I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about Glynis Cousin’s short introduction to ‘threshold concepts’, an idea developed by Erik Meyer and Ray Land and, although I have reservations about some of the things she argues, I find her central theme quite helpful. She describes a threshold concept as one that is ‘central to the mastery of… Continue reading Threshold concepts and the idea of sound to print
Following on from two previous postings (here and here) on the subject of cognitive load in the domain of the teaching of phonics, here is a practical demonstration of the cognitive challenges a four-year-old child has to contend with in just one simple word building exercise. But first, why word building? Word building is our… Continue reading The Reading Achievement Challenge – the child’s view at the point of learning
If you want to know why so many Australian (and English) academics are so strongly opposed to a Phonics Screening Check, which really is a fig leaf for their hostility to phonics teaching itself, it is that, at bottom, they don’t understand the relationship between the sounds of the language and the writing system itself.… Continue reading The know-nothing world of the academic opposition to phonics
If you were listening to the last five minutes of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday, you will have caught a short item on, allegedly, how pupils’ spelling has deteriorated. The item began by stating that new research from Cambridge Assessment is telling us that ‘we are making more spelling mistakes than our parents’.… Continue reading Of polydactyls
Once again I feel obliged to respond to an article posted by Misty Adoniou in The Conversation and, as I have pointed out previously here and here, Misty is as foggy as her name when it comes to talking about phonics. In order to arrest the decline in reading ability, Australia is currently considering adopting the England’s Phonics Screening Check. Misty’s… Continue reading The continuation of the war against phonics by other means
The following are the ‘top 100 hundred high frequency words’, as listed in Letters and Sounds. Word sounds spellings Notes the /th/ /schwa/ or /ee/, depending on context [ th ] [ e ] and /a/ /n/ /d/ [ a ] [ n ] [ d ] a /a/ /ae/ or /schwa/, depending on context… Continue reading Decoding the top 100 high frequency words
This post is a continuation of and companion to the last. As I’ve written on numerous occasions, high frequency words are just that: high frequency: that is, they occur frequently in children’s texts. However, occurring frequently in texts does not mean they have to be taught ‘by sight’. Once a child has learned to segment… Continue reading How to teach any HFWs (part II)
On the ReadOxford website, an Australian academic recently argued for the teaching of ‘sight’ words. What she didn’t or wasn’t able to say was which words she thought needed to be included in any such list, nor why they needed to be included. Neither did she state explicitly how far teachers should go down this road: how… Continue reading How to teach some HFWs (Part I)
Here’s another one I heard in the classroom recently. A teacher was teaching her children the sound /ow/, as in ‘cow’, and a member of the class came up to the whiteboard to write the word. After the child had written the first spelling and said the sound, the teacher told the child to write… Continue reading A good time to start using letter names
Very often I hear teachers talking about “curly ‘kuh’” and “kicking ‘kuh” to register the difference between the spellings [ c ] and [ k ], representing the sound /k/. Why don’t we use this language in Sounds-Write? The answer is simple. If instead we talk about “This kind of /k/,” or “This spelling of… Continue reading ‘Curly c’ and ‘kicking k’ or ‘This spelling of /k/’?
