading instruction: teaching phonics along with learning HFWs by sight. Although SSP programmes teach phonics ‘first and fast’ they can also teach ‘tricky’ words but again through phonics as recommended in Letters and Sounds (L&S) (14). In my own programme, common ‘tricky’ words are introduced in a natural drip-fed way through sentence work, right from the very beginning of instruction. (3 and 17)

Shapiro and Solity (15) compared the effectiveness of L&S (“which teaches multiple letter-sound mappings”) implemented in Reception with ERR (“teaches only the most consistent mappings plus frequent words by sight”), and then followed up outcomes at the end of the second and third years of schooling. They found the two programmes equally effective in broad terms with ERR being more effective with children with poor phonological awareness.

In her blog on sight words (http://readoxford.org/guest-blog-are-sight-words-unjustly-slighted) (16), Professor Anne Castles reviewed the Shapiro and Solity 2015 study (15) and agreed with them that teaching frequent words by sight did not appear to interfere with phonics learning in the ERR programme.

Shapiro and Solity (15) made some positive comparisons of ERR compared with L&S. However, would these comparisons hold up if ERR were compared with other SSP programmes? Shapiro and Solity suggested that in L&S some children may not have fully grasped the concept of segmentation and blending in the absence of print before moving on to segmentation and blending of letters. They pointed out, in contrast, that ERR continued to teach segmentation and blending in the absence of print in every whole class lesson. Is this true for any government ‘approved’ SSP programme? In at least one other SSP programme (3 and 17) practice with oral segmentation and blending precedes segmentation and blending of letters in every lesson.

Shapiro and Solity (15) also maintained that ERR provided more practice with ‘tricky’ common words and that it might be more beneficial for L&S children simply to learn these by sight and gain regular practice with them, instead of attempting to analyse their sound structure. However, other SSP programmes may provide more explicit teaching and practice for HFWs. For example, in one other SSP programme there are resources (18) provided to support the analysis of sound structure in HFWs. Specially prepared common words, sentences and texts make it easier for children to practise sounding and blending them, so that the children begin to be able to read the words without overt sounding and blending. Thus, they start to experience what it feels like to read some words automatically. In addition, blending and segmenting of common ‘tricky’ words takes place in every lesson alongside more easily decodable words, providing the ongoing regular practice that Shapiro and Solity recommended.

At present there appears to be insufficient evidence to support the Shapiro and Solity view that only ERR has potential benefits for children at risk of developing reading difficulties. They suggest that an optimal programme should explicitly teach children to use two strategies: sight recognition and phonic decoding. However, to date, they have not published data which compares ERR with SSP programmes other than L&S, particularly where those programmes use reading books with a high level of decodability and which explicitly support teaching for HFWs.

The Grant longitudinal study (4) used a ‘phonics first and fast’ approach but also taught HFWs through sentence work and through a phonics route. Impressive results were achieved even with vulnerable groups of pupils who were at risk of developing reading difficulties and with higher achievers who were stretched (0% below Level 3B, 6% Level 3B, 94% Level 4+, 65% Level 5 at KS2 English SATs).

Number of GPCs Taught

I have some sympathy with the Solity view regarding the number of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) which should be taught. How extensive should the advanced code be? Solity questions, “whether it is worth teachers spending a great amount of time making sure pupils learn all 85, rather than concentrating on the most frequent ones and then building pupils’ vocabulary.” (1)

Solity is following the ‘principle of optimal information from rational analysis’ and aims to teach the “optimal number of GPCs” (8). However these do seem to be quite limited. Children were taught 61 high frequency mappings between graphemes and phonemes (26 letters; 5 vowels modified by ‘e’; 30 letter combinations) and “where multiple mappings exist between phonemes and graphemes – only one GPC was taught”. (8)

Teaching in this way would require more words having to be taught explicitly should they contain a GPC not covered in the 61 high frequency ERR mappings. Would these words also be taught by sight?  Such words would be in addition to the ‘tricky’ common words taught as “unique entities” by sight. In SSP programmes a greater number of words would be decodable as more GPCs would be taught and words with unusual GPCs would be blended from what is known and from registering the ‘tricky’ bit’ in the word as recommended by DfES. (14, pp15-16).

Learning a large number of words by sight in this way could place a strain on memory to which there is a limit. Diane McGuinness reported the average visual-memory limit for whole word units as approximately 2,000 (19). A good English dictionary contains from 250,000 to 500,000 words, which sounds like a huge challenge for those individuals needing to memorise whole words.  Whereas those able to use a more comprehensive alphabetic code would be at an advantage and more able to work out pronunciations using their pre-existing phonics.

In her blog (16), Professor Castles suggested that some pupils in the Shapiro and Solity study (15) were possibly confused by being exposed to the multiple alternative sound mappings (GPCs) in L&S rather than to sight words in ERR.

What about the strain on memory of learning GPCs? Is there a memory limit to the number of GPCs that can be taught explicitly? According to the literature this limit is high. Victor Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, claims there is a natural upper limit of approximately 2,000-2,500 to the number of sound-symbol units (in our case GPCs) which most individuals can tolerate (20). Also note the reference in http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=173&n_issueNumber=59).  I think we are safe in saying that this limit far exceeds the demands of all SSP programmes. Even those SSP programmes which teach a large and very comprehensive alphabetic code for English are unlikely to be teaching more than 100-200 GPCs. Some SSP programmes will be teaching fewer and a number will be concentrating on even fewer. In Sound Discovery (3) every effort is made to teach the advanced code in the simplest and most straightforward way in order to decrease confusion and minimise overload.

From the perspective of limits to memory, one cannot assume that learning 100 sight words and a reduced set of GPCs as in ERR is less strain on memory than learning more GPCs and constantly rehearsing and practising common ‘tricky’ words through phonics in a SSP programme.

There may be a value in teaching a more comprehensive alphabetic code than Optima in a systematic way as recommended by the Year 1 Phonics Screening check (21), even if, in practice, a greater emphasis is placed on the most frequently occurring GPCs. We simply do not know whether programmes teaching less code are less effective or more effective when there is no comparative research.

Reducing Difficulties

In the Optima video (2), Solity reported that his programme had reduced reading difficulties from 20-25% to 2-3%.

It is perhaps not surprising that such positive results and views have been reported, given the systematic way the Optima programme appears to have been introduced and delivered in schools, the commitment of all staff, including senior management, and the ongoing support from the Optima team. However we do not know whether even better results could have been achieved if they had incorporated some of the features discussed above and which are found in good synthetic phonics teaching (viz. decodables, not teaching HFWs by sight, teaching a more comprehensive alphabetic code – even if then concentrating on the most frequently occurring).

Dr Solity quoted a percentage of remaining ‘difficulties’ as 2-3% with Optima. In the Sound Discovery study (4) we were able to achieve just over 1% of moderate reading difficulties in 2004. Only one child out of the 3 form entry at Year 6 achieved less than Level 4 English. 94% of pupils achieved Level 4+ and 65% achieved Level 5. It is not clear how Solity defines ‘difficulties’ as they relate to his quoted 2-3%. In the Grant study the only pupil who did not achieve Level 4 gained a Level 3B English which is not a severe literacy difficulty. This pupil had complex and severe learning difficulties and he was followed up into his secondary school. He was reported as, “holding his own in mainstream classes in Year 7; he had made good gains in reading and spelling and could understand complex vocabulary in the curriculum. He was able to be de-statemented in Year 9” (4, p19).

Real Books

The Optima video stresses the importance of ‘real’ books in increasing the vocabulary and language comprehension of pupils.  The Optima team did not use the sort of decodable reading books matched to their order of teaching GPCs often used now by SSP programmes.

In contrast SSP schools comply with the Simple View of Reading (22) which identifies two distinct processes in learning to read: ‘word recognition’ and ‘language comprehension’. Many SSP programmes have a strong language comprehension strand using structured, decodable reading materials which aim not only to give practice with decoding but also to develop vocabulary and comprehension.

In addition, in SSP schools, ‘real’ books and rich literature are used alongside decodable books for adults to read to children and to share with them. The aim is to establish a love of books and literature and to increase confidence and enjoyment. Children taught in this way pick up reading quickly. They become enthusiastic and confident about their reading. They are more able and willing to engage in the world of reading around them and take advantage of incidental phonics practice in the environment. They are also more able and willing to access a wide range of texts and literature themselves.

Conclusion

The Optima video was impressive and I am not surprised that the schools were achieving good results with a programme and teaching which the majority of us could endorse. However, in my view, similar outcomes could be achieved and even surpassed in schools which are committed to following rigorously a good quality systematic synthetic phonics programme, which uses books which are decodable at a high level (in this instance at the 81% level as mentioned on page 2) and teaches HFWs with attention to what is, and is not, decodable in them.

 

Dr Marlynne Grant

Registered Educational Psychologist

Author of the government ‘approved’ systematic synthetic phonics programme Sound Discovery

Committee member of RRF

October 2016

 

References

 

  1. Richardson, H. (2016). National phonics check ‘too basic’. BBC News, 16th September 2016. Education and Family, available online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk?news.education – 37372542 ; and British Education Research Association (BERA) press release, available online at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/bera-in-the-news/press-release-children-can-pass-phonics-test-without-extensive-phonic-knowledge

 

  1. Optima Video (2016). Optima Psychology, available online at http://optimapsychology.com/fi nd-out-more/introductory-video /.

 

  1. Grant, M. (2000). Sound Discovery Manual. Synthetic Phonics Ltd., www.syntheticphonics.net .

 

  1. Grant, M. (2014). Longitudinal Study from Reception to Year 2 (2010-2013) and Summary of an earlier Longitudinal Study from Reception to Year 6 (1997-2004). The Effects of a Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme on Reading, Writing and Spelling. Paper presented to ResearchEd Conference, London, 2014. Available online at http://bit.ly/2coAoKP .

 

  1. Juel, C. & Roper/Schneider, D. (1985). Reading Research Quarterly, 18. Also in Adams, M.J. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about print, Bradford Books, pp275-280.

 

  1. International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction (IFERI), 2015. Is there a role for predictable texts in reading instruction? Available online at: http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=469 .

 

  1. International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction (IFERI), 2015. The multi-cueing reading strategies and ‘Is reading about getting meaning from print’? Available online at: http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=554 .

 

  1. Shapiro, L. & Solity, J. (2008). Delivering Phonological and Phonics Training within Whole Class Teaching. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 78, part 4, pp 597-620.

 

  1. Solity, J., McNab E. & Vousden, J. (2007). Is there an optimal level of sight vocabulary to teach beginning readers? Unpublished data.

 

  1. Solity, J. & Vousden, J. (2009). Reading schemes vs. real books: A new perspective from instructional psychology. Educational Psychology, Volume 29, Issue 4.

 

  1. Vousden, J. (2007). Units of English spelling-to-sound mapping: a rational approach to reading instruction. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Volume 22, Issue 2.

 

  1. McGuinness, D. (2004). A response to teaching phonics in the National Literacy Strategy. RRF (Reading Reform Foundation) Newsletter 51. Available online at: http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=112&n_issueNumber=51 .

 

  1. Department for Education (DfE) (2010). Phonics teaching materials: core criteria and the self-assessment process. Crown copyright. Available online at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/298420/phonics_core_criteria_and_the_self-assessment_process.pdf .

 

  1. Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2007). Letters and Sounds: Principles and practice of high quality phonics. Notes of guidance for practitioners and teachers. DfES Publications, pp15-16. Available online at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications .

 

  1. Shapiro, L. & Solity, J. (2015) Differing effects of two synthetic phonics programmes on early reading development. British Journal of Educational Psychology, Volume 86, Issue 2, pp182-203.

 

  1. Castles, A. (2016). Guest Blog: Are sight words unjustly slighted? Read Oxford, University of Oxford. Available online at: http://readoxford.org/guest-blog-are-sight-words-unjustly-slighted .

 

  1. Grant, M. (2007-2009). Sound Discovery Big Books of Snappy Lesson Plans at Step 1, Step 2, Step 3A, Step 3B and Steps 4-7. Synthetic Phonics Ltd. www.syntheticphonics.net

 

  1. Grant, M. (2014). Sound Discovery High Frequency Words, Version 2. Synthetic Phonics Ltd. www.syntheticphonics.net .

 

  1. McGuinness, D. (2004). Growing a Reader from Birth, W.W. Norton.

 

  1. Daniels, P. and Bright, W. (1996) (Editors). The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, p 200, and referenced in:

http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=173&n_issueNumber=59 .

 

  1. Department for Education (2011). Year 1 Phonics Screening Check.

https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/reforming-qualifications-and-the-curriculum-to-better-prepare-pupils-for-life-after-school/supporting-pages/statutory-phonics-screening-check .

 

  1. National Primary Framework for Literacy and Mathematics (DfES) (2006). Crown Copyright.

“The future doesn’t have to be like the past” by Sir Jim Rose

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While England may not top PISA’s international league tables, we almost certainly surpass our international counterparts in the amount and pace of educational reform that governments of all stripes have generated since the Education Reform Act in 1988.* In a nutshell, the aim of these reforms has been ‘to raise standards and narrow gaps’ in pupil performance.

Headline news has recently focused yet again on falling standards of education as national examination results for 16 year-olds this year show that: ‘GCSE grades have seen the biggest ever fall in the overall pass rate in the history of the exams.’ These grades apply to schools in the state sector and stand in sharp contrast, to the independent, private sector where more than a third of the children achieved the highest grade of ‘A’ – nearly five times the national average.

The private sector in England now stands at around 7% of the school population and is way beyond the means of the great majority of parents. Lloyds Bank recently estimated the costs of sending one child to private school from reception to Year 13 as £156,653 – annual fees having nearly doubled from an average of £7,308 in 2003 to £13,341 in 2016.

sir-michael-wilshaw-quote

In a speech, earlier this year, our Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, delivered a scathing attack on the ideologies of both left and right-wing politics, which he holds responsible for a woeful lack of progress on narrowing the achievement gap between socio-economic groups. He said that, despite a range of initiatives, including the Pupil Premium**, no real difference has been made over the last decade:

‘The needle has barely moved. In 2005, the attainment gap between free school meal and non-FSM pupils in secondary schools was 28 percentage points. It is still 28 percentage points now.’

‘Our failure to improve significantly the educational chances of the poor disfigures our school system. It scars our other achievements. It stands as a reproach to us all.’

It is hardly surprising, that this has prompted a resurgence of fierce debate about the stubborn obstacles in the way of boosting the attainment of children from low income families and narrowing the gap in educational performance between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers.

The debate has been further inflamed by recent government proposals to provide more selective, state grammar schools ‘to give parents a wider choice of schools’ irrespective of their background circumstances.

All of this has coincided with the latest national curriculum assessments for children in the final year of primary school (11yr-olds) showing that fewer pupils reached the expected standard in reading than in writing and mathematics. Moreover, evidence of lasting improvements from numerous targeted interventions to help struggling readers is rare. It seems that hard won, early gains from programmes designed to help them ‘catch-up’ tend to fade out as they fail to keep pace with the overall rate of progress of their year groups.

It is little comfort to know that some of these problems are not unique to England. However, some would say that we are the product of a historical past that has led to a more stratified society than many of our international counterparts, and that divisions between state and private education are at the root of these problems. One of our most visionary and dynamic erstwhile school ministers – now Lord Andrew Adonis – commented on the divide between state and private education:

‘Over the entire second half of the 20th century, these prejudices made it exceptionally hard to do more than fiddle around at the margins of state-private partnership. This, in turn, bred a deep fatalism which is with us still. Everyone knows that the status quo is terrible – rigid separation between most of the nation’s most privileged and powerful schools and the rest. Yet no-one has a credible plan or will to do much about it except say how bad it is, why it’s someone else’s fault, and why it will never change because, well, this is England, it’s deep and cultural, and it all began with Henry VIII. It’s the same fatalism which greeted gridlock in central London before the congestion charge, hospital waiting lists before patients’ rights, and rain stopping play at Wimbledon before the roof.

The call now is for activists not fatalists. The future doesn’t have to be like the past.’

In a bold attempt to achieve a strong ‘state-private partnership’, he paved the way for academising the school system – a major reform in England which, though not without criticism, remains a firm commitment of the present administration.

However, progress has been patchy. These radical systemic/organisational changes have yet to make the looked for impact on helping less well-off children scale the rock face of disadvantage. For them it is much like bicycling a ‘penny farthing’ uphill – the higher they get the harder it becomes. Well-off parents, it seems, are able to equip their children with an Olympic class bike in the shape of private schooling that boosts their rate of progress. So what might we do, or do differently to make sure all children have an educational super bike?

It is of first importance, not to lower our educational expectations for disadvantaged youngsters. There are some telling examples of those from the most unpromising background circumstances succeeding against the odds. Moreover, by no means all privately educated youngsters from prestigious schools ‘make it big’ – so caveat emptor.

Secondly, school inspections show that schools of all types vary in quality ranging, in OFSTED terms, from ‘outstanding’ to ‘in need of improvement’. This suggests that systemic change alone is unlikely to be the tide that lifts all boats. It is trite but true to say that to be successful such change must secure high quality teaching irrespective of school type or location – hence, we would do well to curb our appetite for systemic reform and put more effort into the professional development of teachers and training those who support them in the classroom.

While it ought to be a given that every school should endow all of its children with the advantage of high quality teaching, inspection reports show this not to be the case. Rather, the picture remains one of too much variation in the quality of teaching within and between schools. The well-worn mantra that no school can be better than its teachers needs more that a facelift. It needs a change of heart.

This part of the forest might also benefit from a clearer definition of what ‘high quality’ looks like. In other words, establish a common language for a discourse on optimal teaching (and learning). Some promising developments worth close attention have ‘moved the needle’ by encouraging schools to be ‘self-improving’. One recent piece of research points to a positive impact on narrowing the gap in the reading performance of disadvantaged primary children by means of cost effective, well-taught phonic programmes (Centre for Economic Performance Paper No.1425 April 2016).

We do not yet know how well these gains are sustained for example, when children move from primary to secondary education. However, OFSTED Annual Reports show that, in this respect at least, the primary sector is doing rather better than the secondary sector in narrowing the literacy gap – much to the credit of primary teachers. Given that we know far more about how to teach children to read and write than ever before there should be no excuses for poor teaching in this territory.

The future does not have to be like the past, nor ought the best we can do now be the best that we should hope for. All that said, if we are to secure high quality teaching for all children in England, reformers and policy makers would do well to heed the words of Alvin Toffler: “Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”

*The Education Reform Act 1988 is widely regarded as the most important single piece of education legislation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland since the ‘Butler’ Education Act 1944. (Wikipaedia).

**The pupil premium is additional funding for publicly funded schools in England to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils of all abilities and to close the gaps between them and their peers.

Jim Rose

9th September 2016

The Dyslexia Debate and a Response by Sir Jim Rose

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IFERI is pleased to present a new paper by Sir Jim Rose, which was written as a response to Professor Julian Elliott’s recent presentation at Macquarie University, Australia.

Please click here to watch the presentation: The Dyslexia Debate

Sir Jim Rose

The Dyslexia Debate: A Response by Sir Jim Rose

The range and depth of enlightened thinking that DDOLL (Developmental Disorders of Language and Literacy Network) colleagues have brought to this discussion is riveting. It transcends historic wrangles over the term dyslexia that have done little to take us forward. Belatedly, I should like to add a couple of wild cards to this captivating exchange of views. The purpose in so doing is to explore further what might done to make sure far more of the children within the frame of so-called ‘instructional casualties’ receive consistently high quality teaching of reading and related aspects of literacy. Arguably, if schools could achieve this the benefits to children would be enormous and the need for costly intervention programmes reduced.

First, given that the education profession has access to a vastly greater knowledge of reading development than ever before, why is it that we continue to see confusion, not to say dissent, in schools and teacher training, about the teaching of reading, particularly in respect of phonics and dyslexia?

In the UK, although there has been considerable progress over the last decade, we still suffer from outbreaks of phonic phobia and tiresome tensions between fake opposites, such as, phonics v ‘reading for meaning’. Despite the enactment of a National Curriculum which makes such teaching mandatory, we have not yet achieved universal agreement in schools that teaching children how the alphabet works for reading and writing is crucially important.

The mantra ‘one size does not fit all’ is often chanted against phonics. This suggests that some continue to regard phonics as one of several ‘methods’ from which to select and match to discredited notions of ‘learning styles’, rather than a body of core knowledge and skills that has to be taught and practised. In the case of phonic work, if teachers are not convinced of the value of a regularly applied systematic approach it is hardly surprising that mediocre and poor practice persist. What more might be done to make plain what high quality teaching looks like in this domain?

As Alison Wolf (Review of Vocational Education 2011) said, ‘If assessing learning is hard, assessing the quality of teaching is harder’. Because the latter assessment brings with it concerns about ‘blaming teachers’ for children’s failures in reading it leads to reluctance to tackle what are often straightforward, improvable aspects of practice within the control of the teacher and the school.

England may not top the international league tables of pupil performance but we must be among world leaders in the amount of inspection and testing that takes place in our schools, starting in the primary years. Many years spent as a school inspector observing teaching in England and elsewhere convinced me that there is far more variation in the quality of teaching literacy, including reading, between and within schools than there ought to be. Further, we know the distance between leading and trailing edge teaching is associated with unacceptable variations in pupil performance, and that the impact of poor teaching on children who enter school already behind their peers amplifies their difficulties.

Is it beyond our capabilities to assess the quality teaching without blaming teachers?

My second wild card is to ask what we might learn from other professions. Anecdotes are sometimes useful so here goes…

Last year an unfriendly tree wrote off my car. I survived the crash due to the incredible expertise of the medical profession. This unwelcome event had an upside, however, in that it gave me an opportunity to compare the performance of two life changing professions: medicine and education. I had lots of time to catch up on reading about reading while experiencing our National Health Service at its best. Further, I was able to listen to the 2014 Reith lectures by the acclaimed surgeon Atul Gawande. He declared that he was in ‘the disturbance business’ and explored thorny issues, such as, ‘Why doctors fail’. I then read his book: ‘The Checklist Manifesto – How to get things right’ and watched with his TED talk: ‘How do we heal medicine?checklist-6-319x479Many of Gawande’s insights apply to getting things right in education. As a frontline surgeon, he drew upon keenly observed and detailed analyses of medical practice. His concept of our ‘necessary infallibility’ has much to commend it should we dare to explore more forensically why teaching fails while making sure teachers know that the purpose of so doing is to work with them to improve the quality of teaching and achieve better outcomes for children.

Medicine and education are ‘person-to–person’ services subject to human fallibility and to human ingenuity for solving problems: success is won by learning from our mistakes. Both professions look to research for solutions. They also rely on knowledgeable and skilled practitioners to make sure that as far as possible decisions are ‘evidence-based’ and ‘proven’ in practice. Equally important, they must be capable of making sound judgements when faced with the hard question: ‘what should we do when research is inconclusive, evidence is lacking and doing nothing is not an option?’

Among other things, Gawande suggests that doctors fail through lack of knowledge and, or, ineptitude, that is to say, insufficient skill in applying knowledge. He counts himself among them in these respects. He sees mistakes as opportunities: ’we have an opportunity before us, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavour. Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place. But will we do it? Are we ready to grab onto the idea? It is far from clear’.

The notion that we should actively build a school and classroom culture that enables teachers and, equally important, enables children as learners, to learn from patterns of mistakes is an idea worth grabbing. Moreover, his ‘Manifesto’ embraces a set of ethical principles and expectations worth taking on board:

“First is an expectation of selflessness: that we who accept responsibility for others – whether we are doctors, lawyers, teachers, public authorities, soldiers or pilots – will place the needs and concerns of those who depend on us above our own. Second is an expectation of skill: that we will aim for excellence in our knowledge and expertise. Third is an expectation of trust-worthiness: that we will be responsible in our personal behaviour toward our charges.

Aviators, however, add a fourth dimension, discipline: discipline in following prudent procedure and in functioning with others.”

For Gawande professional ‘discipline’ is aided by a ‘checklist’ which transforms ‘cowboys into pit crews’. That is indeed a powerful idea – but you must Google his short TED talk to understand it. (Or click at the end of this post to watch it.)

I have rambled on long enough save to ask: is there anything to be said for embracing some of these ideas, including, perhaps, developing a ‘checklist’ for teaching systematic, synthetic phonics?

With special thanks to Macquarie University for allowing us to distribute and use the link to Professor Julian Elliott’s presentation.

A New Paper by Professors James W. Chapman and William E. Tunmer on Reading Recovery

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IFERI is delighted to be able to share with you a brand new paper by Professors James W. Chapman and William E. Tunmer, from the Institute of Education at Massey University, New Zealand.

This paper was presented, by invitation, at the 39th Annual Conference of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities (IARLD), Vancouver, Canada, July 8, 2015. Professor James Chapman has been a Fellow of IARLD since 1983.

IARLD (International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities) is an international professional organization dedicated to conducting and sharing research about individuals who have learning disabilities. Fellows of IARLD include premier scientists, educators and clinicians in the field of learning disabilities throughout the world.

For convenience, some extracts and conclusions from the paper are published as part of this blog post. To open or download the complete paper, simply click the title below.

The Literacy Performance of ex-Reading Recovery Students Between Two and Four Years Following Participation on the Program: Is this Intervention Effective for Students with Early Reading Difficulties?

 James W. Chapman and William E. Tunmer

Sustainability of Gains Made in Reading Recovery

Considered together, the PIRLS results for 9-year-old children who had received RR in Year 2, the enrolment data for students receiving support from RT:Lits, and the two New Zealand studies on the sustainability of RR outcomes for discontinued children, show that RR simply has not achieved its primary goals in New Zealand. Clay’s avowal that RR would “clear out of the remedial education system all children who do not learn to read” (Clay, 1987, p. 169), and the RR New Zealand’s website claim that RR operates as an “effective prevention strategy against later literacy difficulties” and, therefore, “may be characterised as an insurance against low literacy levels” (www.readingrecovery.ac.nz/reading_recovery), are without foundation.

Why Does Reading Recovery Fail to Result in Sustainable Gains?

We have argued elsewhere (Chapman et al., 2015) that the effectiveness of RR interacts with where children are located on the developmental progression from pre-reader to skilled reader. Because of limited knowledge of print at the outset of learning to read, and/or developmental delay in acquiring the phonological awareness skills that are essential for learning to read successfully (e.g., Pressley, 2006; Snow & Juel, 2005; Tunmer, Greaney & Prochnow, 2015), a large proportion of young struggling readers operate at low developmental phases of word learning, which Ehri (2005) described as pre-alphabetic and partial-alphabetic phases. Delayed readers who are still in these phases, typically those students who struggle the most with learning to read, will not be able to grasp the alphabetic principle and discover spelling-to-sound relationships on their own or in a program that emphasizes text rather than word level instructional approaches. These students will require more intensive and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills than what is provided in typical RR lessons.

What Should be Done to Improve the Effectiveness of Reading Recovery?

There are serious shortcomings and much-needed improvements in several aspects of RR, including the theoretical underpinnings of the program, the assessment battery which fails to include measures of phonological processing skills, the specific instructional strategies emphasized in the program (e.g., the multiple cues approach to word identification), the manner of program delivery (one-to-one versus instruction in pairs), and the congruence between classroom literacy instruction and the RR program.

Regarding the issue of congruence between classroom literacy instruction and RR, the program was originally developed to complement regular whole language classroom literacy instruction in New Zealand. Clay (1993), nevertheless, claimed that RR was compatible with all types of classroom literacy programs, but she offered no evidence in support of this claim. To test this belief, Center et al. (2001) investigated whether the efficacy of RR varied as a function of the regular classroom literacy program. They compared the effects of RR in “meaning oriented” (i.e., whole language) classrooms and “code-oriented” classrooms (i.e., those that included explicit and systematic instruction in phonological awareness and alphabetic coding skills). Their results indicated that at the end of the second year of schooling, children in the code-oriented classrooms (regular and RR students combined) significantly outperformed children in the meaning-oriented classrooms on measures of phonological recoding, reading connected text, and invented spelling, as well as on a standardized measure of reading comprehension. Overall, however, Center et al. (2001) reported that the RR students in both types of classrooms failed to reach the average level of their peers on any of the literacy measures. These findings clearly contradict Clay’s (1993) claim that the regular classroom context does not differentially affect the literacy performance of RR children.

Although regular classroom literacy instruction influences the effectiveness of RR, the most serious shortcoming of the program is the differential benefit at the individual level. The program may be useful in the short term for some struggling readers but not others, especially those struggling readers who need help the most. More intensive and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically-based decoding skills is likely to be required than what is normally provided in RR lessons for those who struggle most with learning to read, and for any gains made in RR to have a lasting effect (Iversen, Tunmer & Chapman, 2005; Tunmer & Greaney, 2010).

Slavin et al. (2011) found reading programs for younger children that had less emphasis on phonics, including RR, showed smaller effect sizes than those programs that included phonics. They noted that RR is the most extensively researched and used reading intervention program in the world, but that the outcomes were less than might be expected. Further, Slavin et al. observed that the overall effect size for 18 studies involving paraprofessional or volunteer tutors using structured and intensive programs was about the same as the effect size for RR studies (+0.24 vs. +0.23), despite the very intensive training that RR teachers receive.

Conclusion

The RR program remains largely un-revised in its instructional approach despite clear evidence showing that claims about RR being an insurance against on-going literacy difficulties are without foundation. The New Zealand Reading Recovery website continues to assert the effectiveness of RR; assertions that are not supported by the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s own data (national monitoring reports and PIRLS), or by the two independent studies undertaken in New Zealand on students two to four years following successful completion of the program. If the RR program is not changed to reflect contemporary scientific research on reading interventions, it should be dropped and replaced by a more contemporary, research-based, reading intervention approach, together with more effective literacy instruction in children’s first year of schooling.

See also:

Excellence and equity in literacy education: the case of New Zealand. W.E. Tunmer & J.W. Chapman (eds.) (June, 2015). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/excellence-and-equity-in-literacy-education-william-e-tunmer/?K=9781137415561

‘Why Children Fail to Read’ – a new paper by Sir Jim Rose – 1st June 2015

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Why children fail to read

‘’We have an opportunity before us, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavour. Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place. But will we do it? Are we ready to grab onto the idea? It is far from clear.’’ (Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto – How to get things right)

The internationally acclaimed surgeon Atul Gawande said that he was in the ‘disturbance business’. His riveting 2014 Reith Lectures, drew upon detailed case histories as he explored such disturbing issues as: ‘Why doctors fail’ despite  the track record of astonishing success of the medical profession.

Much like medicine, education is a ‘person-to–person’ service subject to human fallibility and to human ingenuity for solving problems: success is won by learning from our mistakes. Both professions look to research for solutions. They also rely on knowledgeable and skilled practitioners to make sure that decisions are ‘evidence -based’, and who are capable of making sound judgements when faced with the hard question: ‘what should we do when research is inconclusive, evidence is lacking and doing nothing is not an option?’  From the standpoint of teaching primary children with dyslexia and reading difficulties, this paper explores a small corner of what these two highly valued, life-changing endeavours might learn from each other.

While the quip that ‘Dyslexia is like Marmite, you either love it or hate it,’ may be true it does not help to resolve the debate on why some children have far more serious difficulties learning to read than others. We know for sure that Marmite exists. ‘Dyslexia’, however, continues to come under fire as a myth. At its unkindest, this myth portrays dyslexia as an expensive invention to ease the pain of largely but not only middle class parents who cannot bear to have their child thought of as incapable of learning to read for reasons of low intelligence, idleness, or both. What we can be sure of is that the deep anxiety suffered by parents and children when these stubborn reading difficulties persist is most certainly real and not imagined.

Labelling children to place them into fixed categories is always risky and calls for a separate discussion. Meanwhile, this debate has at least highlighted the question of how, so-called, ‘within the child’, inherited characteristics associated with dyslexia might be disentangled from reading difficulties associated with environmental factors ‘outside the child’, such as, poor quality teaching, weaknesses in parenting, disadvantageous socio-economic circumstances, or a sticky mix of all these conditions that obstruct learning to read. The hardly surprising consensus from research seems to be that both environmental and genetic factors influence reading ability. Further, where ‘genes were strongly implicated, it was more likely that the reading problem would be accompanied by broader difficulties with oral language  …’, [1]

‘Learn to read and read to learn’ is a familiar slogan worthy of a T-shirt. It encapsulates the obvious truth that the goal of reading is not only to sound out but also to understand the meaning of the words on the page. Those children who reach the expected standard in English at the end of their primary education have attained a good level of language comprehension as well as fluent, accurate word reading. Our national tests assess both attributes. The tests also allow us to assemble a picture of how well children spell and write and thus convey meaning to others. Another useful slogan is, ‘If they can’t say it they can’t write it.’ This reminds us of the importance of developing the spoken word and attentive listening, thereby enriching children’s vocabulary so that they have a good stock of words on which to draw.

Defining and getting to grips with the reading problems we are trying to fix are not about ‘blaming’ children, teachers, parents or poverty. Rather, we should start from a picture that is more reliable than dubious headlines about falling standards of reading in England.

According to the Government’s latest statistics [2], the great majority of children in England (nearly 90%) now learn to read to the standard expected of them by the age of eleven: ‘the 2014 figure for level 4 is the highest ever.’ This was far from the case in 1997 when only 69% did so. Should we be content with that rate of progress? The answer is no. We must strive for more because the figures mask patterns of serious under-achievement by vulnerable minority groups. Moreover, some schools in the most unpromising circumstances demonstrate that more is achievable, hence a fair judgement on the state of play might be: so far so good but not yet good enough.

To what might we attribute the rising trend in reading standards? At least four elements have come together to make a positive impact on children’s progress. First, there has been a powerful political and professional drive to prioritise and strengthen literacy, especially through the systematic teaching of reading in primary schools, and in the training of teachers. Secondly, this momentum has been backed by an unprecedented growth of good commercial and government-funded resources for teaching reading, with due attention to phonic work designed to make sure that children understand how the alphabet works for reading and writing. Thirdly, there has been a spectacular growth of excellent children’s literature by our world-class authors. Finally, the last decade or so has seen advances from research, for example, in neuroscience and cognitive psychology that have given us a better understanding of dyslexia, reading disorders and how the brain learns to read. It is often said that learning to read is a complex and difficult task but it is often forgotten that the brain is a complex and highly adaptable endowment that is well-capable of coping with that task in the great majority of children by the age of seven.

Because it is teachers whose knowledge and skills harness these resources to best effect for each child, we are told repeatedly that no education system can exceed the quality of its teachers. In recent years, someone coined the term ‘instructional casualties’ to describe a broad swathe of children who struggle to read because the quality of teaching they receive is simply not good enough, for long enough, for them to become fluent readers. Attaching percentages to the incidence of dyslexia, as factors within the child, compared to instructional failure, as weaknesses in teaching, is far from a precise science. However, it is safe to say that more children fetch up in the latter than in the former category. Moreover, overcoming instructional failure is within the control of the school whereas other factors, such as parenting and background conditions, though amenable to influence by the school, are much less so.

This era of ‘self-improving’ schools has thrown into sharp relief the urgency of strengthening the quality of teaching based on robust evidence of how successful learning is achieved. It is hardly surprising therefore that self-improving teachers are at the heart of self-improving schools. Acceptance of the virtue of reflective, self-improvement is a no-brainer. It should be an ethical principle which applies to all those who provide, and those who provide for, education, including teachers, school leaders and governors, as well as the recipients of education, that is to say, the pupils themselves. Willingness to ask: ‘What do I need to do to improve?’ is a positive and courageous acknowledgement of our ‘necessary fallibility’, irrespective of whether we are leading-edge surgeons or leading-edge teachers. For pupils, too, we ought to foster a strong ‘can do’ attitude and an appetite for self-improvement through which they learn to teach themselves worthwhile things.

Further, schools like hospitals know full well that there is no escape from professional accountability. OFSTED style inspections and published performance data, for example, are now common to both services. Where schools achieve an outstanding OFSTED report and high national test results parents   beat a path to their door in pursuit of a place for their child. Fail badly on these measures and heads will most likely roll, or resign. Within the context of accountability, recent statutory requirements, such as, the introduction of Education, Health and Care Assessments and plans which focus upon how well schools meet the needs of children with learning difficulties have been thrown into sharp relief and somewhat resemble Gawande’s enlightened idea of a safe-guarding checklist.

Anyone who has spent time working on the frontline, or as a recipient, of either of these two services will quickly conclude that lack of time to do the job well is often, in itself, a serious problem that bears upon the twin concerns raised by Gawande, notably, lack of professional knowledge and ‘ineptitude’: the latter being a failure to apply knowledge effectively.

The title of the memorable ‘Rag Trade’ TV series: ‘Never mind the quality feel the width’ might well describe the curriculum prior to its recent revisions. Unwittingly expanding the curriculum, under the banner of ‘breadth and balance’, has been a besetting sin of curriculum reviews. In consequence, slimming down the curriculum to make it more manageable and resistant to overload have been unmet goals of earlier reforms. Has the new National Curriculum and its assessment succeeded in meeting these goals where earlier attempts have failed? It seems the jury is still out. But the issue should be kept under review not least because of the heightened risk of failure that lack of time presents for those pupils who often need more regular, skilled teaching to become literate. Numeracy, too, should be held up to the same light.

Whatever else they do, primary teachers know full well that it is crucial to induct pupils into the symbolic system of language in its various manifestations because: ‘Language is the core symbolic system underpinning human cognitive activity, vastly increasing the efficiency of memory, reasoning and problem solving. Symbolic systems (language, writing, numbers, pictures, maps) enable the individual to develop a cognitive system that goes beyond the constraints of biology…’ [3]

Reading music, too, requires understanding its code, as indeed does computing where ‘coding’ is now embedded in the new primary curriculum. Making sufficient time for children to learn these various codes is a sizeable challenge for teachers and schools.

As the great edifice of inspection, assessment and testing, curriculum expansion and laudable attempts to co-ordinate services goes up, arguably, outstripping that of our allegedly more successful international counterparts, we may have forgotten that school time is finite. If so, we must find ways to prioritise the essential from the desirable and do less to achieve more. Though easier said than done, this suggests, that accountability for children’s success should extend beyond the frontline in schools.

For ‘instructional casualties’, as for ‘dyslexic casualties’, early identification through comparison with their typically developing peers, combined with good assessments, such as, the recently introduced ‘phonics check’ are invaluable starting points for teaching on a regular, daily basis and from which to plan for continuity. Further, one–to–one teaching interventions for reading need to be ‘quality assured’ and mesh with the rest of the curriculum to make sure that the total experience is coherent from the standpoint of the child.

One of the best recent summations on dyslexia is provided by Professor Dorothy Bishop [1]:

‘A genetic aetiology does not mean a condition is untreatable

Could genetic findings be useful in intervention? All too often it is assumed that if genetic effects are found, the child will be untreatable. Yet, high heritability does not imply immutability: it implies that the range of environmental experiences that is usually encountered in everyday life does not have much impact on a trait, but says nothing about potential impact of novel environmental experiences. When, for instance, a child has the heritable myopia, we do not treat them as passive victims of their genetic destiny. Instead, they are given spectacles: an intervention that is out- side the range of normal environmental experiences, but which is tailored to counteract the genetic effect. Similar logic can be applied in the case of dyslexia: if there are genetic variants that affect how children learn, we need to find out how they work to affect brain development and function. That will allow us to develop ways of intervening to over- come the problem—interventions that may need to be different from regular teaching experiences. We are still a long way from knowing how to do this, but genetic information points us towards the right path. It is not helpful to assume that all poor readers are the consequence of poor teaching and that additional or earlier reading instruction will fix the problem. We need studies that examine which kinds of reading instruction are most effective for children at high genetic risk, who often have disproportionate difficulties with aspects of speech sound analysis and associative learning that other children find easy. Genetic research does not lead us to write off children who are poor readers, but rather to recognize that they may need more individualized instruction tailored to their specific needs.’

Dyslexia is not yet well enough understood as an extreme reading disorder for which we have precise solutions. Pretending it is a myth, however, risks burying our heads in the sand and giving up the search. 

[1] The interface between genetics and psychology: lessons from developmental dyslexia: D.V. M. Bishop Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.  Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20143139. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.3139

[2] Department for Education: National curriculum assessments at key stage 2 in England, 2014 (Revised)

[3] Foresight Mental Capital and Wellbeing Project (2008) Jim Rose 01.06.15

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