For years we have been handed excuses by schools for failing to teach their children basic literacy: ‘We’ve got lots of boys in the class’. ‘Many of the children have summer birthdays’. ‘A majority of our children are from very poor backgrounds’. ‘Lots of our children don’t speak English as a first language’. Time and… Continue reading ‘The best that we can be’

This post has been written as a quick response to a debate on Twitter about whether teachers should be teaching letter names or sounds or both to young children just embarking on learning to read and spell.   Until young children (Reception/Y1) are secure with sounds – i.e. they understand that letters are representations of… Continue reading Letter names or sounds?

As the government acknowledges in its document on spelling, throughout the whole of Key Stage 2, teachers ‘should continue to emphasise to pupils the relationship between sounds and letters, even when the relationships are unusual’.The word lists for Years 3 and 4 and for Years 5 and 6 are statutory and, again, in the government’s words, they… Continue reading Statutory Spelling lists syllabified

A question that comes up repeatedly in regard to adult readers’ fluent reading is whether such fluent readers recognise whole words as ‘sight words’ or process through words so fast that it falls below the level of their conscious attention, rendering them unaware of what’s going on. In short, the answer is the latter! Just… Continue reading Do fluent, adult readers read whole words as ‘sight words’? Nooooooooooooo

I know that many teachers will not appreciate me starting this hare, especially when we, at Sounds-Write, have coded lots of words with split spellings and, to boot, we also have a terrific lesson for teaching them, but I wanted to give us something to think about. Having said that, I want to state firmly… Continue reading Why the split spelling cracks me up

This post is a companion piece to the previous one ‘Learning to read made éśé!’   Today I want to deal with the claim that the notion of ‘silent letters’ can in some way assist children in learning to read because the authors of ‘Learning to read made easy’ seem have made this one of… Continue reading Learning to read made éśé II: the nonsense of silent letters

I have just read about and watched the latest in a long line of doomed attempts to solve the problem of the complexities of the English alphabetic code. It’s called ‘Learning To Read Made Easy’ and you can get a flavour of it here. Like its predecessors, it is doomed because the authors don’t understand… Continue reading Learning to read made éśé!

We know from a variety of different studies that the same regions of the brain are activated when we read as are activated in speech comprehension. As we are reading, our brains are hunting for meaning and, as long as a word is in our vocabulary, we understand it as we read. Of course, in… Continue reading Decoding, comprehension and muddled thinking

While in Madrid two weeks ago, I taught my niece (nearly seven years of age) something very interesting. She is being taught whole language at her school in Brussels. [Phonics is to the school as Brussel sprouts are to a seven-year-old.] She is pretty smart and speaks three languages already. Her father is English/Spanish, her… Continue reading Niece in Brussels sprouts