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
St George’s – from crisis to calm is the story of a school that twelve years ago was failing, and failing so badly it was in special measures. What that failure meant was that a good number children moving on to secondary school were unequipped to cope with the demands of the secondary curriculum. A huge… Continue reading St George’s Church of England Primary School: from crisis to calm
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?
One particular news item reporting on the death of David Bowie harked back to an interview he did with Jeremy Paxman on BBC2’s Newsnight programme, which you can see here. As probably everyone knows by now, Bowie changed his name from David Jones early on his career but what was fascinating about his meeting with… Continue reading Bowie bows out
I’ve just been looking at Cumbria County Council’s ‘Reading Intervention Resources’ and, frankly, I’m stunned. You would think that the Rose Review (2006), not to mention all the research that’s been done over the past thirty years, has passed by Cumbria County Council’s reading intervention team without them even noticing. I remember Roland Barthes*, the… Continue reading What a bad list!
Ever since the Phonics Screening Check was introduced, an argument has raged around the introduction of non-words as a means by which to test the literacy of children in Y1 (aged five to six years). Sounds-Write has been using non-words in an activity/game called Nonsense Word Sound Swap for many years. The activity involves asking… Continue reading The whys and hows of using non-words.
If you are watching the latest David Attenborough series, ‘The Hunt’, you’re probably being reminded of the kinds of terminology we rarely come across in everyday, spoken communication. Words like ‘megaherbivore’ and ‘biogeodiversity’ keep popping up, both of which, as I type, my spellchecker doesn’t want to recognise and is complaining about. Many of the… Continue reading The Hunt for word-combining elements
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
Many years ago, I developed a taste for the novels of Graham Greene and, although I didn’t find his tale The Quiet American (1955) as enthralling as some of his others, nevertheless, a phrase from the book has always reverberated in my mind. It’s a complex meditation on the changing order of power relations in, particularly… Continue reading Meaning no harm…?
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
