Teachers all over the UK are
systematically teaching reading through phonics. I say systematically because
the majority will be following step-by-step, a commercial scheme that the
school, at great expense, has bought in. So far Michael Rosen (2012) in his
blog has estimated that schools and government have spent nearly £8 million
pounds on government-approved commercial synthetic phonics publications –
governments match fund each school to the tune of £3000. Schools are doing this not because the teachers think this is the best way to
teach reading, but because the government has told them to do it, and is
subsidizing it. If subsidy is not enough to make sure schools do as they are
told, the children will be given a compulsory phonics test. Apart from
financial inducements, high-stakes testing and accountability is the
government’s strongest weapon to ensure teachers comply with government dictat.
In this blog I unpick the case put forward for phonics and argue that it
has little to do with the successful teaching of reading.
What is phonics?
Phonics is a method for teaching
reading that focuses on the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and letters
(graphemes). A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language but not
necessarily a single letter, for example, ‘oo’ in look is a phoneme. There are
44 phonemes in the English language.
Synthetic phonics is the chosen
form of teaching phonics by the English government. It assumes that simple
decoding is all that is required in reading and aims to teach the sounds of
individual letters and the 44 phonemes of English. Children are taught to sound
out the letters in words and ‘blend’ them together.
Why phonics?
Advocates of phonics put forward
the following argument:
- · The alphabetic principle (phonics) exists.
- · Children need to be taught the alphabetic principle in order to become readers.
- · If you teach children the alphabetic principle they will learn to read.
The presentation of a logical argument
in this way, whereby the conclusion is inferred from the two premises is known
as a syllogism. If we can show that either the major premise (phonics exists) or
the minor premise (children need to be taught phonics to become readers) is
false, then the conclusion will also be false.
Let us suppose for a moment that
the first premise is correct (and I intend to show that it is not) and an
alphabetic principle does exist, this still says nothing about whether this has
to be taught in order for a child to become a reader. But I get ahead of
myself, let’s start with that first premise: ‘The alphabetic principle exists’
and examine it. The popular way of talking about this principle is to call it
phonics. The simplest way of explaining phonics is to describe it as letter-sound
correspondence. If you follow the
phonics’ rule (which is what government wants us to do) you can turn a single
letter into a single sound. Let’s throw
the cat amongst the pigeons and see how quickly this assertion breaks
down. The following analysis of phonics
has been greatly assisted by the painstaking work of Steven Strauss (2005).
Teachers are familiar with the
so-called CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant, as in C-A-T). Even I was taught, “The cat sat on the mat”
almost 60 years ago, however, the alphabetic principle doesn’t even work for
CVC words as all teachers know. Whilst it works for ‘fit’ and ‘sit’, it doesn’t
work for, ‘fir’ and ‘sir’, both CVC words, but the sound of ‘i’ seems to be
controlled by the ‘r’ – these can be called the r-controlled words. Try it out! The ‘i’ sound changes in the
presence of an ‘r’. The important thing to note here is that the phonics rule
that single letters create a single sound is shown to be wrong when we think
about this ‘r-controlled’ example.
That’s OK you might say, we can
teach this rule, but what if ‘r-controlled’ is just the tip of the ice-berg? Let’s
think about ‘y’ controlled words? Try pronouncing the following ‘a’ in bay, day, hay, ray, say, way – did you
notice that to pronounce these words properly ‘a’ has a long sound. But in our
example above, ‘the cat sat on the mat,’ the letter ‘a’ has a short sound. So there isn’t a single sound for a single
letter, there are long and short sounds.
Sounding out letters cannot teach us when to apply the correct one.
What about another phenomena
known as ‘magic e’? Magic ‘e’ is
magic because its presence can change the pronunciation of vowel sounds from
short to long by remaining silent! So pan
becomes pane, can becomes cane, ban becomes bane and so on. This adds another rule we must teach that also
challenges the notion that there is an alphabetic principle of letter-sound
correlation.
We can teach magic ‘e’ – most
teachers do – but wait a minute, magic ‘e’ isn’t that simple (did I say
simple?) If there are two consonant letters, the sound of the vowel changes.
The vowel is long when the two letters are ng,
th and st, as in range, bathe and taste, but short when the two letters are nc, ng, ns, rc, rg, or rs,
as in dance, dunce, hinge, tense, farce,
barge and parse. We can just add
these exceptions to our teaching, can’t we?
Not so fast, we also have to remember that if the word contains the
sequence ‘ie’, which is otherwise pronounced long, this long pronunciation
takes precedence over the short vowel pronunciation before two consonants, as
in pierce and fierce. Are you still with
me? We need to remember that if the word contains e, i or u immediately
before r, the r-controlled pronunciation takes precedence over the long vowel
pronunciation, as in hearse.
Getting confused? Let’s try and
sum this up.
A vowel letter is pronounced
short in CVC words, unless:
1)
The vowel is
immediately followed by the letter r, in
which case it is r-controlled and
then it is long as the following
examples demonstrate: i, e, or u (as in fir, her, fur), if a (as
in car, far) or if o (as in for).
2)
The vowel is
immediately followed by the letter y, in
which case it is long, for example, if a
or e (as in say, hey), if u (as in buy, guy) or if o as in (boy, toy).
3)
The vowel is
immediately followed by the letter w, in
which case it is [uw) (as in new, grew),
if a (as in paw, saw), or optionally [ae] (as in how versus, low and bow [baew] versus [bow]).
As
my friend the meercat would say: Simples! (short vowel on cat).
Let’s
move on. Teachers are also expected to teach letter combinations as one sound, as
in the most common combination, th. ‘Th’
can be pronounced with either a voiced th
as in the, this, that or voiceless th as in thin, thick and thank.
How does phonics help children know when faced with sounding out a word if th is to be voiced or voiceless, and
more importantly in a phonic system of teaching, how does the teacher teach
this? Letter-sound correspondence simply won’t work. And unfortunately voiced
and voiceless pronunciation does not only apply to th. Consider as, is, has, his and was in contrast to bus, Gus,
pus and yes. Will small children being taught how to
read find it helpful to know that ‘s’ is
voiceless when house is a noun, but
voiced when it is a verb? Try it: “Look at the house”(noun); “the cattery
housed the lost cat” (verb). To say nothing of the confusion caused when the
same word can be both a noun and a verb depending on the sentence.
Wait,
there’s more. The letter g immediately
following n and immediately preceding
er is pronounced if the er is part of the stem, as in finger and linger, but is silent if er
is a separate suffix, as in singer
and ringer, unless of course you are
decoding the words longer and stronger. Phonics is not for the
faint-hearted. As the few examples included here demonstrate the phonics’ rules
that are needed to generate pronunciations for even the most simply spelled
words very quickly become overwhelming.
The
rules are complex. And we haven’t even discussed homographs – words that are
spelled alike, but have distinctly different pronunciations such as Reading and reading, for example, ‘he likes to read’, ‘she read the book’ or
homophones – spelled differently but pronounced the same, their, there and they’re,
and pair and pear. Or even more confusing the mixing of homographs and
homophones as in bow (and arrows), bow (to the queen) and bough (of a tree) – and while we are on ‘ough’ – how about, cough, hiccough,
dough, enough, drought, fought, plough, thorough and so on. Oh, we just teach
those as exceptions to the rule!
I
could go on, but let us move now to consider the conclusion to our syllogism (try
and pronounce this word phonetically), that if children are taught the
alphabetic principle (phonics) they will learn to read. Such an assertion has
assumptions that we must identify and challenge. The first assumption is that children must
first turn the written word into sound before the word can be recognised. Following
this, the second assumption is that the letters of the alphabet systematically
represent the sounds of the language, which as I have just demonstrated, they
do not. There are other assumptions:
Assumption:
Phonics has to be learned if you are to
become a reader.
Assumption:
Phonics must be taught if children are
to learn to read.
You
might expect there to be strong, scientific, research evidence to support these
assumptions before deciding to impose a phonics approach to teaching reading on
teachers and children – the fact is, there isn’t any.
So what
do we know about reading? The most
important thing that I know about reading is that it is a meaning-making process. It is true that we can learn to decode
through phonics, in fact I can read Welsh, a truly phonic-based language quite
well, but the problem is I don’t understand any of it. I have taught many
Muslim children who have learnt to decode the Koran, but they don’t understand
the Arabic they are reading. There is a world of difference between decoding
and reading, we may be able to teach children how to ‘bark at print’ – and
given the irregularity of English, that can produce some hilarious results –
but this must not be confused with reading.
When
we read, we read for a purpose, we are focused on meaning, not on the sounding
out of letters or the identification of single words. Ingrained on my memory is
the experience of my eldest daughter who was being taught to read in the 1970s
when a whole word approach to reading was fashionable. Each night she would
come home from school with a pack of ‘flash cards’. The words, all printed on
individual cards, corresponded to all the words that would appear in her next
reading book. My homework as her parent
was to ‘flash’ each card to prompt sight recognition. When she could recognize
them all (the teacher had to check of course), she was allowed to have the next
reading book from the memorable (not) series, ‘The Village with Three Corners’.
Unfortunately she constantly got mixed up between the words ‘was’ and ‘saw’ and
because of this she was not allowed to have a reading book. I pointed out to
her teacher that when she read those words in a book she never got
confused. The sentence, “she saw Roger
Redhat in the park” would never be read as, “she was Roger Redhat in the park”
– that would not make sense, but the teacher refused to give her the book until
she “had sorted the words out”. This experience started my own particular
journey into understanding the process of learning to read.
The
reader who is reading the text is important, the author who is writing the text
is important. The author has an intended meaning that the reader needs to
construct for him or herself. The background knowledge and beliefs of the
reader is important as the reader brings these to the meaning-making process.
Of course letter-sound relationships are not ignored, but they represent just
one of a number of cognitive resources deployed in the task of creating meaning
from an author’s text. Compared to other resources, though, such as knowledge
of syntax, semantics and text genre, letter-sound relationships are relatively
inefficient in leading the reader to meaning. What I have found most successful
of all when teaching children to read is when they have the opportunity to
learn to read by reading stories they have created themselves.
I
have been working with schools on a project, known as the Storytelling Curriculum. Using this
approach children dictate their own stories to an adult who transcribes the
stories and reads them back to the children. Children then read their stories
to the class. The key to success here is that the children understand what they
are reading; it is their words, their meanings and their chosen genre they have
used to create their own stories. From reading their own stories to the class
they quickly move on to reading the stories of their friends and from this to
books. In fact, as shown in the research that we carried out, the children’s
progress in reading over one year was far more than that expected or achieved
in schools following a phonics approach (Lyle & Bolt, 2013). The child who
is reading his or her own story to the class has created the story to convey
meaning to themselves and to others and in reading the story is concerned to
make meaning for the listeners. As proponents of what was called a whole
language approach to reading powerfully argued, reading is a purposeful act of meaning construction. Reading is not
merely learning how to decode words.
There
is a vast amount of research that supports a pedagogy of reading that
emphasizes meaning construction over decoding, however the current government
policy ignores this in its quest to put phonics centre-stage. As I have
attempted to show above, the sheer number of English words whose spellings
either violate, or render excessively complex, the supposed rules of
letter-sound regularity make phonics an extremely complex approach to reading
that is guaranteed to confuse teachers, let alone their pupils. To rely on phonics
for the correct identification of a word is like relying on touch to tell the
difference between two different types of potato.
What I find most worrying about this wholesale and enforced adoption of
phonics is the potential side-effects of too much phonics as children are
turned off to reading by utterly boring and meaningless activities. When this
approach to teaching is linked to high-stakes reading tests based on phonics
and not meaning, it is a recipe for misery in the classroom.
The
standardized curriculum that is the new phonics curriculum is a
‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that serves no-one. The high-stakes testing that
accompanies it will decide the educational future of millions of children. It is
already pushing out the creative subjects of art, music and drama. It does not
address the needs and talents of individual children and I predict will
contribute to a rise in incidence of anxiety and depression among our children
who are already judged to be the most anxious in Europe and are already the
most tested – constantly weighing the pig does not make it heavier! According
to Whitehead (2010) we already spend far more on testing than we do on books! When
teachers are encouraged to see children merely on how well they perform on the
tests this turns teachers into machines for producing successful test-takers.
Teachers will teach to the test and the test will define the curriculum. When
this test is based on spurious assumptions without any proper research to back
it up, when years of research into a whole language approach to reading is
tossed aside, we need to ask some series questions about the government’s
motives in spending so much of our education money on something that is not
proven to teach children how to read.
As
Michael Rosen reports in his blog:
USA: 4800 elementary schools,12,000
pupils doing systematic phonics did no better at comprehension than non-phonics
taught pupils.
Why doesn’t the government want to take
notice of research like this which meets their criteria of large-scale,
controlled, experimental study? As with
so many government-led initiatives we can only assume they have decided what
they want and will willfully ignore all evidence to the contrary.
This doesn’t mean that all phonics is a
waste of time. There are some children who have learning difficulties who can
benefit from being taught phonics. But to extrapolate this and apply it to the
teaching of reading to all children is to ignore that the majority of children
learn to read at an early age without being taught by professional readers. The
success of these children should be examined in any theory of learning to read.
Learning to read does not start when children are taught sounds.
References
Lyle, S. (2012) The Storytelling
Curriculum. Creative Teaching and
Learning, Vol. 3.3, pp. 30-36.
Lyle, S. & Bolt, A. (2013) [in print] The
impact of the Storytelling Curriculum on literacy development for children aged
6–7 and their teachers. Welsh Journal of Education.
Rosen, M. (2012). http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/government-approved-phonics-scheme.html
Strauss, S.L. (2005) The Linguistics, Neurology, and Politics of Phonics. London:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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