Interestingly, a member of the Libertarian Alliance felt the need to try to explain why ghoti can't be decoded, missing the point that it is not decodable but is instantly recognised despite that.
Equally, there are probably very many words I recognise and know the meaning of which I may not know how to pronounce because I've never needed to. I'm happy to be corrected if I get one wrong. That's one of the ways you learn. In fact, I can drive on the continent using a foreign road map. I only need to see the name of a place once. I might have to hear it pronounced a few times.
I learned to read by the time I was five. This was not uncommon in my generation. I had a grandmother who was determined that her grandchildren would not be disadvantaged in the way that many of her peers had been. My early childhood was very much about devouring books. Every day there was a new one, from the library I was later to discover, and we would read it from cover to cover. As time passed the books could no longer be completed in a single session, but my confidence had grown and it wasn't long before I was reading increasingly independently.
My grandmother had no reading schemes and knew little of phonics. What she did know was that reading was rewarding both as a leisure activity and as an investment for the future. The important lesson I learned was that reading was something very special.
Reading is very special today, but not for the same reasons. Later this year, six and seven year olds will be tested on their ability to decode, that word again, a mixture of real and nonsense words. On the Government's practice materials site, the nonsense, "pseudo" words have pictures of imaginary animals next to them. Are the children to assume that the nonsense words are not really nonsense but refer to something invented or perhaps real? It doesn't matter because reading is not being tested, only decoding and only 40 words, 20 real and 20 nonsense. I prefer to describe them as nonsense. Pseudo gives them an implied quality they don't deserve.
An explanation of the illustrations for the pseudo words is given here,
"The attachment of an illustration to the psuedo words was in response to fears expressed by teachers that children would try to attach meaning to the psuedowords and so try to change them to words they recognised."
What is this saying? It is telling us that children will look for meaning in the pseudo words and to prevent them doing that it is necessary to embue the pseudo words with a meaning, however ridiculous that meaning is. Apparently, this is a "logical approach."
Children will search for meaning in words because that's the whole point of words.
There are three main processes in reading. The phonics, largely mechanical sounding of parts of words. Contextual clues which come from the text and the recognition of whole words. Each of these are important but people who are dependent themselves on sounding out seem to have assumed that it is the primary, perhaps the only way, it is done. This methodology reduces the importance of the other aspects. Phonics has been found to be an important determinant to reading speed when reading out loud, but many of us simply don't sound out, even silently, when we read to ourselves so that reading for meaning may be very different from reading for someone to hear, where diction is important.
I don't know for sure because I didn't keep a diary until I was eight, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that I had read more than 40 books, not 40 words, by that age and at an increasingly difficult standard, not like the appalling trivia which accompanies some phonics schemes today.
There is an important difference between reading and decoding. I have been known to sing and in different languages. It has taken a remarkably small amount of time and effort to be able to decode something like a song from Schubert's lieder. You can learn to sing these songs word perfectly but does that mean you are reading them? Of course not. Of course, you do need to know what they are about. You don't want to be singing a sad lament wearing a big grin.
Reading should be about access to real reading material, stories that children want to read. Decoding may be important for some words so knowing about phonics has a place but that place should be on route to reading and understanding books.
Some of the teaching of phonics goes far beyond simply sounding out letters. Children are required, in groups, to emphasise the sounds in various ways, often accompanied by gestures and waving. This seems to be an additional and unnecessary overhead to a scheme that is already diverting children away from. It is also making something you have to individual competence in into a group experience. You should be learning to share communication with others but reading is not usually a choir activity.
"But it's fun," the phonics ideologists will insist, "the children enjoy it." The good news is that they also enjoy reading when properly taught and motivated and they enjoy it on their own terms, not according to someone else's definition of fun.
I hadn't realised how strictly vetted reading had become until, after a creative writing session in a school. I offered the head a few of my books. She opened one, read the first six words and said, "no, we can't use this."
I asked why and she pointed to the word "fastidious". "Children this age can't be expected to read at that level," she explained, "it should say "careful" or "fussy".
I'm sorry, but the fastidious character was working in a laboratory, probably another unacceptable word, and I would expect something more than "careful" with "fussy" being completely wrong.
Why are we testing the ability of small children to decode 40 words? The answer is not nice. We can use their scores to label them. He''s a 39'er, she's a 22'er and poor little Kyle only managed 3. We can then assemble the scores from a school and use it to
The system places an enormous amount of control in the hands of teachers. Because phonics is the overarching system of teaching reading, parents and children are discouraged from the kind of independent exploration of books. It is argued that many parents don't read to and with their children as a justification. Again we are dumbing down based on some perceived lowest common denominator.
When my children were in Primary school the headteacher introduced a new reading scheme. Parents were told that we could no longer read with our children because the materials at home were not compatible with school learning. After the letters went home a large crowd gathered outside the school in protest.
"Who's the expert here," demanded the headteacher.
A Professor from the local University put his hand up.
"If you don't leave and go to your homes I'll have no choice to call the police," she responded.
"It's OK, we're already here," two members of the crowd responded.
The headteacher, seeing that she was getting nowhere stormed back into the school. She left soon afterwards.
The difference with the phonics scheme is that it is imposed centrally with the support of ideologists who insist that they are right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. I don't think anyone dismisses the usefulness of phonics as an adjunct to learning to read. A lot of the time you can decode a word and sometimes you can't. It is already accepted that there are "tricky" or "naughty" words that refuse to allow themselves to be decoded. You need different strategies to read these words. You need to internalise them. That's what you should be doing with all words.
Many adults, maybe most, read silently, not needing to sound out the words or individual phonemes but this has not always been so. The first recorded silent reader was St Ambrose. "When he read," said St Augustine, "his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud."
What we want children to be able to do is for their eyes to scan the page and their hearts to seek out the meaning, but I have met so many children who are unable to do that. They have a decoding system standing between them, the words and the meaning and they stutter through texts in a way that causes them considerable frustration.
Talking to one ideologue about phonics I was told, "you're just like Michael Rosen." I thought she meant I was a great writer for a second, but she continued, "he's SWP so you can't take anything he says seriously. Reflecting on this thought I thought of the potential.
Do you want to save money by cancelling school swimming lessons? Just ring Michael Rosen and say, "Michael, do you think it's a good idea for schools to teach children to swim?" He's bound to say yes and the idea can be rejected as SWP.
"Michael, should we lower the school leaving age to 12?" He'll say "no," and you have another policy.
But why stop there? Millions could be saved by sacking hundreds of policy advisors and replacing them with Michael Rosen's telephone number.
"Michael, should we privatise the roads?"
"Michael, should we encourage people to hoard petrol to break the drivers strike."
"Michael, should we put VAT on hot pasties?"
"Michael, should we tax old people more?"
You've been blaming the Tories for these policies when it is plain to see that all they have done is to 'phone Michael Rosen to get his opinion and then done the opposite.
As an analogy, compare learning to read to learning to program a computer. You could try to learn all the programming instructions before embarking on your programming. Nobody I know has done that. If you want to learn to program you write a program. As your skill increases, the programs you can write become more complex and eventually it becomes second nature. Does that mean that you now know every instruction? Of course not. It means that you know how to find out if you need to know.
The same is true of reading. A child reads a book, initially with an adult and gradually builds their vocabulary. Many of the words they will know from speech and will quickly recognise familiar ones. Eventually it will become second nature and with reading a pleasure because it hasn't been preceded by boring drills, new words are something to discover rather than fear. There are dictionaries and thesaurus for new and unfamiliar words and children enjoy exploring them if they have been encouraged properly.
It's like reading the Watchtower, reading these authoritarian evangelists:
http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/marleys-ghost-kept-awake-at-night-in.html
It's worrying that they make the Jehovah's Witnesses seem intelligent.
Since St. Ambrose there has been a clear distinction between reading aloud and reading for meaning. This seems to have been discarded on an assumption that we all read by decoding. Reading aloud is clearly different. As an experiment, my wife read a single page aloud in the time I read eleven silently. Swapping places, she read eight silently to my one read aloud. The fundamentalists would still insist that we were doing the same thing. (we wore earplugs to avoid distraction.)
"Reading is not a natural process," insist the fundamentalists and this belief justifies an authoritarian and censoring approach to teaching. They are not just teaching reading but "how to speak properly," implying among other things an attack on accents and idiomatic language. I've referred elsewhere that the word fastidious is not deemed suitable for children under the age of eleven, being a too complex concept and having too many syllables.
Is reading natural? Obviously we have to learn to do it but there are lots of things we have to learn. Reading is simply an extension of our profound ability to recognise patterns. We even see them where none really exist. "That cloud looks like..."
Reading should exploit the natural desire to find patterns. The modern phonics approach subverts it demanding that there is one way and one way only. Gibberish first, meaning later.
(work in progress. Some disjointedness expected.)
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