[Updated November 6, 2017]
I have never met a teacher who is not sincere about trying to do the best they can for the students in their classrooms. Insincere teachers may exist, but I don’t see them. Fortunately, in the context of the ongoing community, academic, and political debate about phonics instruction and assessment of children's phonics skills, teachers’ sincerity is not at issue. However it is also not enough, regardless of its abundance.
A dip into the recent (last 3-4 decades) history of reading instruction reveals the strange and sad
tale of phonics being turned into the unwelcome ugly duckling of early year’s classrooms.
I have written about the contested place of phonics in the early years
previously, so won’t re-hash that history here. We are now at an odd impasse,
however, that sees most parties to the debate in broad agreement (at least
overtly) about the importance of the so-called “five big ideas” surrounding early reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and
fluency), but the welcome mat that is rolled out in (a) teacher pre-service
education and (b) early years classrooms for these elements is uneven. When was
the last time you saw a heated Twitter debate about the importance of
comprehension for early readers? Or vocabulary? Of course we don’t see such
silly debates, because they do not occur – everyone agrees (OK, prove me wrong
someone!) that these are critical ingredients in early years instruction. Phonics, however (and perhaps to a lesser
extent its close relative phonemic awareness) has to paddle very hard to
justify its presence in early year’s instruction.
This ambivalence has
been more than evident in Australia in the last week since the federal government’s announcement that a Year 1 Phonics Check will be rolled out across Australian
states and territories in the next year. I’ve heard all kinds of opposition to
this move and would like to collate the key arguments here, together with my
responses.
My response
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We’re already doing
phonics
aka Phonics is in the mix |
There is no doubt
some truth to this statement. I think it’s fair to say that in most
classrooms, some form of phonics instruction is used, but I will wager that
in a large number of cases, this is a third-of-three option in the
widely-used Multi-Cueing Strategy (also sometimes referred to in the UK as
“Searchlights”). This is a Whole Language zombie that remains alive and well
in teacher education and Australian classrooms, and encourages children first
to guess, and as a last resort, to use analytic, not synthetic phonics, in order to work out the first sound in the word with which they are unfamiliar.
This leads me to the
other problem with the “We’re already doing phonics” defence – the fact that where
phonics is “in the mix”, it is more likely to be analytic than synthetic. All
children need to learn to decode, and some do so more seamlessly than others.
Those who enter school with smaller vocabularies, less phonemic awareness,
and less pre-school text exposure will derive particular benefit from being
explicitly taught the alphabetic principle via synthetic phonics instruction.
These are the same children who teachers then identify as needing “extra
resources” when they don’t easily make the transition to literacy. Maybe the “extra
resource” they need is more rigorous initial instruction.
Can you see a circular argument happening here?
My third issue with
this response is that if this is the case, why are literacy levels in this
country way below where they should be? If all is well with respect to early year’s
instruction, how do we account for the fact that we are producing way too many secondary students with inadequate literacy skills and have a workforce with worrying low oral language and literacy skills?
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Teachers already
assess their students and know which ones are behind
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Maybe they do, and
maybe they don’t. This assertion is difficult to assess, because there is no
universal tool and no central data collection on the decoding skills of
Australian students. My bet is that many teachers are using “Running Records”
for this purpose – another Whole Language throw-back, and not a substitute
for a properly standardised Phonics Check.
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Teachers are the
experts and should be left alone
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No professional
group should put itself above scrutiny. Imagine if doctors, nurses, airline
pilots, or engineers said “Stop looking over our shoulders. We know what
we’re doing”. Have a look at what happened in recent times to babies born at a small regional hospital in Victoria, where doctors and nurses were assumed
to know what they were doing, and were left alone accordingly.
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Testing doesn’t
improve performance
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This is like saying
“Guns don’t kill, people do” – it’s a logical fallacy. If testing doesn’t
have a place, why do Maternal and Child Health nurses weigh our babies? They
weigh our babies to scientifically monitor progress, rather than seeing what
they want or expect to see. In this way, some of the risks associated with cognitive bias are averted.
A further problem with this argument is that it is logically inconsistent with the protestation that a Phonics Screening Check is not needed because teachers already test the skills of children in their class. Presumably they do this as part of an overall strategy aimed at improving performance? Finally, as noted in the 2017 Report of the Year 1 Literacy and Numeracy Panel, a large number of measures are used for early years assessments across education sectors and states/territories in Australia, and these have varying degrees of fitness-for-purpose when it comes to assessing early decoding skills. The introduction of a national measure would introduce some welcome uniformity into this important but contested space. |
All we need is more
money (a la “fund Gonski reforms”)
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I have yet to see or
hear any explanation as to how more money will improve teacher knowledge and
skills with respect to early reading instruction. Perhaps we are to spend it
on expensive teacher PD, rather than properly preparing pre-service teachers
in the first place?
Fund schools fairly for sure, but don’t assume that more money is the answer. That is simplistic nonsense. Further, we could make significant savings right now by removing support for all kinds of neuroflapdoodle that are endorsed and invested in by schools. |
We need more support
for struggling students
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Yes, we do need more
support for struggling students. But if we work from a Response to Intervention framework, we want to ensure the highest quality instruction at
Tier 1, so that those students in Tiers 2 and 3 are there because they have
genuine needs that will respond to the expertise on offer by speech-language
pathologists and educational and developmental psychologists. They should not
be there because they are instructional casualties from Tier 1.
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It is too expensive
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The cost of the
Phonics Check in the UK has been estimated to be around 10-12 GBP per student per year. Compare this to the cost of
providing the Arrowsmith Program, as recently promoted by a state branch
of the Australian Education Union. Compare it too, to the cost of educational failure.
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We shouldn’t subject
six year olds to tests
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We shouldn’t subject
six year olds to academic failure and a lifetime of falling behind.
Further, as noted above, teachers and some of their representative organisations tell us that one of the reasons a Phonics Screening Check is not needed is that teachers are already testing their children in Year 1 (some in fact claim that this is too late). So it's either OK to assess young children's progress, or it's not. |
A Phonics Check
won’t improve children’s reading skills
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The evidence from the UK suggests that at a system level, the introduction of a National
Phonics Check has contributed to improved reading in the early years. If we
have an efficient means of making at least some gains in this critical
domain, why would we not take it? Why would we not provide data-driven feedback to the teaching profession about what beginning readers actually can, and actually cannot do?
Phrased another way, how can we justify to children in the long tail of under-achievement, turning our backs on an option that is likely to offer them a brighter future? |
Reading is about
extracting meaning, not sounding out words
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The Simple View of Reading holds that successful reading requires both decoding skills and
comprehension. Children should be equipped to read using skills of decoding
and inferencing, not inferencing (aka guessing in some cases) alone, along with
a long list of learned-by-sight words.
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We take a “Balanced
Literacy” approach
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This is akin to the
“phonics is in the mix” argument. Balanced Literacy, however, simply lines up
all the ducks and says “off you go – jump in the pond!” It does not position systematic
synthetic phonics instruction as the starting point to get children off the
blocks.
If you look at the literature on Balanced Literacy, a word you will encounter frequently is "eclectic". That does not inspire confidence that a systematic approach to instruction is being taken.
“Balanced Literacy”
is the answer to good phonics instruction in the same way that “throw in some
sultanas” is the answer to “How do you make a fruit cake”?
I have written a critique of Balanced Literacy, which you can access here. |
English is too
inconsistent a language for phonics instruction to be useful (so a Phonics Check is a waste of time)
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This is another
urban myth regularly trotted out by Whole Language disciples, who themselves
were probably never taught about the morpho-phonemic structure of English, or
about how to trace the etymology of the various words English has
appropriated from other languages.
About 50% of English
words do have a transparent orthography, meaning that they can be read by
someone who understands letter—sound correspondences. A further 36% have only
one sound that deviates (typically a vowel), 10% can be spelt correctly if
morphology and etymology are understood, and a mere 4% cannot be decoded from
knowledge of these principles (see Snow, 2016).
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As I have said a number of times, there are no magic bullets in the important business of reading instruction. There is, however, a wealth of scientific evidence to draw on, and it is inexcusable for teacher educators to stand between this evidence and the next generation of classroom teachers.
No doubt there are
other fallacious arguments in this space too. Feel free to tweet/email me if
you would like me to add them to this list – it can be a living document.
Let’s hope in the
meantime, however, that reading instruction’s ugly duckling can be transformed
into a beautiful swan. There are children out there whose educational futures
depend on it.
(C) Pamela Snow, 2017