This post has been written in response to a number of questions I’ve been asked or come across (especially on Mumsnet) asking what parents can do to prepare their children for learning to read and spell. The advice below is derived from my own experience in teaching my youngest daughter and my grandchildren, as well… Continue reading Stepping stones to beginning reading
This post arose out of a tweet I read this morning which said that ‘a friend had to read the first page of Oliver Twist aloud to university students because it was too difficult for them’. Thinking back to the time I was teaching literature courses at university, I also found that my students in… Continue reading Why can’t children read… Dickens?
The Journal of Research in Reading has just published an important and timely paper on the government’s phonics screening check ‘Validity and sensitivity of the phonics screening check: implications for practice’ (Duff, F.J., Mengoni, S. E., Bailey, A.M. and Snowling, M.J. It asks two ‘critical ‘ questions: First, how well do scores on the screening… Continue reading How valid is the phonics screening check?
I just got the following comment on my blog posting ‘The English writing system’ (26/04/2014) from Bruce Price, who describes himself as an ‘writer, artist, [and] education activist: Rudolf Flesch and Denise Eide say that English is 98% phonetic, more or less. They get to this number by conceding every debatable point.But I think this… Continue reading No non-phonetic words, Shakespeare and St George!
Mike Lloyd-Jones’s new book Phonics and the Resistance to Reading is an absolute cracker! Without in the least patronising his readership, Mike’s panoptic survey of the teaching of reading takes us back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and all the way to the present day. His story begins in 1807, where, he says,… Continue reading Down with miserablism!
Posting from Perth, Western Australia. I thought you might like to know that Pro5, the organisation charged with administering match-funding on behalf of the DfE has just sent us an email to confirm that the initiative has officially been wound up as of 31st March 2014. They also added the following: The DfE have provided… Continue reading The death of match-funding
Casey-Lee hard at work! Caron Callaghan is a member of the teaching staff at St Thomas Aquinas CPS, where Sounds-Write first piloted the Sounds-Write training course. Over the years, many, many children have passed through Caron’s capable hands on their journey to the fully literate life of independent readers and writers. Being a woman who… Continue reading Sounds-Write in Zambia
Yesterday, the Guardian, to its shame, in my opinion, chose once again to give space to Andrew Davis for yet another opportunity to launch a diatribe against the teaching of synthetic phonics. Why do I say ‘to its shame’? Because, at bottom, Davis, an academic philosopher, doesn’t know what he’s talking about and anyone with the… Continue reading Andrew Davis’s philosophical phonics fantasy
A question that arises which proponents of phonics have to keep coming back to challenge over and over again is whether the writing system is truly phonic. Many words, it is alleged, contain ‘unphonetic spellings’. A moment’s pause for reflection will persuade any right-thinking person that this is baloney. As I never tire of reminding anyone who… Continue reading The English writing system
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
