mythspt1

mythspt1.htm/20DEC2001

THE MYTHS Part 1

1. "Phonics is old‑fashioned, dull as ditchwater. " You who have watched your child learning from this book and the games will know that phonics need not be dull. The main thing is that it works. Nothing is more boring than failure.

"Reading is so much more than just saying the words," they say. True ‑ but if you can say the words, you are far better off than if you can NOT say the word. And for all the words already in our spoken and understood vocabulary, being able to say the word gives you access to the meaning. Those trying to mock phonics out of existence, the phonicsphobics, try to imply that when you read a word by phonics, you do not understand it. This is not true and they have no grounds for saying it.

2. "We should read words as wholes, as word‑shapes. " Can you read these words from their shape? No!

They are three different ways of writing a word‑shape. The teachers who require children to read before knowing letters have never themselves tried to read words without letters. If you know the sounds that Russian letters make, you can puzzle out the words of environmental print that come from Western languages, words like restaurant, pharmacy, and having sounded the word, you have understood it, but without being able to sound the letters, the words are inaccessible. The words shaped above are: average, sixpence (the shape is formed by what Americans call blocking), and apparent, a kind of skeleton. The shape for 'average' could also be revenge, manage, etc. Many words fit the same shape.

If we could read words from their shape, and if this were in some way better than having letters, books would be printed in word‑shapes. A tree, a fish, a table, these things are wholes, and are the same no matter from which end you view them, but words, like figures and music, are a sequence ‑ of letters. If you change one letter, you have a different word. You cannot analyse a whole.

If there are only a few, say 20, words, a child can remember that "aeroplane" is the longest, and 'is' has a dot on top, but as the words mount up, the child can no longer tell one from the others. The teacher nevertheless often thinks a child is reading because (unable to read) he resorts to other 'strategies'. He guesses from the picture. He learns book after book by heart. He guesses from the first (or first and last) letter or a combination of many cues which are approved in teacher training and the National Curriculum. Teachers are trained to think "many strategies" should be used in reading, ‑but if a person knows good phonics, phonics is enough to get the word. Only for a very few words do we need the context, ‑ words that can have a different sound, like the two ways to sound read, lead, minute, or words with a varying stress, con'flict (noun) or conflict' (verb), but even for these words, we must first get the sounds from the letters.

It is by age 7 that many parents realise their child is not really reading, that while he may "read" a story, he cannot read a separate word on its own, out of context, not on the particular page, and by that time

a) two precious years have been lost;

b) the child has probably lost confidence;

c) he has gained a quite erroneous idea of what reading actually is. He thinks you really can guess, and that an approximation is near enough. He has never developed the automatic habit of going through the letters left to right. As a result of this, 18‑year‑olds in America have misread:

Printed word Read as

delicacy delinquency

bivouac bifocals

timid diminished

bos'n cow

God knows good news

neurosurgeon trapeze

and (in England) chain fair hair

If children are not taught HOW to read, they are lost.

3. "Guessing is OK. " Far from being OK, guessing is a strong danger signal. It is a last resort telling us that the pupil CANNOT read the word from the letters. In my teaching, it is the only "crime". I say endlessly, "Don't guess." If they cannot read the word, they should say so. There is nothing wrong in saying "I cannot read it" if that is the truth. Indeed guessing wastes time, and sadly as one lad said, "A guess is right sometimes." On average there is one chance in 4 of guessing right, even for people who can read, so the odds are 3:1 against.

A child reads "home" as "house", but it is not a house, it is a flat (apartment). If the printed word is "pony", and the child reads it as "horse", does this really not matter? Anyway, if nothing else, this should ring every alarm bell in town that the child cannot read, because "horse" does not start with a p.

4. "Reading from pictures is OK. " We do not read from pictures. Pictures can be a distraction. We read from print and nowhere else. A word can only be exactly what it is; a picture can vary in meaning: truck, van, lorry, vehicle, Ford, Volvo (three starting with the same v), ambulance, army transport, Nightfreight, Parcel Force. Resorting to pictures is a simple, clear danger signal that we ignore at our peril. Teachers have said, "All children guess," only because for 50 years since look‑say came in after WW II they have seen so many children guessing ‑ all the millions who now have problems.

5. "The best way you can help your child to read is to read to and with him. " There are a few children who may learn to read thus, but they are the children who will learn anyway, and will not be harmed by this book. Sharing a book, reading to a child is a happy family activity. I read to my son when he was small. It can help to interest children (and adults) in reading, but it is simply not the same thing as teaching how to unlock the words, how to decode, because our alphabetic language is a code. Shared reading has received too much emphasis and attention ‑ at the expense of phonics.

For most children, reading if done at the speed for it to carry any meaning is far too fast for a listener to identify, study and learn individual letters, not to mention the lettergroups when the sound changes (sh does not say s ... h ... ). This is a weakness of TV programmes intended to have something to do with learning to read: the words, the letters come and go, they appear so fleetingly, that the watcher barely has time to register the first one or two letters, then it vanishes and is gone beyond recall, so the watcher gives up trying to concentrate on letters, or self‑tutoring, and just lets the cartoon flow on.

Teaching a child HOW to read, learning to read, is simply a different activity from "reading", just as learning to drive a car, or play the piano, or do arithmetic, is not the same for a beginner as for an expert. We must first learn HOW. The theories that have done so much harm have been derived from a study of fluent readers, and have ignored failure, and are now challenged in "Reading by Apprenticeship?" by Roger Beard and Jane Oakhill (NFER) and by many, many reports of research by people like Stanovich, Chall and Gough.

6. "The teacher is the most important factor. " This is perhaps the most widely believed myth of all. If it were true, then with so many hard‑working, well‑meaning teachers, all would be well. But over and over again, world‑wide, the same teachers, just by dropping the whole‑word teaching, have seen attainment rise by the same amount, not just a bit but enormously. (See Item 12 ) No matter how "good" and dedicated a teacher is, she cannot make a "dead wrong" method work. Teacher, pupil, parents, all get frustrated.

7. "Johnny isn't ready. " Most children are ready to start by age 4, some even earlier, if they start on phonics. If you try to start them on whole‑word teaching, without phonics, they cannot. At one support centre, the aim for a year was for a lad to learn 10 sight words. He learned 5, then forgot them. But just one term of phonics got him going and his reading age went up a year. He would never have learned by learning sight‑words, yet the teachers are supposed to suit the method to the child.... Instead of taking them off wholeword teaching at once, teachers have been trained to wait, and they tell parents, "Don't worry. He'll catch on." Nine million didn't (90 million in the U.S.A.).

8. Low I Q. "Johnny is so stupid that it will take him a long time to learn. He is a slow learner. " I doubt this. My son Tim has Down's syndrome. He was my first pupil and the reason why I ever got embroiled in all this reading disaster. He taught me how to teach reading. I was told his I.Q. was 65. Specially qualified teachers let him sit two years with Ladybird Book 2. When in 1970 I started teaching him myself, untrained, desperate, using simple phonics, he went steadily through the Royal Road scheme, which has a fairly steep gradient, and progress never halted. 18 months later he could read ‑ and I had to tell the school! And they tested him, and found he could read. He has borrowed books from the library all his life. Now he will not read fiction, but borrows and buys books on history, the British royal family's genealogical tree, military insignia, aeroplanes. He reads what he wants to in the newspaper, finds TV programmes, reads maps, road signs, like we all do. His life now would be very different if he could not read. So while teachers expect failure, I believe, "If he can, they all can" ‑ unless severely brain‑damaged or put off by wrong teaching.

Moreover, on this I think the experts will in time be proved doubly wrong, not that low I.Q. stops a child learning, but that NOT learning to read prevents the normal development of I.Q. Learning to read is like turning a switch ‑ the light comes on, the brain begins to work, the pupil finds out what "learn" means, and that he CAN learn. Children who have been called stupid or thick lose their self‑esteem, and people foolishly try to restore self‑esteem in a vacuum without teaching reading, but when the learner learns to read, his self‑esteem is restored without being specifically targeted. Dr Doman says (1963, p.80‑81), "Virtually all tests of intelligence applied to human beings are dependent upon the ability to take in written information (reading)... In our culture, this is as it should be. ... While ... lack of ability to read... inevitably results in lack of education, it is infinitely more important that it also results in lower intelligence."

Consider the following: (Reading Age: R.A., Chronological Age: C.A.)

Boy age 6.2 could not read, I.Q. 97.

By age 7.0 with R.A. 9.0, his I.Q. had risen to 118 and a year later had gone up another 9 points. Total rise 30 points.

Boy age 7.6 could not read, IQ 82.

9 months later, R.A. 7.8, I.Q. had risen 24 pts.

Boy age 8.8, RA 6.9, I.Q. 108.

8 mos. later, R.A. 9.0 I.Q. had risen 22 points.

Girl age 5.8 could not read, I.Q. 92.

19 months later, C.A.7.4, RA 9.6 IQ rise 50 pts.

and conversely

Boy age 7.0, RA 6.6, IQ 120.

In two years his R.A.only rose by 1 year (he did not do his homework, would not come for lessons), the gap between his CA and RA widened and his I.Q. fell to 113, a drop of 7 points.

We need a large‑scale study like this, but it does not fit in with low I.Q. being a cause of reading failure.

9. "Schools need more money, resources.

When we drop the wrong teaching, phonic teaching is far cheaper than the longdrawn‑out schemes. Brisk teaching can get through a phonic programme in two terms (perhaps one term). Schemes go on for years, 5 - 6 years! Getting it right first time would save nearly all the £millions now needed for remedial teaching. Nearly all today's special needs are in reading. Attainment (and teacher job satisfaction) will rocket while costs drop to a fifth or even less, of today's spending on special needs. Human misery will shrink. We shall probably spend a lot less on truancy, delinquency, vandalism, youthful aggression, and other social ills, and "training" at 16+.

10. "We do teach phonics. "

Now that phonics is in the National Curriculum, immediately schools all claim that they teach phonics, but so many teachers say their training never taught them how to teach phonics, phonics has been neglected for so long, that many (perhaps most) infant teachers now do not know their phonics. They do not know the spelling rules. What they claim as phonics is usually too little, too late, poor quality such as "deductive" or "intrinsic" phonics, mixed in with storybooks, and taught "as need arises" for years, instead of a short, intensive, concentrated course AT THE BEGINNING.

"If BUT BETTER BASKET all start with the sound of 'b', then this shape at the beginning must be what says ‘b’. It is a b (bee). " The pupils are expected to learn a lot of words by sight and from them work out the connection between letters and sounds. This puts the cart before the horse. Some do not go beyond OLOSM, one letter one sound method!

Another idea which admittedly is not "reading for meaning" or "Whole Language" or look‑say, is the idea of starting with onset and rime, alliteration/rhyme. In trim treat tread track the onset is TR. The pupil learns BEAK (How?) and from that can read PEAK WEAK BEAN BEAD. "As the children get older [How old? 77 87] the analogies become more sophisticated.... use a word like BEAK to read a word like HEAP." (Goswami, 22.12.92, Radio 4) Would it not be simpler to teach them EA when they are 4? These studies of teaching by analogy (a kind of phonological awareness) have been done on children age 6 in areas of low attainment (like the rest of Britain). These children should have been already reading. The kind of phonological awareness this book teaches is phonemic awareness, being aware of separate sounds, not sound‑strings. But this onset/rime idea seems to be catching on, as a new gimmick, "being up to date".

Because so many teachers do not know the spelling rules, some of them say "English is not phonetic" as a reason not to teach phonics. Roger Beard (TES June 7 1996) says that "Nearly 500 simple words can be derived from a set of only 37 rimes, e.g.: ‑ash, ‑eat, ‑ick, ‑op and ump." But how are they to read ‑ash in the first place?

A good 90% of words can be sounded out; the 26 letters plus the 50 or so 'rules' in this simple book will unlock perhaps 100,000 words or more. And even the irregular words have some part that works: in YACHT the y and t work. But one teacher telephoned to ask me how I would sound out CHURCH. Did he really expect me to give 6 sounds for 6 letters? But we sound out CHURCH as CH..UR..CH, 6 letters, 3 sounds. Another secondary teacher asked the same question about "chemist" not knowing that in words from the Greek language CH says K (echo, school, Christmas etc.- Step 94). They try to put us down, on the basis of their own ignorance! Just before President Bush held his Governors' education Summit in 1989, the Republicans issued a statement (see p.81 Mona, I can't find this on Page 81)) saying that "reading experts' lack of knowledge about phonic teaching" is one of the obstacles to reading reform.

Link to Myths part 2