Literacy: Phonics success revealed
A multi-strand literacy programme with early years phonics teaching at its core has eradicated illiteracy among schoolchildren in one local authority area in Scotland, according to the final results of a ten-year study released by West Dunbartonshire Council this week.
The findings were seized on by the Conservatives in Westminster, who want to extend the use of synthetic phonics, as they unveiled proposals for all six-year-olds in the UK to sit a national reading test.
A series of investigations involving over 60,000 pupils, including all of West Dunbartonshire's 23 nurseries and 35 primary schools, found that the level of pupils leaving secondary school without basic reading skills has fallen from 20 per cent to virtually zero since the study begun in 1997.
The study's author, consultant psychologist Dr Tommy MacKay, said, 'In the nurseries, children were given constant exposure to literacy through naming, labels and books. They were inculcated in the relationship between the printed and spoken word.'
Parents were involved in supporting the teaching of reading at home. Extra classroom help was given in the early years, along with home visits for vulnerable children.
Primary 1 and Primary 2 pupils had daily lessons in phonics. In most cases, the report said, reading ages were 'fast forwarded' by a whole year, and children's progress was maintained in subsequent years. Children from Primary 3 upwards who did not progress were given intensive support from volunteers using the multi-sensory programme Toe by Toe.
In one part of the study, nine Primary 1 classes who were taught using synthetic phonics, a method that builds words from individual sounds and stresses whole-class activity methods, were compared with nine Primary 1 classes taught with traditional analytical phonics, which takes whole words as its starting point. Synthetic phonics was found to produce better results.
Dr MacKay said, 'Good phonics teaching is likely to produce good results, but synthetic phonics teaching will almost certainly get enhanced results.'
