The phuss about fonix
Synthetic phonics could deprive children of literary experiences, argues Helen Bromley Like the proverbial bad penny, the debate on phonics has turned up again.
Like the proverbial bad penny, the debate on phonics has turned up again.
The Government, alarmed by the fact that one fifth of 11-year-olds are apparently unable to read, has appointed former Ofsted director of inspection Jim Rose to carry out a full-scale review of how reading is taught.
Indications already are that synthetic phonics (teaching children letter sound relationships before introducing them to books) will feature even more prominently within the national literacy strategy.
The review follows the 'success' of the synthetic approach in Clackmannanshire schools where, according to a recent report, children taught to read using this method were more than three years ahead of their peers by the end of primary school.
This report, however, was small, narrow and not peer-reviewed. The widespread media coverage of its findings only brought more confusion to practitioners in an area that is already riddled with misconceptions and misunderstandings.
The tendency to regard phonics as a cure for all reading ills is very worrying. Emphasis is often placed on buying a published phonics scheme, with all its expensive books and accompanying photocopiable resources (totally inappropriate for the under-fives), or 'doing phonics' for a prescribed amount of time each day.
Both these solutions can have negative results. Schemes may not necessarily take into account the interests, passions and emotional needs of the children in the setting, and cannot ensure the centrality of the child at the heart of the learning process, a backbone of good early years practice.
'Doing phonics' for 15 minutes a day in a large group may ensure one kind of coverage, but practitioners need to reflect deeply on whether or not all children are benefiting from such an approach, such as children with English as a second language.
They also need to have the confidence to recognise that many aspects of good early years practice in communication, language and literacy - shared reading, shared writing, singing songs, working with children's names, reading alphabet books on a regular basis - are 'doing phonics'.
Using knowledge
Learning is not just cognitive, it is also affective, and children's emotions need to be engaged in a positive way if they are to develop an attitude towards reading that tells them it involves pleasure and desire.
Reading needs to be understood by the child to have a purpose and to operate in a context in which they can engage.
Young children need opportunities to play with letters and sounds, just as they are invited to play with other new concepts. Incorporating letters in dough, sand and water could form part of a far more meaningful phonics scheme than any photocopy ever could.
It can also be argued that acquiring knowledge of sound-letter relationships and building the consonant-vowel-consonant (cvc) words so beloved by the phonics lobby is simply not enough. Children need to learn how and when to use phonic knowledge to their advantage, in conjunction with other clues, in both reading and writing.
Practitioners looking for ways to assess children's understandings of sound-letter relationships would do well to look for such knowledge in their emergent writing, rather than merely assessing children through the use of lists of letters. While reading involves decoding, writing involves encoding, and young children need opportunities to experience both.
For those of us working in the Foundation Stage, it is important to offer children experiences that will help them become enthusiastic readers for life. We also need to find ways of articulating young children's progress in reading both to ourselves and to parents, so that discussions about 'how many sounds children know' or how many sight words they have become only a small part of a much bigger picture.
Disturbingly, the reading behaviours that begin long before children decode individual words or sounds seem to have been forgotten in the battle to get children to learn letter-sound relationships and the misguided desire to encourage children to read every word with 100 per cent accuracy.
Valuing children's early attempts at reading-like behaviour and at memorising strongly tuned texts so that they can enjoy them on their own terms seems to make much more sense than removing access to books altogether.
Building words
With particular regard to Foundation Stage children, teaching phonics is neither simple nor reliable. Many five-year-olds have great difficulty 'building words', particularly in decontextualised activities, and have much to learn about the relationship between spoken and written language before attempting any word-building activities.
For those children who successfully master phonics lessons, our complex spelling system means that these lessons do not live up to the claims that they will provide instant access to word recognition. Indeed, if synthetic phonics were the only method for decoding offered, one of the most famous lines in the world of story - 'Once upon a time' - would be largely inaccessible to the emergent reader.
This focus on decoding every single word accurately, with an emphasis on letter-sound relationships as the primary clue, ignores the wealth of research evidence showing that learning to become a reader involves far more than that.
There is a need to instil in children a positive attitude towards reading, and this will surely only come from the interaction between quality books, an adult and a child.
Recently quoted research findings do not give us evidence of attitudes, or ways in which children exhibit empathy with or understanding of the plot and the characters in the books they are reading. We are given numerical scores of reading ages, which only measure narrow aspects of what it is to be a reader and give no indication of how to interpret them.
Young children are more than a sum of their parts, and carefully planned focused observation of all manner of reading behaviours needs to be at the heart of an assessment of progress in reading.
The research evidence from the longitudinal study Books for Babies, begun by Barry Wade and Maggie Moore in 1992, clearly showed that an introduction to books in the early years of life has an impact on long-term reader development and on other subjects. It demonstrated that 'Early interest in and engagement with books is associated with greater focus, motivation and concentration in the classroom in later years.'
One has to ask how these children would have fared in school if all their early confidence and attitudes, as well as their skills and understandings, had been ignored.
Reading without books
Common sense, supported by professionalism and experience of working with emergent readers, should tell us that it is totally inappropriate to deny children meaningful, pleasurable engagements with quality texts because they do not know their letter names. How can you learn to read without a book?
The text is central in the process of learning to read. What is needed is to enhance professional understanding of those working with young children so that a variety of reading behaviours can be valued.
The dangers of an overemphasis on phonics, and an overemphasis on accuracy at the expense of understanding, are becoming all too clear. The recent Ofsted report into attitudes towards reading showed that if children are engaged in activities where reading has been reduced to a variety of decontextualised exercises, it becomes unattractive to many children.
Increased emphasis on word building at the expense of engagement with quality texts could have the same effect in the early years.
It is salutary to return to the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, which we should remember is enshrined in law. The guidance categorically states that practitioners are required to 'plan and organise the learning environment to provide experiences that build on what children already know' (p15).
There is no reason why phonics teaching should be any exception. Children have been encountering whole words in context from a very early age, in a variety of ways. To ignore such knowledge, for example by denying access to books until letter/sound relationships are learned, makes no sense at all.
Such an approach denies children access to invaluable prior knowledge, which should be celebrated, recognised and valued, rather than disregarded and ignored. It should also be noted that the same guidance argues for practitioners to enable children to become involved by 'planning experiences which are mostly based on real- life situations'.
No one involved with the education of young children wants to prevent them learning or acquiring phonic knowledge. It is undoubtedly an important part of learning to read and write. However, such learning must take place in a supportive context so that all children can have equality of access to such knowledge.
We need to return to a focus on learning instead of teaching, on good books instead of isolated letters, and on the children instead of the struggle between ideologies. Only in this way will we truly empower early years practitioners in their support of emergent reading. NW
