Once again I feel obliged to respond to an article posted by Misty Adoniou in The Conversation and, as I have pointed out previously here and here, Misty is as foggy as her name when it comes to talking about phonics. In order to arrest the decline in reading ability, Australia is currently considering adopting the England’s Phonics Screening Check. Misty’s… Continue reading The continuation of the war against phonics by other means
On the ReadOxford website, an Australian academic recently argued for the teaching of ‘sight’ words. What she didn’t or wasn’t able to say was which words she thought needed to be included in any such list, nor why they needed to be included. Neither did she state explicitly how far teachers should go down this road: how… Continue reading How to teach some HFWs (Part I)
Today I’m wondering if ‘Stand Up for Education’ has been newly created for people, with the title of professor, to tell jokes about education, or whether they simply use it as a forum for displaying their ignorance about the process of teaching literacy to young children. The latest post on SUFE is titled, ‘Phonics fanatics: politicians who… Continue reading A word to the Wyse
I’ve just been asked by someone in Australia why it is that the Sounds-Write programme aims to teach to young children multiple spellings of a sound at the same time – the concern being about overloading children’s memories. This is unquestionably the hardest aspect of learning how to read and spell for every single one… Continue reading One sound, different spellings: the Sounds-Write way
Following on from my last post in which I reported the results of a spelling test taken by a class about to begin Y2 in St George’s Primary School in Wandsworth, this time I’m publishing the results from the same spelling test for a class just about to begin Y3. The reason I’m putting the posts… Continue reading The phonics achievement challenge
The allure of using Whole Language to teach children to read lies mainly in the fact that, as you’d expect, humans are heavily biased towards meaning and a whole word approach has an immediate appeal because, at the beginning, it seems so easy. On the other side of the methodological divide, learning how to recognise… Continue reading What are the problems with Whole Language and why doesn’t it work?
How can I tell that we’re back in autumn, which seems to be not so much a season of mellow fruitfulness as a season of a dearth of academic ‘astutefulness’? Well, because Misty Adoniou, a senior lecturer at the University of Canberra, has been at it again! What is the ‘it’ that she’s been ‘at’?… Continue reading Why Misty makes me see magenta
Here is a short You Tube video, featuring Dr Helen Abadzi, on, amongst other things, the role played by memory in education. In the extract Dr Abadzi begins with the neuromyth of brainstorming and (at 1:13) she goes on to talk about the part played by memory in the learning process. Here, she talks about… Continue reading Dr Helen Abadzi
The following post is what I intended to get across at the recent researchEd conference and didn’t have time to finish! The post covers some of the important issues raised by John Sweller, Paul Kirschner, John Hattie, Daniel Willingham, David Geary and others in a number of academic pieces published on human cognitive architecture and… Continue reading What human cognitive architecture has to tell us about instructional design in phonics teaching.
A few weeks ago when I read Misty Adoniou’s piece in The Conversation, I really thought the depths had been well and truly plumbed. [See blog posting] I was wrong! Susan Godsland has just passed me a link to an execrable piece soon to be published in SchoolLeadership Today. The article ‘The limits of phonics… Continue reading Prate and Lyle