Having been round the literacy block a few times, I did permit myself a smile when I read the title of the paper by Anne Castles et al ‘Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert.’ Good luck with that, I thought. And, sure enough, who should pop up with an anti-phonics/anti-Phonics Screening… Continue reading Exploding myths – imploding arguments
A couple of weeks ago, Debbie’s son Kofi wrote his name. Kofi and his mother Debbie had been making a shopping list when Kofi asked for a piece of paper and wrote his name. He wrote, completely unaided, without his mother having to hold his hand or to prompt him, and, said each sound as he… Continue reading Kofi and the art of the possible
This is the fourth and final blog post about my talk at ResearchEd Auckland. The earlier ones are here, here and here. Learning, as we always tell teachers on our phonics training courses, is uneven and is punctuated by sudden improvements, long plateaus, and/or periods of regression. That’s what learning looks like. It’s messy! To… Continue reading The role of the teacher
This post is the third of four, where I share with you the presentation I gave at the recent ResearchEd conference in Auckland, New Zealand. When teaching children to read and write in English, as teachers, our problem lies in devising efficient instructional procedures for teaching the complexities of the English alphabet code, and… Continue reading Reading: from working memory into long-term memory
Linguistic phonics makes the relatively complex English alphabetic system simple. The approach teaches from sound to print: in other words, it starts from what all children learn naturally – the sounds of their own language. This is what cognitive psychologists call biologically primary knowledge. John Sweller, Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales,… Continue reading Learning to read: primary and secondary knowledge
This post is the first of four where I share with you the presentation I gave at the recent ResearchEd conference in Auckland, New Zealand. I spoke about what research in cognitive architecture has to offer phonics instruction. But before I tackle that, let me start by explaining what writing is about, as that underpins… Continue reading The roots of writing
It is said of Cervantes that he would catch a piece of paper blown by the wind in the road to stop and read it. When I was a child, I too loved reading and would grasp at anything and everything that was available to read. I read both grandmothers’ Woman’s Own and Readers’ Digest, the accounts… Continue reading The pleasure of reading
Following on from yesterday’s post and some broader observations about the South Australia Phonics Screening Check, I want now to look at the detail of the Check. I’m not going to go into the issue some people have with pseudo or nonsense words. The rationale for using pseudo words has been explained many times before.… Continue reading The 2017 South Australia Phonics Screening Check (Part II)
So, after much kerfuffle and a huge amount of opposition from a wide range of (mainly) university academics, the teaching unions, and assorted self-proclaimed pundits, South Australia has just reported the results of an opt-in version of the Phonics Screening Check. It was taken between 7th and 18th August 2017 and it was exactly the… Continue reading The 2017 South Australia Phonics Screening Check
Guest post from James Lyra Recently on the various Dyslexia Support pages, there have been many questions about ‘decodable’ books. Here is my take on the topic. Technically, every written word in the English language is decodable, because every written word is a symbolic representation of the spoken word i.e. letters are symbols (created by us… Continue reading Decodable readers, systematicity and practice
