David Didau's post: Do we teach children to love reading? Part 2
http://www.learningspy.co.uk/reading/te ... ng-part-2/
Michael Rosen asked why children who had been taught synthetic phonics through one of the government's recommended SSP schemes were unable to decode well in later years.
Jacqui MB responded:
It’s a really important question and I thank you for raising it.
The answer is that these children have been taught phonic knowledge following one of the schemes, but, at the same time, haven’t been taught to apply phonics when reading.
During 1:1 reading with their teacher, despite learning phonics from the same teacher in the same week, they have been told to read as *fluently sounding* as possible, as early as possible, reading whole words learnt by sight, guessing words from picture clues, guessing words from the rest of the sentence and, finally, by phonics. Current Y4 & 5 children I hear read were told in Reception (these are real comments with real dates taken from October of a Reception reading log book):
– 4/10 of Reception: ‘X started by sounding out the repeated words but by the end of the book he had started to recognise the pattern of the book and became more fluent.’;
– 12/10: ‘Well done, much better, X still insisted on sounding out ‘this’ but read the rest without as much focus on using phonics.’
– 18/10: 'Well done, X much more fluent. X is starting to use the pictures to help his fluency.'
The legacy of this approach, teaching phonics but then encouraging children not to apply them right from the off, is the flawed guessing strategy used by many struggling but also supposedly average readers in KS2 and KS3 and probably beyond.
We know that the pictures disappear and guessing synonyms from context is no help at all – it rarely happens in practice. More often lookalike words are inserted which resemble the misread word but are not close in meaning. Despite this, they carry on regardless. In Connie Rosen’s words, a ‘child’s response to a ‘sense of misfit’ is rarely to go back and re-read. He is more likely to accept it as one of the many things he doesn’t understand in life or simply to lose interest and discard the book.’ Even if the book is not discarded, if a sense of misfit occurs frequently, a grasp on overall meaning is lost.
Phonics is being taught in all primary schools, yes. But, without a committed approach to teaching children to apply their knowledge when they read, to use phonics to decode from the off and not to memorise words by sight and guess words from pictures in a bid to sound (artificially) fluent, poor reading habits set in for many. Spoken words are added to their own store of vocabulary – their comprehension increases with age – but, with a fading knowledge of the alphabetic code (either taught or deduced) and no habit to apply it when reading, they are stumped when faced with words they do not instantly recognise.
By Y4 and onwards, these children, the children who don’t naturally absorb the alphabetic code for themselves, are increasingly unable to decode words that they would otherwise understand. And for them, reading anything in print is not a pleasure, it’s frustrating.
Et voila!