This post is a reprise of a post I wrote in February 2016. As its subject matter seems to crop up all the time in discussions about phonics teaching, I thought it would be helpful to re-post it. What do people mean when they talk about ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ spellings? ‘Regular’, as the dictionary definition… Continue reading The ill-conceived idea of ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ spelling – a reprise
Whether you’re a religious person or not, the gospel according to St Matthew is a veritable treasure trove of useful stories and proverbs that provide useful analogies to the process of learning to read. Keith Stanovich was inspired by Matthew Chapter 25, v 20 to call one of his most quoted papers on the… Continue reading Laying the foundations for literacy
Following on from my last post, here, after three years of Sounds-Write, are the results from St George’s CEPS at the end of Year 2. As before, if you look at the table, which I have anonymised, you can see that 30 children in Year 2 (the end of their third year of schooling) did… Continue reading A Class Act, Scene 2, Year 2
There has been much talk recently about how successful various approaches to the teaching of reading are. At Sounds-Write, we encourage schools using our programme to give their pupils a spelling test. The reason for this is that spelling is highly likely to give a much more accurate picture of a pupil’s literacy than… Continue reading A class act – St George’s Church of England Primary School.
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
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
