Initial Teacher Education: What are student-teachers told about the promotion of systematic synthetic phonics?

This is the hub of the site and the place to post queries, start discussions and join in the conversation!
Post Reply
User avatar
Debbie_Hepplewhite
Posts: 2499
Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 4:42 pm

Initial Teacher Education: What are student-teachers told about the promotion of systematic synthetic phonics?

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Here is a blog post doing the rounds via Twitter. It demonstrates the kind of misunderstanding that is very common everywhere - but when lecturers in Initial Teacher Training (ITT) demonstrate this level of misunderstanding, you can see how student-teachers are not getting off to the best start in their teaching career:

https://blog.derby.ac.uk/2017/07/is-fas ... f-reading/
The University of Derby

Is the government’s fascination with phonics taking the pleasure out of reading?
I contributed a reader's comment which may, or may not, be approved, so I copied and pasted it to this forum, see below:

The points made by the writer in this post sadly reflect misunderstanding about what government in England promotes, and why - and what the research findings of many decades have shown us about being a reader in the full sense and how best to provide reading instruction.

Cumulative, decodable texts which match the alphabetic code taught to date are used specifically when asking children to read independently. The books teachers share with children and read aloud to children should be all manner of wonderful children's literature and not designed on the basis of cumulative, decodable texts - why would they be? Children are not being asked to read them - the teacher or adult is doing the reading.

Learners and teachers are lucky nowadays that there are a handful of series of decodable texts for beginners to practise their own reading. Look and say, predictable and repetitive reading books were not, and are not, wonderful children's stories - and cumulative, decodable reading books are often engaging to children despite people who say otherwise.

Regarding literature; books are full of printed words new to children (not in their spoken language) so reading them technically is the equivalent of trying to decode pseudo or nonsense words. Regarding the Year One phonics check; printed words that children have not seen before are a recognised helpful form of assessment of children's alphabetic code knowledge and technical abilities to lift new words off the page.

It is an invaluable form of continuing professional development to appreciate that some teachers are far more effective at teaching children phonics - as this technical aspect of reading is so important in getting off to a good start to lifelong reading - and a good decoder is so much more likely to enjoy reading as it is not such a struggle to lift new words off the page in wider reading. Surely we want all children to be well-served by teachers who excel in early reading instruction - and who excel in reading children's literature aloud to children.
User avatar
Debbie_Hepplewhite
Posts: 2499
Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 4:42 pm

Re: Initial Teacher Education: What are student-teachers told about the promotion of systematic synthetic phonics?

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Has the article now been removed I wonder? On clicking on the link I provided above, this now leads to a page saying:
Sorry, we can't find what you're looking for
Did this follow these tweets in response to people reading the article?:

it's concerning that trainee teachers might be exposed to this, rather than decades of evidence.
shocking article - no wonder it's been removed. Is this person really teaching people to teach?!!
It's not pleasant or comfortable to be critical or negative about the hard work and efforts of others but, VERY SADLY, in the field of foundational literacy and teacher-training, we still have to do persist in raising concern because of the level of myths and misinformation that still about - affecting teacher knowledge and understanding with huge consequences for learners themselves.

One of the points raised nowadays is that with the advent of the internet and the amount of research information available to read, teacher-trainers and teachers should not be ill-informed or misguided. However, there are more sources of information than the internet (teacher-trainers in situ, inheriting the practice of fellow teachers, guidance from literacy organisations, material from publishers) and I point out constantly that teachers, and parents, continue to get misinformation and contradictory information through no fault of their own - just circumstances.
Post Reply