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Why do they make teaching reading harder than ABC?
Every child in this country who cannot read is a child betrayed. Illiteracy is a terrible handicap to inflict on anyone and it is quite unnecessary, because learning to read is easy. Almost everyone can do it. Teaching reading is very easy, too. Yet somehow the educational establishment has managed to make it difficult.
I write with conviction and experience; years ago my brothers and I taught our younger sister to read, even though she has a learning disability, then called a mental handicap. Our school had given up, but she became a brilliant reader. She can read and pronounce any word in English, whether or not she understands its meaning or its context, and without pictures.
That is because she and we learnt to read in the old-fashioned way, learning the sounds of letters and putting them together into words, starting with c-a-t and h-a-t. That's all we did. With the wonderful Cat in the Hat books it was fun.
We weren't taught to teach. We had no idea that we were following a simple system of "synthetic phonics", as it's now called, or "decoding" words. We didn't know that this system is the best and simplest for struggling readers, or for those with very little English - as research now shows. We just knew everyone did it and it worked for almost everyone.
That was then. A terrible wave of folly overtook British teaching in the 1960s. Parents were even told not to help children with their reading. It should be left to the "professionals". Meanwhile, the professionals got it all wrong, introducing a range of misguided methods and muddling them all up together.
Phonics was resolutely dumped as undesirable in favour of ill-considered guesswork experiments such as "look-and-say", "whole language" and "real books".
It remains a mystery why phonics became so ideologically unacceptable, though it worked, and why all these other methods gained favour from our progressive educational establishment, though they don't.
The results were all too predictable. Last week a Unicef study of 24 countries reported that the UK's adult illiteracy rate of 10% is "a statistic of shame". Last week an Ofsted report announced that 200,000 seven-year-olds (31%) cannot read properly.
Ofsted also said that a quarter - yes, 25% - of all 11-year-olds cannot read and write well enough to follow the secondary school syllabus. Naturally enough this goes on into adult life, with tragic results.
Our prisons are full of illiterates, for instance. The education minister talked of the 3m adults now in the workforce whose reading age is below 11.
What of our national literacy scheme (NLS)? What of our much vaunted national literacy hour, started four years ago? And didn't the men at the ministry promise to bring back phonics?
The truth is that the national literacy scheme has been a failure, and could never have been anything but a failure, because it was misconceived from the first. It was put together in the midst of a furious academic debate about reading methods. To accommodate different reading lobbies, it was bodged into an eclectic mix of several failed approaches and - crudely - phonics lost out, for all the lip service that's paid to it.
There were well placed experts who said so repeatedly, but they were largely ignored; such is the power of educational progressives. Ever more misguided demands have been made on exhausted teachers. "I'm all NLSed out" is a common complaint among teachers.
That is hardly surprising. They now have not just the main national literacy strategy to follow. There are also five extra catch-up programmes on top - starting with Pips, ELS, ALS and FLS and a key stage 3 literacy programme. These are Progression in Phonics for reception and year one; Early Literacy Support for children in year one who have failed in the Pips programme; Additional Literacy Strategy for children falling behind in year three and four and Further Literacy Strategy for children in years five and six who have failed on ALS. Then there is the key stage 3 literacy programme for those who didn't learn to read properly at primary school.
What's startling is that there is no programme at that stage to help those who are still not reading at all. Yet the NLS was started precisely for weaker readers. Why did the original scheme need this expensive tinkering? It defies belief.
Take ELS, which is extra time for struggling beginners for whom the daily literacy hour is not working. ELS has, in fact, very little to do with phonics. Learning bout letter sounds and letter shapes is crucial to a good start in reading, according to excellent research.
But only 3% of the extra ELS time is allocated to sounding out letters, the very basis of learning by phonics. Instead, 60% of the time is spent on shared reading and shared writing and other activities, which are no use at all to a child who hasn't yet mastered the basics.
If you feel confused and outraged, imagine what teachers feel. Add to that the problem that they are not properly taught how to teach reading. Ofsted also reported last week that at Cambridge University, one of the country's top teacher training courses, student primary school teachers still did not know how to teach reading at the end of a four-year degree course. In particular the teaching of phonics "left much to be desired" and was hardly touched on.
In other words, Cambridge graduates are not equipped to teach phonics or, therefore, the vaunted literacy hour - not, however, that the literacy hour has much to do with proper phonics. One can only guess how much worse things are at the bog-standard colleges.
At the root of this is an extraordinary ambivalence about phonics. Teachers themselves sometimes resist synthetic phonics. At other times they hardly know what it is. They are often under pressure to coach for reading tests with misleading results. Failure emerges only later. There are temptations, too. According to one teacher, there's a lot of helpful "pointy pointy" from teacher going on during early reading tests.
All this may have contributed in part to the failure of the national literacy strategy, but its real failure lies in its own resistance to the essentials of synthetic phonics. Simply put, a child must be able to decode a word for himself before he can comprehend its meaning. Being encouraged to guess what it is, by context, picture, total word shapes or beginning letters, as the NLS actively encourages, is counterproductive for the child and misleading for the teacher.
Much of the literacy hour consists of just this time-wasting stuff. According to the best research, synthetic phonics works and almost none of the other rival reading strategies do. How is it that ministers didn't know?
Perhaps something at last may be done. The government is panicking, publicly.
Privately I have heard that Tony Blair has sent a message to the national numeracy and literacy advisers that they have only a year left to get their act together or he will scrap the literacy (and numeracy) strategy. Wh-y n-o-t d-o i-t n-ow? It's that simple, really.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 01, 2002
Comments:
I am researching synthetic phonics as part of an undergraduate research project and found your article very interesting. Have you written anything else on the subject? I am currently a teaching assistant working with children with special educational needs and hope that my research will support my long held belief that all children must understand the letter sounds of their language before they begin to read words. I believe an eclectic approach can be confusing and misguided, especially when when delivered by untrained staff (myself included) and untrained volunteer helpers.
Posted by: Heather Cooper | 4 Jul 2005 16:48:25
To Heather Cooper or any others of your readers have yet to learn of the Reading Reform Foundation, I can recommend it as the location of much sensible discussion of the use of Synthetic Phonics in the teaching of reading and useful links to other related material. Its URL is http://rrf.org.uk/
Posted by: Ken Moore | 19 Feb 2006 17:40:10
