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Children as young as three are being grouped by "ability" to prepare for Sats, research has found.

Teachers say they are expected to group children in order to prepare them for the phonics check taken at the end of Year 1 and the KS1 Sats taken at the end of Year 2, a study by the UCL Institute of Education has found.

The study, commissioned by the National Education Union (NEU), discovered that, while 45 per cent of teachers think grouping damages some children's self-esteem, it is seen as a "necessary evil" due to the pressure that schools are under from the statutory tests.

"The findings make for challenging reading," Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU, said.

"It's an absolute disgrace that the pressure on schools to ensure pupils pass tests means children as young as three consider themselves 'low ability' right at the start of their academic life, a belief that could impact on their self-esteem, carry on throughout their schooling and determine the direction of their adult lives.

"The National Education Union will work hard to lobby the government to address accountability and curriculum pressures that lead to the labelling of children. As a first step to improving the situation, the government should commit to make the phonics screening check non-statutory."

The research has been commissioned as the government prepares to reintroduce a Reception baseline assessment, which could mean teachers having to test children at the beginning of Reception in literacy, maths, communication and possibly "self-regulation".

"There is a real risk that if bring in an assessment at the beginning of Reception that encourages further labelling of children," said the UCL Institute of Education's Alice Bradbury, one of the co-authors of the report.

Limiting expectations?

More than 1,400 teachers were involved in the study, including 1,373 who responded to a survey and the others in four focus groups and four case study schools.

The survey found that across nursery, Reception and key stage 1 teachers most commonly grouped children in phonics classes (76 per cent), then maths (62 per cent), reading (57 per cent) and literacy (54 per cent).

Even in nursery classes, more than half (58 per cent) of children were grouped for phonics sessions.

The survey found that 52 per cent of teacher felt grouping did improve results. But there were also fears that it could reduce children's confidence and limit their expectations.

"It was deemed an efficient way to plan differentiated lessons but it made children very competitive and destroyed self-esteem in some pupils," one teacher told the researchers.

Beatrice Merrick, chief executive of early years association Early Education, said: "Many, including parents, will be shocked by the pervasiveness of setting, streaming and other 'ability' based interventions with children aged 3 and 4, and even more so given the evidence that shows this harms far more children than it helps.

"It is worrying that so many teachers feel pressured into such steps against their better judgement; we hope this will lead to dialogue in all schools about how best to ensure all children achieve their potential without fear of early labelling or artificial constraints on their learning."

Minister for Children and Families, Robert Goodwill, said: "Teachers and early years staff are best placed to make decisions about the teaching methods they use. There is no statutory requirement that suggests children should be grouped by ability.

"We are clear that, while assessment is a fundamental part of children's education to measure progress, it should not cause significant stress or anxiety."
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Children as young as 3 grouped by 'ability' to prepare for Sats

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Children as young as three are being grouped by "ability" to prepare for Sats, research has found. Teachers say they are expected to group children in order to prepare them for the phonics check taken at the end of Year 1 and the KS1 Sats taken at the end of Year 2, a study by the UCL Institute of Education has found.

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The Lucy Calkins Project - Education Next : Education Next

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The Lucy Calkins Project - Education Next : Education Next

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Once upon a time there was a thoughtful educator who raised some interesting questions about how children were traditionally taught to read and write, and proposed some innovative changes. But as she became famous, critical debate largely ceased: her word became law. Over time, some of her methods became dogmatic and extreme, yet her influence continued to grow.

That educator is Lucy McCormick Calkins, the visionary founding director of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Begun in 1981, the think tank and teacher training institute has since trained hundreds of thousands of educators across the country. Calkins is one of the original architects of the "workshop" approach to teaching writing to children, which holds that writing is a process, with distinct phases, and that all children, not just those with innate talent, can learn to write well. She is author of some 20 books, including the best-selling The Art of Teaching Writing (250,000 sold). According to the project web site, books by its leaders are "widely regarded as foundational to language arts education throughout the English-speaking world."

While her influence is geographically broad, Calkins is perhaps nowhere more powerful than in New York City, where the project began as a consulting service to a few elementary schools and grew into a highly profitable venture. According to Andrew Wolf of the New York Sun, Calkins charges $1,200 to send one of her assistants into a school for one day. In 2003 schools chancellor Joel Klein appointed her and the project, through a no-bid three-year $5.4 million contract, to the task of revamping the way literacy skills are taught in more than 100 district schools, including most of those in Brooklyn and Queens, the project's mission is to retrain-through onsite workshops, leadership seminars, curricular materials, and an intensive summer institute-primary and upper-grade teachers, administrators from principals up through district superintendents, and central department policymakers.
Stories That Matter
Calkins's approach to literacy grows out of a pedagogical theory that prides itself on being in step with the natural development of both writers and children. Her earliest mentor was the progressive educator Donald Graves, who observed in the 1970s that while American children were taught reading and math, they were only rarely taught how to write beyond grammar and spelling. Graves argued that in being deprived of lessons that would develop the skills and habits that most good writers have, children were relegated to the status of "receivers," never "senders," of information. Graves, in turn, was deeply influenced by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and college journalism professor Donald Murray, perhaps one of the earliest to describe the craft of writing. By observing his own writing process, Murray delineated a method all writers could follow. "Writing might be magical," he is often quoted as saying, "but it's not magic. It's a process, a rational series of decisions and steps that every writer makes and takes, no matter what the length, the deadline, even the genre."

Graves adapted Murray's approach to teaching writing to children. The idea was to make them more conscious of what successful adult writers do-draft ideas, revise, edit, and publish. By involving children in this process, he sought to help them become more active in their own education, and not incidentally, more self-aware; he advocated that children write extensively about themselves and their observations.

Calkins popularized and developed many of the positions taken by Graves regarding writing and later applied them to reading. At the heart of her philosophy is the notion that children ought to be given a "voice," encouraged to discover and refine their own personal writing style, as they compose "stories that matter." Calkins is a "constructivist," believing that children should generate their own texts, using material from their own lives. Her belief in self-expression as a key to learning extends to reading: children develop a passion for reading when they are given freedom to choose books that are meaningful to them. Her approach to literacy reviles "direct teaching," where the teacher stands in front of the room and lectures, preferring instead that children work in small groups and consult each other as much as possible. And she advocates that teachers routinely engage in conferences with each individual child about his writing and reading experiences (see sidebar). She writes of the "art" involved in teaching and conferring, and thereby suggests that while aspects of literacy can be taught, there also exists a degree of creative intuition in the process, on the part of both the child and the teacher.
No Detours, No Surprises
Some of Calkins's ideas on writing have made exciting contributions to the life of the classroom. In her nearly 600-page 1986 tome, The Art of Teaching Writing, Calkins lays out her rationale and methods for implementing a writers' workshop in the classroom. She instructs teachers to make room for students to keep a "writer's notebook," a place where they can "jot down things they notice and wonder about" and record "bits of life." Calkins offers up this notion in a relaxed spirit, conjuring a playful atmosphere that encourages creativity. Photographs of lively students and reproductions of students' writing assignments, done in their own quirky handwriting, add to the friendly and appreciative tone of the book.

In her later work, however, Calkins's notion of the writer's notebook is prescriptive, even rigid. She instructs teachers as well as parents to make sure children "never miss a day" of writing in their notebooks, because "if you allow kids to get off the hook once, they'll try to get off it all the time." In Raising Lifelong Learners (1998), she describes how she needs to stand over her son while he writes down his thoughts after returning from a play date. The earlier "jotting" and "bits of life" sensibility seems to be gone, as she complains that her sons, then six and four years old, "often say non-sequiturs," and how she, and all parents and teachers, should confront "sidetracks," and prohibit any "detours."

Project staff instruct children to revise their writing, according to sometimes peculiarly stringent guidelines, and do the same to their drawings. Writing coaches instruct even kindergartners to redo their pictures, making some things bigger, smaller, using less white space, etc. At a project open house in 2004, Calkins said, "I tell kids that after they've finished writing [personal narrative] they should go back and lop off the beginning and lop off the ending. Those parts are always weak. The meat is always in the middle." When an audience member asked if there were exceptions to this, she said emphatically, "No."

To keep the focus on autobiographical writing, the project trains teachers to deter children from writing fantasy of any kind. A six-year-old child whose classroom was under the project's tutelage remarked to me, "Once upon a time is against the law in our school." Not long ago Calkins altered her stance modestly and decided that staff in her program can now teach children how to write "realistic fiction."

"What's most important to me," explained a project staff member during the open house, "are social issues. I teach fiction writing to teach social justice." She went on to describe her methodology: "I tell students that they must always first start with an issue-gender discrimination, racism, poverty-not a character. Then we create a character around the issue." She explained that she instructed children to plot the story from start to finish before setting out, telling them to be certain to alternate between "incident, dialogue, incident, dialogue." While virtually all professional writers of fiction describe the element of surprise and discovery as central to the process, this teacher takes an alternate view: "By the time children begin to write, they know exactly what their characters will do and say. The point is, there should be no surprises when you sit down to write fiction."

The leader then projected copies of student papers on the wall, where we read several stories about bullying, gender discrimination, etc. The stories were impressively written, although they seemed, after a while, to sound almost uniform; without exception, each protagonist was a victim of some kind. Fictional characters in a project workshop might be described in the same way as literary critic, Sheila Egoff, describes characters in many current teen novels: they are "defined by the terminology of pain."
It Takes Two to Read a Book
The publication of The Art of Teaching Reading (2001) catapulted Calkins to expert status in reading as well. The book offers ideas about setting up libraries in classrooms and the value of offering students a wide selection of books, adults reading aloud, and many other things that go into Calkins's idea of helping children live a "richly literate life."

Beginning in kindergarten, children are to regard books as objects of study. They are asked, for example, to compare two books and try to figure out which characters have a "worse life"; make a "study" of Frog and Toad books; or debate whether Enchantress from the Stars is fiction or fantasy. Children are asked to keep track-on Post-its, or other diagramming material-of the ways characters' lives resemble their own. Post-its loom particularly large in the Calkins universe. "If I could change the world," she writes, "children across America would carry books that were furry with slips of paper and jotted writing." Indeed, project methods require a vast array of accoutrements: charts, matrixes, Venn diagrams, page numbers, graphs, reading marathons, bookmarks, book corners, book bags, book celebrations, jazzed up "book talk," and great discussions about how to live "readerly lives."

"Every reader has two lives, one public, the other secret," noted poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia. Not so in a project classroom. Calkins maintains-for reasons never explained-that reading is fundamentally a "social activity." "The books that matter in our lives are the books we have discussed." Or "It takes two to read a book." She relays approvingly how a teacher asks kindergartners who are enjoying a book, "But where are your tools, your logs, your Post-its?"

Rarely are children invited to simply sink into a story and experience it emotionally. In fact, when an unguarded emotion occurs while a teacher is reading aloud, it is perceived as a unique, nearly baffling event. Calkins relates approvingly how a teacher, while reading the very moving book The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes to a group of six-year-olds, noticed a boy whose "facial expression showed how Peggy felt as she stood by and watched her classmate Wanda being taunted. 'Oh my goodness,' [the teacher] said to the class when she saw what Robert was doing, 'Let me keep reading and all of you watch the way Robert's face shows what Peggy was feeling.' Soon everybody was following Robert, supplying the facial expressions and gestures to match the interpretations of Peggy's mood."

Yet Calkins herself, in the middle of The Art of Teaching Reading, describes with some derision two 2nd-grade students using jargon to discuss a book. She hears them say that they are making "text-to-self" connections, and "text-to-text" connections, phrases they'd obviously been taught to use. When she asks them what they are referring to and their response is flimsy, she concludes that all their jargon is much ado about nothing. "If anything," she muses, "the long metacognitive detour had probably pulled these readers out of 'the virtual dream' of the story, and broken the spell of the enchantment." Apt words, indeed.

Planning the Writer's Conference

The Calkins tome One to One: The Art of Conferring with Young Writers (2005) is the result of 18 months of poring over transcripts of her own and her protégés' conferences with very young children, in an attempt to extrapolate their own "best teaching moves." The goal is then to refine those moves, sort them into categories, and write scripts to accompany them. Calkins has managed to bring the whole unwieldy world of teaching writing into neat, snap-on categories. There are four phases for conducting a conference: the research phase (to last no longer than two minutes), in which the teacher assesses what she or he will teach the young writer; the decision phase, in which the teacher decides what kind of conference (there are four kinds) to implement; a teaching phase; and, finally, a link phase, which involves extracting an oath from the child. "From this day on, for the rest of your life," the teacher asks the child to pledge, "are you always going to remember to do X when you write?"

Calkins instructs teachers to give two compliments during their conferences with students, one at the beginning and one at the end, and to "briefly record what you have complimented in a box containing the child's name." The Conferring CD-ROM comes with a letter from Calkins that advises teachers to "study the compliment section in every conference. What do you see us doing over and over again? Compare the way we tend to give compliments and the way you have done this. By doing this, you will be able to create your own Guide to Giving Powerful Compliments."

While the idea of meeting one-on-one with a child to discuss his work might suggest spontaneous communication between two people, conferences as described by Calkins have a prepackaged, often manipulative quality. She writes, "One effective strategy for buoying a writer's identity is to tell the child he or she has written just like a professional writer." She suggests saying, "You're trying to do something you've seen another author do. That's so professional of you!" Calkins reports proudly how well a member of her staff intervened when two kindergarteners were squabbling over Magic Markers: "Writers...do not wrestle over markers. Can you imagine Mem Fox or Tomie DiPaola wrestling over markers?"

Another approach brings a similar result. "We try the technique of pretending that the child has been doing exactly what we hoped he or she would do," Calkins explains. "I help Olivia see that her experience is a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end," she writes, describing a "successful" conference she had with a child about a drawing. "I condense her long explanation of her picture into a tighter narrative line that is within her reach of being able to write. But I do this acting as if she's done all the work herself, and she willingly believes that all I've just done is to restate the story she invented. When we assist a writer, it is often helpful if the writer is fooled into thinking she's done the job herself!"

So Do Her Methods Work?
Calkins is shaping the education of millions of children, yet no independent research backs the efficacy of her programs. Aside from grumblings from the New York City teachers required to work under her system, there has been remarkably little open debate about the basic premises behind Calkins's approach, or even feedback on how the programs are faring in the classroom.

What controversy exists generally centers around two concerns: First, her programs do not explicitly teach phonics-which she calls "drill and kill." She favors a "whole language" approach to literacy, which builds on the premise that reading and writing develop naturally in children. Her detractors argue that this lack of direct instruction leaves many children, especially those who already struggle, at a disadvantage.

The other argument, perhaps resonating with a larger audience, is that her methodology lacks real content, has no reference to any knowledge that should be learned. In The Art of Teaching Reading, she explains that she doesn't want "all reading and writing to be in the service of thematic studies" but instead seeks to "spotlight reading and writing in and of themselves." Calkins's insistence that students should focus mostly on writing about their lives rankles the many educators who believe that curriculum should be focused on content-rich material, and that students should read and write about information outside of their own personal lives. Broadening one's knowledge base strengthens reading comprehension, builds vocabulary, and deepens knowledge of the world, all of which help students understand the text, but also, as E. D. Hirsch writes, "what the text implies but doesn't say."

What has not been openly questioned is the assumption that Calkins has retained her ordinal stance, that it is the teacher's job to midwife a child's own, often richly imaginative voice, rather than impose her own. Calkins's program originally gained its popularity, at least in part, because of its mission to help children make their distinct voices heard. She was known as a champion for flexible, creative teaching, uniquely attuned to children. "If we adults listen and watch closely," she wrote in 1986, "our children will invite us to share their worlds and their ways of living in the world." And while this impulse continues to inform aspects of her approach, she has tended over time to become increasingly focused on enforcing her own methodology; many of her techniques limit children's genuine engagement with reading and writing. This insistence on only one way to do things, not surprisingly, has translated into a demand that teachers quiet their own impulses, gifts, and experiences, and speak in one, mandated voice.

Recently, Common Good, a bipartisan organization committed to "restoring common sense to American law" asked New York City public school teachers to keep a diary for 10 days and consider specifically "how bureaucracy impacts everyday teaching." The results were presented in a town hall-style meeting attended by more than a hundred educators and union representatives. One of the topics was "mandated teaching," which referred specifically to the required presence of Calkins and Teachers College in city schools. The responses were almost universally negative.

This entry from a teacher's diary is typical: "Administrators expect all our reading and writing workshops to adhere to an unvarying and strict script....For example: 'Writers, today and everyday you should remember to revise your writing by adding personal comments about the facts.' Sometimes I feel like I'm a robot regurgitating the scripted dialogue that's expected of us day in and day out."

A kindergarten teacher reported how she was instructed to ask her students, on the third day of class, "to reflect on how they'd grown as writers." She explained that the children were still preoccupied with missing their mothers and felt the assignment was "ridiculous."

The truth is there isn't one way to teach writing, or a limited number of ways to have conversations with children about their imaginative work and their lives. Calkins would have done well to heed the counsel of Donald Murray, whose prescient caution she quotes in The Art of Teaching Reading: "Watch out lest we suffer hardening of the ideologies. Watch out lest we lose the pioneer spirit which has made this field a great one."

Barbara Feinberg is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in such publications as the New York Times and the Boston Globe. She is the author of Welcome to Lizard Motel: Protecting the Imaginative Lives of Children, Beacon Press, 2005.

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The Lucy Calkins Project - Education Next

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Once upon a time there was a thoughtful educator who raised some interesting questions about how children were traditionally taught to read and write, and proposed some innovative changes. But as she became famous, critical debate largely ceased: her word became law. Over time, some of her methods became dogmatic and extreme, yet her influence continued to grow.

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A phonics tale of three children(with morals for teachers of reading) © Mem Fox 2008
This piece was presented at a conference of Auckland principals in Auckland, New Zealand in April 2008
Thank you. It's great to be here. My husband is hoping I won't have free time to buy shoes since shoes are infinitely more interesting in New Zealand than they are in Australia. Many things are more interesting in New Zealand: the scenery, the accent, the passion for rugby and the fact that for most of last century you led the world in the teaching of reading. Your famous educators: Sylvia Ashton Warner, Don Holdaway and Marie Clay blazed a trail for the world to follow, and we in Australia followed in your footsteps like grateful children learning from wise parents. Our school children benefited massively from your wise counsel.

On my last few visits to this country however I've heard murmurings of discontent from your very own teachers regarding the direction some New Zealand schools are taking in the teaching of reading. It appears that far from being confident leaders with brilliant theories and practices to share with the world there's a feeling abroad that perhaps other countries like the United Sates, with its current heavily phonicated methods, have better ideas; that programs such as the Spalding Method, Accelerated Reader and Jolly Phonics-by the very fact of their being so expensive and so well-marketed-¬must be better than anything you had before; that you're such a tiny nation you couldn't possibly have the best ideas, and so on. What a ridiculous notion, for heaven's sake!

I'm here today to beg you hang on to your old way of doing things in literacy education, to continue to be to be leaders still, not followers. Leaders think. Followers don't. Leaders have a good grasp of their subject. Followers don't know what they're talking about. Leaders speak with confidence. Followers fumble. Leaders have status. Followers have no status: they're pathetic. Leaders have authority. Followers have none. So why, after being leaders in literacy, would you want to follow anyone else? In particular why would you want to adopt a single idea about the teaching of reading from the United States, a country in which literacy standards has fallen drastically over the last ten years?

Before I burst a blood vessel over this let me take a short break and read you a book of mine that seems to me to apply to principals as much as it does to pirates: read Tough Boris.

To return to our former topic, the strength of New Zealand teachers was-and still is in the main, so let's not panic yet-that they truly understood the nature of phonics and the role that phonics played in the teaching of reading. In this speech I'm going to revisit phonics, through three parables, as it were, as a sort of revision for those of you who might have become a little hazy on the subject. Those of you who know it all-and I do apologize because I know there are many in this audience who do know it all-might like to have a little doze from time to time. Here goes...

Once upon a time in Australia there lived three children. Their names were Sean, Justin and Josephine. Sean lived in Hobart, and still does. Justin lived in Melbourne, and still does. And Josephine lived in Adelaide-and still does, around the corner from me. Each of these children learnt to read before he or she went to school, without any lessons. How this happened is fascinating. And challenging. And ultimately, confronting for those of us in literacy education.

Let me tell you about Sean first. About five years ago I received this message on my website:

Your books hold a special place in our lives, wonderful memories of baby and early childhood. Our son was able to read grade two readers at 3yrs, two months and recently a national show was aired on him called 'genius kid'. I read to him every day from five months on and now he reads to his baby sister and has done so from the time she was three days old. I followed your advice and think 'Reading Magic' is one of the most valuable books ever! Mem, we can't thank you enough for making it so easy and so much fun. Hope we meet you someday, Angie, Sean and Sarah

Angie had provided an e-mail address so I wrote back and asked if I could phone her and talk about this amazing occurrence, and we chatted for ages one Sunday morning. Lo and behold: it was the same old read aloud story-a story that never ceases to excite me, no matter how often I hear it.

Angie told me she began reading to Sean-who is now nine-from three months and that Time for Bed was the first of my books she bought.

Angie couldn't remember exactly when she first read Reading Magic, but she was fairly certain it was when Sean was almost two years old and she claims she was an instant convert. She said she couldn't believe it could be so simple and told lots of her friends about Reading Magic, for which I could kiss her feet. Sean's reading developed very quickly. At 3yrs 7mths he had a reading age of 7yrs 7mths and a vocabulary understanding of a child of fourteen and half and Angie says it was just from doing the things I recommended. (What a publicist! I should employ her.)

Sean appeared on Today Tonight, a tabloid TV evening program in Australia. The segment was called Genius Kid. He was also on the front page of the main newspaper for southern Tasmania, in an article entitled 'Smart Sean in a class of his own'. Here's part of it:

When Russel and Angelea Galloway have trouble with their computer they turn to their four-year-old son Sean for help. 'He normally works it out,' Mrs Galloway said at their home near Sorell yesterday.

Sean is a gifted child with an IQ rating of 147. He has already been accepted into the high IQ organisation Mensa...

Mrs Galloway said: 'He just seems to be good at everything yet he is a perfectly normal loving child.'At fifteen months Sean could identify all the letters of the alphabet. His maths and spelling were also rated equivalent to a seven year old.

The Galloways call themselves as ordinary people. Mr Galloway is a free-lance cameraman while Mrs Galloway is a full-time mum. Their second child Sarah was born four months ago and Sean has been reading books to her since she was two days old. Sean reads up to ten books a day.

So that's the story of Sean. I'll skim over the story of Justin because his story is told in full in the chapter of Reading Magic called 'Proof'

In brief, Justin's parents, Allan and Donna Bartlett, read aloud regularly to their son with remarkable results. Justin was twenty-one-months old when they first contacted me.

He had been introduced to books at six days old. It had seemed to his parents like a good thing to do-it added interest to the daily baby-care routine-and he seemed to like books and being read to, right from the start. By three months he clearly knew which way a book should be held, and he could even turn the pages on cue, responding to the obvious pause in reading at the end of a page. By three months!

At twenty-one months he had a speaking vocabulary in excess of five hundred words, which his mother attributed to what he had gained from books. He could also sight-read about twenty words. Incredible: before he even turned two.

You and I know that most children learn don't learn to read at home-they learn soon after they start school, when everything they already know clicks into place with the help of a teacher. But a growing number of children is learning to read before they start school and they're learning quickly, happily and easily, like Sean and Justin.

I need to read you Koala Lou before I tell you about the third child in my Tale of Three Children. [Read it.]

I'm happy to have made the acquaintance of my neighbourhood wonder-girl, the glorious Josephine, who was able to read anything at the age of three which is when she and I met. She is now seven. She lives in the street that runs into mine, and on Boxing Day 2004 she and her mother Liz dropped by to introduce themselves and to show me how much Josie loved my book Koala Lou. She read me the whole book, self-correcting when she needed to. Her dad is an accountant and her mum is in human resources. Neither has been an educator. They told me they didn't know how it had happened. When I asked if they had read aloud to her, they both said: 'Of course. All the time. Ever since she was born.'

Josephine was read the same stories repeatedly, hundreds of times. Her mother told me that Josie taught herself to read using whole words. She did not use phonics to learn new words and is very confused if this method is thrust upon her. When someone tells her that hot is made up of the sounds: huh-o-tuh, Josie quite rightly hears her otter instead of hot. When she doesn't know a word she asks what it is, and remembers it next time she sees it, because she sees it over and over again as books are read to her and as she reads them herself. From the words she already knows she applies logic to extrapolate what other words will be in the sentence she's reading.

Which is exactly how our daughter Chloë learnt to read, two weeks after she started school, aged four and half. She'd heard the same favourite books read time and time again, had watched the print, and had joined in. And then, like the prima donna she was, she demanded that she be allowed to read the books herself, preferably on audio-tape so she could listen to herself later. When she didn't know a word I told her what it was immediately so she was never held up, so she could keep the story going, so she could storm ahead with blind courage.

'You will tell me the difficult words, won't you, Mummy?' she'd say, as she launched, pell-mell and fearlessly, into reading a story she loved. I remember two words in particular, in different books, which she hesitated on: cosy and investigation. I told her what they were. A few pages later, when the same words reappeared, she read them without any hesitation whatsoever. And of course she saw them again and again during repeated, joyful, shared readings of those same books.

When children learn to read before school without any lessons, they do so because they've been looking at the same print over and over again as they've listened to the same language, in the same stories, which have been read so many times that their parents are driven to distraction. Not only does the print become familiar, language becomes familiar. Learning to read is much more about learning language that it is about making sounds from the letters on a page. It stands to reason that it's going to be easier to read driven to distraction if we've heard driven to distraction over and over again, than if we've never heard that phrase. In certain situations, the moment we read driven to we're going to expect a word like distraction to follow, and the print will confirm it.

Anyway, that's the end of my Tale of Three Children and Chloë. What implications does my tale have for teachers of reading?

Most methods, at most schools, tend sooner or later to get most children reading. Research tells us it's the teacher, not the method, that makes the difference. However, in the light of recent movements and arguments in the teaching of reading, it's important to understand the intricacies and meaning of phonics which is basically the ability to sound to break words up into smaller pieces and sound them out, as in: c-a-t says cat.

And where does phonics fit into reading education? Before we go any further we need to ask ourselves a more fundamental question: what is reading? It's making meaning-please hang on to that piece of information-it's making meaning, not sound, from the marks we see on the page. Take this sentence: 'There was a tear in his...' We can't say the sound of the word 'tear' unless we know its meaning in the sentence: is it a tear in his eye, or a tear in his shirt? Merely sounding out the phonics of t-e-a-r gets us nowhere: context is all important. Which is why random words lists are such a idiotic idea.

It transpires-and I find this fascinating-that children like Sean and Justin and Josephine, who learn to read without any lessons, and could read fluently at the age of three, never sounded out words phonically as they learnt to read. In other words advanced readers don't use phonics, even at the age of three. They, and we who are fluent readers, use phonics only after we have learnt to read, when we meet difficult, multi-syllabic words that we can't make sense of by the usual logical means: through print, or grammar, or a prior understanding of what we have just read, or through general knowledge.

We use phonics when we realise we've spelt something incorrectly, as I did earlier when I was writing the word 'capability.' I had to break it up into the five syllables to get it right. Phonics was really useful in that situation. In fact we can't write without phonics which is why we should be teaching reading at the same time as we're teaching writing-as we're teaching reading-as we're teaching writing-as we're teaching reading-and so son..

Phonics is also useful when we come to a word we don't know, such as the Polish surname that the Sydney entrepreneur, Richard Pratt was born with: Przetitzki, which is very difficult for English speakers to read, unlike: 'The cat sat on the frigging mat.'

But a capability in phonics doesn't mean competence in reading. It's quite possible to read with all the correct phonics in place and yet not to be reading at all. For example, I can read phonically correctly the entire Indonesian edition of my picture book Hattie and the Fox without understanding a word I'm saying:

'Ya, ya, ya!' kata babi. 'Peduli apa?' kata domba...

Correctly sounding out the words is not reading, it's barking at print, retrieving no meaning at all from the text. So it's disappointing to discover that many parents, politicians and even a few principals think that decoding phonics correctly is indeed reading. I'm sure you'll agree that getting the phonics right is completely pointless in the '"Peduli apa?" kata domba' situation,.

Only 50% of the words in English are phonically decodable This is a a nuisance, especially for the mad keen phonic-ators among us. It's my sincere hope that we're able to go beyond a 50% literacy level in Australia and New Zealand. We have, actually. We're always in the top four in the world after Finland, and sometimes Canada. The Finns have an unfair advantage over us: their language, like Indonesian and Italian, is phonically simple.

And if phonics is so important, so fundamental, so essential-as so many claim-and so crucial to our ability to make meaning from text, how come we can read the following with ease?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteers are in the rghit pclae: the rset can be a toatl mses but you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae we don't raed ervey lteter but the word as a wlohe.

So, hey, waht does this say abuot the improtnace of phnoics in raeidng? Prorbalby that phonics ins't very imoptrnat at all. How apcoltapyic is that, in the cuerrnt licetary wars!

As if that weren't proof enough that phonics is useful but not essential, here's more: how can it be possible that the billions of people in China and Japan, Korea and Taiwan learn to read when there is no phonics possible in their written language, which is displayed, instead, in pictographs? Children in China have to be told what a word is and then learn to recognise it and memorise it. Amazing what they achieve, isn't it? All those billions of people, deprived as they are, poor things, from the apparently essential benefits of phonics, becoming competent in literacy.

Sadly, let me say this again: phonics-mad literacy terrorists truly, madly, deeply believe that's making sounds is all there is to reading. How sad. How pitiful. As if we'd lie in a bath on Friday night and read The Da Vinci Code aloud. Most of us read silently when we read at all. Within that silence meaning is made, and within that silence we're able to read much more quickly than we do when we read aloud.

When we force poor little reluctant readers to read to us and when we tell them to sound out words they don't know, instead of simply giving them the word, they tend to read so slowly that they make little sense of the print and receive no joy from it. ('Giving the word' is what the parents of young early readers are know to do.) Children who are reluctant, remedial readers may perhaps be able to complete a little book tortuously and phonically correctly, but there's no reward in it, no excitement or passion, or emotion of any kind.

These unfortunate children don't love reading because they've never been read to. They can't see the point of reading, because they don't receive meaning or fun or value from it, even though they can decode words nicely. How ironic it is then, that we tend to each phonics heavily to the very children who need phonics least: the confused children, the ones who can't yet read.

Sadly, because of the money to be made from phonics programs, and the ease with which these programs can be tested and 'researched' phonics has been claimed in the USA in particular to have been 'scientifically proven' to be the best method to teach reading. If we scratch a quick-fix, sure-fire method of 'curing' reading difficulties we will often (but not always) find behind it a core group from an education publishing house, or a government department, or an institute in a university which stands to gain massively, financially, from their endeavours. Many expensive programs that you and I see in use in classrooms are earning bucket-loads of money on the basis of a flawed understanding of reading, and a willful misinterpretation of research. It sickens me.

The current methods used to teach reading in the USA are causing such a worrying decline in reading standards that many American states have hired teachers from Australia and New Zealand who are working at this moment to improve literacy in failing schools. There are in 536 of these teachers in New York alone.

Why would you and I even contemplate changing from the best methods in the world to the least effective? In Australia, due to the methods we use to teach reading, 66% of Australian children list reading as one of their favourite pastimes. How good is that?! I feel inordinately proud of that statistic.

[As I re-read this article in August 2013, I'm drowning in sorrow: Australia is copying the methods and testing regime of the USA instead of sensibly following in the footsteps of Finland which has the highest literacy rate in the world. Anyway, to continue...)

It's simple: children who arrive at school without any exposure to books, print, pictures, page-turning, and gorgeous stories that lighten up their lives need only that when they arrive in school: an enormous and intense exposure to books, the same books over and over and over again; an exposure to print through Big Books and to the details in the pictures; they need to experience page-turning; lots of chat about what's going on in the story and about the funny things in the pictures; gorgeous stories that lighten up their often sad lives; and lively teachers who switch them on to loving books, and who create a longing to be able to read. A phonics-first-and phonics-only approach can never in its wildest dreams achieve the same effect. I mean, compare this kind of literacy-learning with a phonics lesson: read The Magic Hat. A multitude of explicit phonics lessons can be taught from the pages of joyful books by expert teachers who are excited by teaching-teachers who make children excited about learning.

Do we want children whose backgrounds (both rich and poor, let's get that clear: this isn't about financial disadvantage it's about a read-aloud disadvantage)-do we want children whose backgrounds have lacked books to be resurrected into literacy in our classrooms or crucified on the cross of phonics? I certainly know which I'd choose.

The funds currently directed into the miracle cures and quick fixes in reading-out of which publishers make billions of dollars-would be better used in schools by providing children with a class library of appropriate classics that have been adored for years, instead of the mind-numbing 'readers' currently in vogue. With this kind of action-who knows?-we might even wipe out illiteracy in a single generation. How about it? We could at least try.

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This piece was presented at a conference of Auckland principals in Auckland, New Zealand in April 2008 Thank you. It's great to be here. My husband is hoping I won't have free time to buy shoes since shoes are infinitely more interesting in New Zealand than they are in Australia.

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Teaching of synthetic phonics in Australia based on flawed evidence | EduResearch Matters

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Teaching of synthetic phonics in Australia based on flawed evidence | EduResearch Matters

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What is phonics for? Where does it fit into an overall pedagogy of literacy? Without clear answers to these questions, the contestants in the phonics debate will continue to circle each other like blindfolded prizefighters.

The aim of literacy teaching is to produce readers who tackle texts on paper or screen with confidence and understanding, so that they can learn, enjoy their reading and, when appropriate, read aloud with fluency and expression. But to beginners the marks on the page are arbitrary, meaningless squiggles. Even those which correspond to words they understand when spoken to them cannot yet be related to meaning. Therefore the overriding aim of phonics is the efficient identification of unfamiliar printed words.
So who needs to be taught phonics and when?
Some children are enabled to bridge that gulf by being read to copiously, and joining in the reciting of the texts they have heard so often they have them off by heart, until they twig the essential insight that what they are saying is represented by what they can see. For them, phonics is not only unnecessary, but may be a hindrance. Therefore phonics has no place in the teaching of reading to young fluent readers, and testing their 'phonic knowledge' is irrelevant and risks causing them to regress in their learning.

What of the children who arrive at school not yet reading? Their most important immediate task is to learn to read, so for them the purpose of phonics is to provide a quick start on the identification of regularly-spelt words, alongside the essential (for English, with its complex orthography) learning of some basic high-frequency but irregularly-spelt words as sight words.

The experimental evidence shows clearly that phonics in this context works for both normally-developing children and those who are falling behind. But the same body of evidence also shows that (a) the teaching must be systematic and not incidental; (b) it must be embedded in a broad and rich language and literacy curriculum, because there is much more to reading than just word identification, and therefore phonics alone does not constitute teaching children to read.
The flawed case for teaching only synthetic phonics
The message about embedding phonics in a rich curriculum is there loud and clear in the Rose Report (2006), which was published in England and used as evidence to impose a national phonics test in England. Advocates of the phonics test, and the associated teaching of "synthetic phonics", in Australia regularly cite this report, especially to argue that Australia should impose the teaching of synthetic phonics on all school beginners.

I was present during the presentation of evidence for the Rose enquiry and I believe Jim Rose overstated his case for synthetic phonics in the subsequent report. Nevertheless, Rose's message about embedding phonics in a rich curriculum, which is a very basic message, got lost in the controversy his report stirred up around whole-word versus phonics.

Jim Rose mostly stuck to saying phonics teaching must be systematic, but in places elided that into saying that systematic phonics is synthetic phonics, which the experimental evidence did not justify, and still doesn't. There is as yet no evidence that any one form of phonics teaching produces better progress than any other form of phonics.

Following the Rose Report there was a noticeable increase in the number of phonics-based intervention schemes for struggling readers in England, but it was only after the change of government in 2010 that strong official pressure was put behind synthetic phonics, often using a flawed and partial interpretation of the research evidence, and Rose's conflation of systematic phonics with synthetic phonics. This was expressed in the misleading slogan-like mantra that 'Synthetic phonics is the best way to teach children to read', ignoring all the caveats about embedding phonics in the broader curriculum and the dearth of supporting evidence.

It is ironic that that line is actually at odds with the latest (2013, p.13) version of the national curriculum for English in England, which has this to say:

Skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Underpinning both is the understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words. This is why phonics should be emphasised in the early teaching of reading to beginners (i.e. unskilled readers) when they start school.

This is much more balanced than many public pronouncements. Moreover, it implies that phonics teaching is essentially time-limited. As soon as children 'get it' or are seen to have 'cracked the code', only occasional reinforcement of sounding-out and blending for unfamiliar words is needed. As Jeanne Chall put it 50 years ago in Learning to Read: the great debate, once children have developed the ability to identify written words, teaching further phonics 'is sheer madness'.
Teachers don't need a national test to tell them about their own students
What of those children who don't 'get it' the first or second time? There are a few for whom phonics simply doesn't work, but they are rare and exceptional. An Australian friend who taught in an Infants school (Years 1-2) in England for over 30 years says that she was unable to unlock the door of initial literacy for just one child in all that time. There are others who struggle and fail to progress well. Observant teachers know perfectly well who they are, and need deep professional knowledge to understand them and work round their difficulties. Teachers don't need a test to identify children who are struggling. When teachers in England were asked about the phonics test a great many said it didn't tell them anything they didn't already know.

What teachers of initial literacy do need is better support for helping the strugglers, which was supposed to be part of the follow-up to the phonics test, but is notable by its absence. Money put into that would be well spent, which the money spent on the phonics test is not.
In the first three years of national operation, the phonics test in England cost £44,000,000 - what a waste! Spend your Australian dollars on good professional development instead! Greg Brooks is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield, UK. Greg is a contributor to the book Reading the Evidence: Synthetic Phonics and Literacy Learning edited by distinguished researcher Margaret Clark (OBE) that will be launched at the *NOTE to readers and bloggers. Our Facebook and LinkedIn shares are not showing in some browsers but are showing in Safari. So check us out in Safari. Our tech people are on the case. AARE 2017 conference in Canberra on Wednesday 29th November. Other contributors to the book are Misty Adoniou, Terry Wrigley, and Henrietta Dombey. He was a member of the Rose Committee (2005-06). Greg was the chairperson of Federation of European Literacy Associations (2013-16) and has researched and written widely on the initial teaching of reading and spelling, especially through phonics. Find more about Greg Brooks here.
The theme of the 2017 AARE conference is ' Education: What's politics got to do with it?' There will be over 600 presentations of current educational research and panel sessions at the conference over the next five days. Journalists who want to attend or arrange interviews please contact Anna Sullivan, Communications Manager of AARE, Anna.Sullivan@unisa.edu.au Follow the conference on Twitter #AARE2017

Follow this blog as conference goers blog about their presentations through the week.

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Teaching of synthetic phonics in Australia based on flawed evidence

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What is phonics for? Where does it fit into an overall pedagogy of literacy? Without clear answers to these questions, the contestants in the phonics debate will continue to circle each other like blindfolded prizefighters.

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What is meant by phonics?

Let's start with the definitions:

Phonics: this is the direct relationship between sound and symbol. This involves the printed word and requires the use of the eyes and the ears to decipher words.

Phonemic Awareness: is hearing the relationship between sounds and symbols and involves the spoken word. It requires the ears only and the process does not involve print. The terms 'phonics' and 'phonemic awareness' are not interchangeable.

What do we believe?

Here at UWCSEA, we believe that both phonics and phonemic awareness are just one element of the the reading journey. Other areas of reading instruction include fluency, comprehension, vocabulary and oral communication. In order to learn to read, our children need many opportunities to see, hear and speak language. There are a number of elements which work together to build the knowledge, skills and understanding needed in order to make sense of the written word. These include:

general knowledge about the world

visual information about the text

information about sounds (phonemic awareness) from oral language

understanding about how writing and reading are related

understanding about language structure

understanding about how texts are structured

understanding that text makes sense

In the Infant School, teachers give students many opportunities to see, hear and apply all these elements of reading, writing and oral language during their play. We teach phonics in authentic (real-life) contexts, meaning it is closely connected to the speaking, listening, reading and writing that children experience in their daily lives. Children's experiences of language are aligned with the UWCSEA Learning Principles (see link below).

Some common questions about phonics and reading

If I teach my child the letter names/sounds, does that mean they will be able to read?

Teaching the letter names and sounds to your child is one essential piece of knowledge that readers need in order to comprehend text. However, it is not the only one. Children need plenty of authentic opportunities to experience these sounds in real-life contexts, so being exposed to as many texts as possible is equally as important as knowing sounds and recognising letters. When taught in isolation, children may not transfer their letter/sound knowledge to reading texts and, therefore, they will not be able to make sense of the written word. This is why it is important to remember that phonics/phonemic awareness is one aspect of learning to read and write.

My child knows the letter names and sounds, so why aren't they reading?

Once letters are recognised and sounds are related, children begin to build upon their knowledge and place the sounds together to begin to decode words. This is a process of discovery for our children and teachers guide them by carefully planning provocations which will build the knowledge, skills and understanding needed to develop their conceptual understanding of reading. If a child is only exposed to the know

ledge of letter sounds and/or names, they will not have the opportunity to apply other essential elements of reading and vital connections between the concepts of reading may not be made.

When will my child be a reader?

Each child is different and the reading journey is unique to the individual. Just as each child learns to walk at different times, they will learn to read the text at different stages too. Children are learning to read from their earliest interactions with text and illustration and this developmental stage is a key to their reading journey.

My child's preschool taught Jolly Phonics/Letterland... why don't you?

At UWCSEA, we believe in a responsive approach to learning, where teachers consider the needs and interests of the individual. One of the key elements of a packaged phonics scheme is the 'whole class,' linear approach. Whilst this may be appropriate at times in an early years classroom, our teachers understand the need to personalise the learning experiences for our children in order for them to be appropriately challenged and make connections to their prior knowledge. We also understand that play is an important vehicle for learning and therefore we offer as many play based learning opportunities as we can. Teachers may well incorporate aspects of different phonics schemes into teaching and learning but, again, this will be in response to respective learning needs.

How can I help at home?

Read for love and the enjoyment of reading. These times at home should be seen as an opportunity to bond and be presented as a gift to your child whilst avoiding too much 'teaching.'

Encourage your child to pay attention to the pictures and the words on the page.

You may like to point out some common words that you know your child already knows.

Ensure your children see you read. Be a role model for reading.

A parent's role in the reading process is to help develop a love of reading that allows students to develop a lifelong reading habit. Children need role models in reading who live literature rich lives.

By Olivia White (Literacy Coach, K-5, East Campus)

Other reading related to UWCSEA and learning:
UWCSEA Learning Principles
Literacy and Mathematics: Learning through play in the Infant School by Nicole Tripp and Olivia White
Image of the Child by Ben Morley Parenting in the Digital Age

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Let's start with the definitions: Phonics: this is the direct relationship between sound and symbol. This involves the printed word and requires the use of the eyes and the ears to decipher words. Phonemic Awareness: is hearing the relationship between sounds and symbols and involves the spoken word.

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The Goal of Phonics Instruction is to Get Readers Not to Use Phonics When Reading

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The Goal of Phonics Instruction is to Get Readers Not to Use Phonics When Reading

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For many of you, the title of this blog entry may sound a bit nonsensical - Why teach something and then not use it? But let me ask you to think a bit more deeply about phonics. If you are reading this you are likely a proficient reader. When reading how often do you have to stop and analyze or "sound out" individual words? My guess is that more than 99.9% of the words you encounter in reading are not analyzed or "sounded." Most words we encounter as proficient readers are sight words - they are recognized instantly and near effortlessly. Phonics is hardly used at all when proficient readers read.

We need phonics and other word analysis skills in order to get words into our heads. But after a few encounters with analyzing specific words, those words become "imprinted" in our brains as sight words. We need phonics to get words into our internal lexicons. But once those words are automatized or made into sight words phonics is no longer needed.

Getting words to the point of automatization is critical to proficient reading. The problem in reading is that all of us have a limited or finite amount of attention or cognitive energy. Analyzing words, as is done in phonics, uses up a lot of that cognitive energy. And that energy that is applied to word analysis cannot be applied to the more important part of reading - comprehension. So what often happens are readers who can read all the words correctly, but because they are spending their precious cognitive resources on word analysis their comprehension falters.

Carol Chomsky noted this phenomenon in her 1976 classic article entitled "After decoding: What?" Working with struggling readers, she taught them to decode words. However, despite the fact that they were able to decode words accurately, "albeit slowly and painfully (p. 288)," they continued to struggle with reading comprehension and general proficiency in reading. The answer to her question of "What?" was helping students develop automaticity or fluency in their reading. She did this by having students read interesting and challenging materials while simultaneously listening to an audio-recorded version of the text. In a 15 week intervention period (less than four months), her students made approximately 8 months progress in reading!

Phonics is important, no question about it. It is a tool that readers use to get words into their internal lexicons. However, proficiency in phonics should not be the goal. Rather the goal should be to get students to the point where most of the words they encounter are automatically recognized so that their attention can be devoted to making meaning.

The way to get young readers to the point of automatic word recognition is the same way a person develops automaticity in any activity - practice. However, the practice needs to be the kind that allows children to move to proficient reading. Two of the best ways of providing proficient practice is through assisted reading and repeated reading.

Assisted reading is what Carol Chomsky used with her students. Students read texts while simultaneously listening to a fluent reading of the text. This can occur by reading with a more proficient partner, reading with a group of others, or reading while listening to a recorded version of the text. In all of these situations, the assist of another reader provides students with a scaffold that allows them to approach fluent reading on their own.

Repeated reading simply involves reading a text multiple times until a student can read it at a level that approaches proficiency. When students who struggle in reading read a text, the initial reading is not proficient. However, when they read it a second, third, and perhaps even a fourth time their proficiency improves until they are able to read it much like a proficient reader. The "magic" behind both assisted and repeated reading is that the improvement that comes from reading one text with assistance and/or repeatedly new texts that students have not previously read. In essence, students begin to pull their transfers to reading up by their bootstraps.

While I don't want to get overly technical in this blog, I do want to mention that, in this age of scientifically based reading instruction, a good deal of research supports both assisted and repeated reading, especially with students who find reading difficult. In a recent review of research related to fluency interventions Stevens, Walker, and Vaughn (2017) conclude that "Results showed repeated reading,... and assisted reading with audiobooks produced gains in reading fluency and comprehension" (p. 576). My own research on the Fluency Development Lesson (Rasinski, 2010), a lesson that integrates assisted and repeated reading consistently results in improved performance in word recognition automaticity and comprehension.

While it is critical that we provide students with solid instruction in phonics or word decoding, it is equally important that we keep in mind that we need to take students to that next level word reading-fluent, automatic, and proficient reading.

References

Chomsky, C. (1976). After decoding: What? Language Arts, 53 , 288-296.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010). The fluent reader: Oral and silent reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension (2 nd edition). New York: Scholastic.

Stevens, E., Walker, M., & Vaughn, S. (2017). The effects of fluency interventions on the reading fluency and reading comprehension performance of elementary students with learning disabilities: A Synthesis of the research from 2001-2014. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50 , 576-590.

You can find resources for teaching accurate and automatic word recognition (i.e. fluency) at Tim's own website - www.timrasinski.com

Daily Word Ladders by Timothy Rasinski

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimRasinski1

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The Goal of Phonics Instruction is to Get Readers Not to Use Phonics When Reading

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For many of you, the title of this blog entry may sound a bit nonsensical -- Why teach something and then not use it? But let me ask you to think a bit more deeply about phonics. If you are reading this you are likely a proficient reader.

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Why Is My Kid Allowed to Make Spelling Mistakes? | Cult of Pedagogy

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Why Is My Kid Allowed to Make Spelling Mistakes? | Cult of Pedagogy

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Dear Cult of Pedagogy, Last week, my son brought home a stack of papers from his first-grade class. Some of them had obvious spelling errors, but no one had marked them wrong. Later that same day, I was helping my 10-year-old daughter with a research paper. I noticed a few misspellings on her draft, but when I pointed them out, she said, "My teacher told us not to worry about spelling when we're drafting." What's the deal? Why don't teachers seem to care about spelling anymore?
When kids first learn how to write, they grapple with many different skills at once. After they master letters and build them into words, their next step is stringing those words together into complete ideas. That takes a lot of mental work, and trying to spell every word perfectly can slow the whole process way down. For this reason, many teachers in the early grades encourage inventive spelling, also known as temporary spelling - where the child makes his best guess on the spelling of the word, rather than stopping to find out the correct version.

This practice is grounded in research. A number of studies demonstrate that kids who are allowed to use inventive spelling learn to write more quickly, more fluently, and with a richer vocabulary than those who work under more rigid spelling expectations (Kolodziej & Columba, 2005).

Researchers suggest that parents think about inventive spelling the way they once viewed their child's early attempts at speech:

When the child said "ba-ba," did the parent say, "No, honey, it is pronounced "bottle"? Parents treasure this developmental step their child took towards conventional speaking by lavishly praising the child and offering the bottle...The child will not call the item a "ba-ba" for the rest of his/her life; rather, when the child is developmentally ready, he/she will be able to say "bottle" (Kolodziej & Columba, 2005, p. 217).

In the later years, spelling does "count," but it has a time and a place. Most writing teachers use some version of the Writing Process, where students are taught to (1) gather and group their ideas (pre-writing), (2) flesh out those ideas in sentences and paragraphs (drafting), and (3) reorganize the piece so that it accomplishes the writer's goals (revising). Only then, after the piece has been revised into a shape that's close to finished, do most teachers tell their students to start the next step: editing. In this stage, final corrections are made to spelling, punctuation, and usage.

The reason spelling and mechanics are de-emphasized in the first few steps is the same as in the younger grades: Too much focus on correctness interrupts the flow of ideas. Furthermore, teachers want students to understand that good writers revise their pieces many times for structure, development, clarity and voice. Although the mechanics are important for polish, correct spelling can't make up for a poorly structured, underdeveloped piece of writing. And if a piece is going to be revised several times, it makes no sense to keep correcting the mechanics, only to have those words dumped entirely in a later revision.

Producing a finished piece of writing is a lot like putting on a polished musical performance: It requires the synthesis of many skills, some of which need to be handled separately. Imagine if a band conductor brought a brand-new piece of music to her band and expected all sections to play it together, perfectly, the first time. Even someone with no musical training can see that this is an unreasonable approach. Instead, if each instrument section starts by practicing their part separately, the performers will get really solid on their individual parts before pulling it all together to refine the complete performance.

So what should you do if your child comes home with a paper full of spelling or other mechanical errors? Take a cue from the teacher: If the teacher hasn't mentioned the errors, then spelling was not a priority for this particular assignment or at this particular stage. Instead, praise the content itself. Here are some specific things to look for, and if they are there, to praise:

Strong, vivid vocabulary: "You chose a really interesting word to describe that monster - ferocious."

Idea development: "You described how the lizard's tongue works really clearly. At first I couldn't understand how a tongue can smell, but this sentence helps."

Audience awareness: "This introduction really grabbed my attention."

Organization: "Nice transition here: 'On the other hand.' That's a good way to show that you're going to talk about a different side of the issue."

Attempts at sophisticated construction: "Is that a semicolon? That's a pretty advanced punctuation mark. I like to see you trying new things with your writing."

If you want to help your child improve his spelling, keep assignments that contain errors in a folder. Later in the year, after a certain kind of word has been taught - say, the difference between there, their, and they're - have your child go through the folder and see if they can catch some old mistakes with this set of words.

Rest assured, teachers still care very much about spelling. They just recognize that learning other skills - harder, more complex skills - often works best when those skills get a student's full attention. Single instruments first, then the whole orchestra.
Reference:
Kolodziej, N.J., & Columba, L. (2005). Invented spelling: Guidelines for parents. Reading Improvement, 42 (4), 212-223.

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Why is my kid allowed to make spelling mistakes?

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"Last week, my son brought home a stack of papers from his first-grade class. Some of them had obvious spelling errors, but no one had marked them wrong. What's the deal? Why don't teachers seem to care about spelling anymore?"

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In Defense of Decodable Text - High Five Literacy

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In Defense of Decodable Text - High Five Literacy

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Timothy Shanahan, Distinguished Professor, recently wrote a blog entitled, "Should We Teach with Decodable Text," which caused a Tweetstorm on Twitter and lots of discussion in the Dyslexia community. Why? What exactly is decodable text and why should it be controversial? According to Shanahan, "This is not a highly researched topic. There have been only a handful of studies into the effectiveness of decodable texts since the term was first used back in the 1980s. And, truth be told, they are kind of [a] mess; with little evident agreement about what decodable text is, what it should be compared with, and what outcomes we should expect to derive from it."
So what is decodable text?
Decodable text offers beginning and/or struggling readers a chance to practice the phonics skills they have already been taught using connected text. Perhaps the definition of "decodable" could or should be tightened up, but its purpose is clear; decodable books focus on spelling patterns that the reader can decode given his or her existing knowledge of letter and sound correspondences. Decodable readers usually follow a specific sequence of skills and instructional procedures that cumulatively develop with each book. Quality decodable books will not only use simple short vowel words, they will reflect growth into advanced code knowledge and utilize vowel digraphs (vowel teams) and multisyllabic words. The better book series will introduce one or two new concepts at a time while offering lots of practice opportunities with simpler patterns. The structure will be apparent to anyone with or without a teaching degree, and it becomes easy to pinpoint skill deficits. Decodable text is only decodable if children have been taught that particular letter pattern. Decodable text would not (or should not) be handed to a child without the child having first been taught the letter and sound correspondences.

The goal should be to move children into authentic books they can handle independently. Phonics proponents feel that until beginner or struggling readers are ready to read authentic text, they should be given reading material that they can handle themselves without being forced into using ineffective strategies such as guessing, using pictures, or using cues based on context. Phonics instruction is more effective when children have immediate opportunities to apply what they learned to their reading, and decodable books facilitate this learning. Their easily observable progress will determine how long they remain in decodable text.

Contrary to Shanahan's assertion, the use of decodable text was researched thoroughly. Perhaps the confusion lies in the fact that the term "decodable" was not around at the time. In the 1960s, the Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Development and Research (SWRL) was one of a number of educational laboratories charged with bringing research-based programs and procedures to schools. In 1972, SWRL partnered with Ginn and Company to publish the early decodable readers, the Beginning Reading Program (BRP), better known as the "I See Sam books." The federally-funded research on these little "decodable" books has been in the public domain for years, and their positive results can be found quite easily in any search. This program became the focus of SWRL's efforts for fifteen years! This would qualify as thoroughly researched by anyone's standards. "The R&D effort required to design, develop, and field test the Program was, and still remains, unprecedented." (Durkin, 1990). The studies clearly indicate that teaching kindergarten children using BRP was successful. Children from all backgrounds, including minorities and the disadvantaged, became proficient beginner readers with only 20 to 30 minutes of daily instructional time devoted to teaching reading. Although most children who entered kindergarten with reading skills typically came from advantaged backgrounds, virtually all children were reading by the end of the year. Students who learned to read in kindergarten were found to be superior in reading skills and retained their advantage through high school.

As far as decodable books being a "mess," it is true that some books are poorly developed, but the aforementioned BRP readers were carefully researched and designed with specific content and sequencing of sounds and letters to help children "gain initial competence in reading." (Adams, 1990). The BRP books illustrate a superior design structure compared to others that rush through the code or stay in short words for too long. In the BRP books, phonics was taught at the same time as the books were presented, so there was no mistaking the value of its content. Decodable books should be "compared with" what beginning and struggling readers usually receive today, either leveled books or controlled readers. For a typical reader, phonics instruction combined with leveled books for Guided Reading will not harm them, and many children will begin to generalize patterns to non-decodable books easily. The amount of phonics introduced would be sufficient for such children. For the struggling reader, however, decodable books can make a huge difference because they provide much more steady practice. The goal is to break bad habits while forming new habits. The point of the decodable books is for children to apply what they learn and see if the code is being retained.

According to Shanahan, we are robbing children of the opportunity to make "cognitive calculations" by keeping children in decodable text. In other words, he implies many children can begin to internalize the alphabetic principle without the decodable text, or, at least, with very little practice. For a typical reader this might be true, but can a dyslexic child or a struggling reader make these "cognitive calculations"? Practitioners in the trenches, who work with such children, KNOW THAT THIS WOULD BE UNUSUAL TO SAY THE LEAST. Transfer and generalizations of code knowledge are significant leaps that frequently take time and intensive practice to develop. We do not keep children in decodable text if they can easily move through the sequence of skills required. Nobody wants children to only receive phonics and controlled, stilted language instruction. This is the false argument Whole Language proponents use to undermine phonics advocates.

Children should be exposed to more than decodable text - no argument there. But how? Shared reading and reading aloud to children are both necessary for children to build language and vocabulary. Dr. Shanahan does point out that decodable text has a place, but it should be "severely limited," without giving specific alternatives. We can only get a hint of what he must be thinking by looking at the basal reader series he has authored for McGraw-Hill. In the meantime, school districts will interpret his blog to suit their needs, and this can be unfortunate for all the children in need of decodable books.

Faith Borkowsky, Founder of High Five Literacy and Academic Coaching, is a Certified Wilson Dyslexia Practitioner, is Orton-Gillingham trained, and has extensive training and experience in a number of other research-based, peer-reviewed programs that have produced positive gains for students with dyslexia, auditory processing disorder, ADD/ADHD, and a host of learning difficulties. Her book, Failing Students or Failing Schools? A Parent's Guide to Reading Instruction and Intervention, is available on Barnes and Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/failing-students-or-failing-schools-faith-borkowsky/1128896546 and Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/1937615456/

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Timothy Shanahan, Distinguished Professor, recently wrote a blog entitled, "Should We Teach with Decodable Text," which caused a Tweetstorm on Twitter and lots of discussion in the Dyslexia community. Why? What exactly is decodable text and why should it be controversial? According to Shanahan, "This is not a highly researched topic.

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Why phonics is crucial - but some won’t ‘get’ it | Tes News

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Why phonics is crucial - but some won’t ‘get’ it | Tes News

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"Systematic phonics is the great equaliser," states Anne Castles, distinguished professor in the department of cognitive science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. "If the child does not have rich language background, you can teach them phonics then they can go and read and supply themselves with that rich language, which is so key for their ability to access the curriculum later on."

Speaking on this week's episode of Tes Podagogy, Castles argues that the evidence this is the case is now compelling.

"There have been thousands of studies that have looked at phonics in various ways, various forms and using various measures," she reveals. "We are at a level of confidence now where we can say we have a pretty good understanding that if a phonics programme follows a set of principals then most likely it will be effective, because it would fit with the broader evidence base we have."

Evidence for phonics

Despite this evidence base, however, she admits that she understands why the topic of phonics remains controversial.

"It is certainly true that it has been more difficult to document evidence of the success of phonics in the long term, but we are starting to see that evidence come through," she says. "However, we do need more of it.

"And a lot of teachers have used whole language methods for a long time and have experienced success. There are plenty of children who will learn to read regardless of the method being used. So it is very hard for teachers, as they have seen a method bring success, to be told there is a better method."

She says there has also been a tendency on both sides of the argument to claim that phonics should be the totality of reading instruction in the early years - or that this is what people wish to happen - and this has fanned the flames of the debate unnecessarily. It's an issue she touched on in a co-written article for Tes earlier this year and one she revisits in the podcast.

"There should never be a suggestion that the only reading instruction children should be getting is phonics," she says. "They should be read to, they should be enmeshed in a reading environment, they should be engaged in all sorts of reading instruction."

A balanced approach

Another claim that she says is unhelpful is that, if well taught, every child will "get" phonics. That is simply not the case, she says, but what phonics can do is help teachers to spot those with reading disorders sooner.

"I don't believe it is true that all children will 'get' phonics if they are taught properly," she explains. "There are some children who are instructional casualties - they have no reading disorder but have not been taught explicitly and have needed the instruction - but there will also be a group who will continue to struggle way past the first few years of schooling [despite good phonics teaching]. What phonics can do, is help us to spot those children who do have reading difficulties. By having a phonics check in place, you can pick out the ones who do not seem to be responding well and get some intervention in place."

In the podcast, Castles goes on to discuss the evidence base in more detail, to talk about the commercialisation and politicalisation of phonics and how that influences the debate, and also about the problems with identifying language problems at too early an age.

You can listen to the podcast below, or by searching for "Tes - the education podcast" on your chosen podcast platform.

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'Phonics is crucial - even for those who won't 'get' it'

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"Systematic phonics is the great equaliser," states Anne Castles, distinguished professor in the department of cognitive science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. "If the child does not have rich language background, you can teach them phonics then they can go and read and supply themselves with that rich language, which is so key for their ability to access the curriculum later on."

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Views: True literacy is more than just words, Latest Views News - The New Paper

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Views: True literacy is more than just words, Latest Views News - The New Paper

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Whose responsibility is it to teach literacy?

This is a very complex debate.

Literacy is fundamental to both individual success and the continued growth of the wider society.

Consequently, discussions occur across society from policy level to staff rooms to homes.

Often the debate reflects personal views stemming from our own experiences of learning to read and write.

As personal values, there is the potential for quite heated debate.

The recent social media commentary on respective responsibilities is an example.

However, the binary nature of the argument has the potential to put off finding a solution to a genuinely larger problem of high-level literacy in children, which is not just about knowing words.
Defining high-level literacy
Fifty thousand to 60,000 - that is the number of words that some researchers say will help our children navigate university and beyond.

Dividing that total by number of school years and by week means children need to be actively learning 100 words a week.

It would be challenging for English teachers to cover this as there are also other important things for our children to be learning at school.

If children spend 25 minutes a day reading on 200 days in a year, they are likely to cover one million words in a year at an average reading rate.

Of those words, 15,000 to 30,000 will be new.

This sounds great.

However, learning the words in a way that will allow children to manipulate them with precision and nuance requires multiple exposure.

Scarborough's Reading Rope model shows skills that are working concurrently to help us read effectively.

Along with basic decoding of sounds, background knowledge of the topic is entwined with vocabulary depth, sentence structures, verbal reasoning to recognise metaphors, and knowledge of the literacy style.

All of these require explicit instruction. Within those skills, students will have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Responding to these in full would again crowd out an already packed curriculum.

Teachers and children would be under even more pressure.

So, can the literacy gap be bridged more effectively at home? Like the mechanics of reading, home life is just as complex.

Time is one obvious factor.

Juggling work, a household, and potentially other children, means that finding time to support literacy in the form of reading is challenging.

Varying levels of education can mean that many parents lack the confidence to engage with the academic side of their child's development.

This often results in a fear of doing something wrong and disadvantaging their child. Culture is important - perceptions of parental roles and the home-school relationship are specific to context.

Asking who should play the dominant role in developing literacy, even if it was a valid question, would vary from country to country.

So, if teachers cannot completely support literacy, and parents also find it challenging to support, is there a solution?
Be unified in achieving literacy in children
The binary debate of whose responsibility it is to teach literacy is a distraction.

The important thing is to be unified in the vital importance of literacy for everyone.

Next is to understand what high-level literacy means in real terms and being aware of the barriers to it.

While these are certainly complex, breaking them down into simpler components makes it easier to see how best to help develop literacy.

Only then can we effectively agree on who is best placed to do it.

Some of the resulting debates are likely to be about the shape of intervention reading programmes and teachers from subjects other than English playing a more active role.
The writer is head of primary courses at the British Council Singapore. The British Council is the UK's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.

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Views: True literacy is more than just words

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Views News - Whose responsibility is it to teach literacy? This is a very complex debate. Literacy is fundamental to both individual success and the continued growth of the wider society. Consequently, discussions occur across society from policy level to staff rooms... Read more at www.tnp.sg

# data[].attributes.headline
Views: True literacy is more than just words, Latest Views News - The New Paper

# data[].attributes.subject
Views: True literacy is more than just words, Latest Views News - The New Paper

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Whose responsibility is it to teach literacy?

This is a very complex debate.

Literacy is fundamental to both individual success and the continued growth of the wider society.

Consequently, discussions occur across society from policy level to staff rooms to homes.

Often the debate reflects personal views stemming from our own experiences of learning to read and write.

As personal values, there is the potential for quite heated debate.

The recent social media commentary on respective responsibilities is an example.

However, the binary nature of the argument has the potential to put off finding a solution to a genuinely larger problem of high-level literacy in children, which is not just about knowing words.
Defining high-level literacy
Fifty thousand to 60,000 - that is the number of words that some researchers say will help our children navigate university and beyond.

Dividing that total by number of school years and by week means children need to be actively learning 100 words a week.

It would be challenging for English teachers to cover this as there are also other important things for our children to be learning at school.

If children spend 25 minutes a day reading on 200 days in a year, they are likely to cover one million words in a year at an average reading rate.

Of those words, 15,000 to 30,000 will be new.

This sounds great.

However, learning the words in a way that will allow children to manipulate them with precision and nuance requires multiple exposure.

Scarborough's Reading Rope model shows skills that are working concurrently to help us read effectively.

Along with basic decoding of sounds, background knowledge of the topic is entwined with vocabulary depth, sentence structures, verbal reasoning to recognise metaphors, and knowledge of the literacy style.

All of these require explicit instruction. Within those skills, students will have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Responding to these in full would again crowd out an already packed curriculum.

Teachers and children would be under even more pressure.

So, can the literacy gap be bridged more effectively at home? Like the mechanics of reading, home life is just as complex.

Time is one obvious factor.

Juggling work, a household, and potentially other children, means that finding time to support literacy in the form of reading is challenging.

Varying levels of education can mean that many parents lack the confidence to engage with the academic side of their child's development.

This often results in a fear of doing something wrong and disadvantaging their child. Culture is important - perceptions of parental roles and the home-school relationship are specific to context.

Asking who should play the dominant role in developing literacy, even if it was a valid question, would vary from country to country.

So, if teachers cannot completely support literacy, and parents also find it challenging to support, is there a solution?
Be unified in achieving literacy in children
The binary debate of whose responsibility it is to teach literacy is a distraction.

The important thing is to be unified in the vital importance of literacy for everyone.

Next is to understand what high-level literacy means in real terms and being aware of the barriers to it.

While these are certainly complex, breaking them down into simpler components makes it easier to see how best to help develop literacy.

Only then can we effectively agree on who is best placed to do it.

Some of the resulting debates are likely to be about the shape of intervention reading programmes and teachers from subjects other than English playing a more active role.
The writer is head of primary courses at the British Council Singapore. The British Council is the UK's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Views: True literacy is more than just words

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Views News - Whose responsibility is it to teach literacy? This is a very complex debate. Literacy is fundamental to both individual success and the continued growth of the wider society. Consequently, discussions occur across society from policy level to staff rooms... Read more at www.tnp.sg

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Synthetic Phonics: What It Is and What It Is Not

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Synthetic Phonics: What It Is and What It Is Not