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!
A couple of weeks ago I came across a piece by Kelli Sandman-Hurley in Edutopia entitled ‘Teaching Syllables Can Mask Meaningful Morphemes’. In the article, which you can read here, Sandman-Hurley starts by asking how many times you’ve seen the word ‘every’ spelled as ‘evry’. This is indeed a close approximation of what we hear when we are speaking normally in conversation. On the… Continue reading Teaching syllables or morphemes? Why Sandman-Hurley is mistaken
I haven’t posted on the Scripps Spelling Bee event for some time now – since 2011 in fact. As in so many previous competitions, thiswas a nail-biter to the end and finished in a tie. It’s the second tied win in two consecutive years. Prior to 2014, there hadn’t been a tie for fifty-two years. In the… Continue reading Scripps Spelling Bee 2015
Sounds-Write is very proud to be able to make public this testimonial from Mrs Janet Hilary, headteacher of St George’s Church of England Primary School in London. I recommend Sounds-Write to every teacher and school leader I meet. At St. George’s, where deprivation levels are extremely high, we achieve consistently outstanding results in all phases.… Continue reading Our wonderful testimonial from Jan Hilary of St George’s C of E Primary School
‘Phonics,’ wrote Diane McGuinness, in her superb book Early Reading Instruction ‘is a problematic word.’ Never was there a truer thing said! Why? Because ‘phonics’ is an umbrella term for all kinds of approaches, some good and some fair-to-middling-grim. According to McGuinness, the ‘classification is unsatisfactory because it does not identify the critical difference in… Continue reading Sound to print: the appliance of science
There are a number of reasons why I think that phonic programmes that advocate the use of flash cards are barking up the wrong tree. The use of flash cards is a legacy of old fashioned phonics programmes, which emphasise the visual/graphemic at the expense of the aural. Presenting children with flash cards, which are… Continue reading Why doesn’t The Literacy Blog advocate the use of flash cards?
Talk to anyone today who was taught to read through i.t.a. (Initial Teaching Alphabet) and they will almost invariably tell you how they’ve never been able to spell correctly since. As i.t.a. was more or less abandoned in the sixties/early seventies (though it did cling on for much longer in some places), many of today’s… Continue reading i.t.a: a great idea but a dismal failure
The strange case of the word ‘yacht’. This old chestnut comes up on a fairly regular basis and is cited as an example of how not all English words are decodable. In truth, the word presents us with more of a challenge than many others. However, holding to the notion that every word incorporated… Continue reading The strange case of the word ‘yacht’
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
