Synthetic phonics is not enough. If the government, local education authorities and, for that matter, Channel 4, made this clear, I would not be writing this article. The problem is that we are constantly being led to believe that the teaching of synthetic phonics in the way that the government and opposition are calling for, eradicates illiteracy.
There are several reasons why it doesn't.
1. Synthetic phonics itself is a system that requires children to understand that the sounds we make with our mouths to speak English can be represented on a page by certain letters. Turn that round, and it says that certain letters (or certain letters stuck together in twos and threes) will, if you read them properly, cue you to make certain sounds. The problem is that the way we write English is complicated by two things: a) any letter (or combination of letters) will cue you up to say not just one thing, but several different things. Most famously, think of the 'ough' letters in 'tough', 'cough', 'though', 'bough', 'thorough' and 'though'. There you have the same group of letters and in each of these words they're pronounced differently. b) many of the sounds we make, can be written in different ways. Think of the sound in the middle of the word 'squeeze'. Here it's represented by the letters 'ee'. In 'dream' it's 'ea'. In 'receive' it's 'ei'. In 'sieze', it's 'ie'. Now, if you stop for a moment and think of some other vowel sounds, 'ay' as in 'hay', 'ie' as in 'pie', 'oe' as in 'toe', 'oo' as in 'too', but also that other kind of 'oo' as in 'good', 'ew' as in 'stew' and so on, then you (and I'm assuming you are a fluent reader!) could easily find many other ways of spelling those sounds.
This is why learning to read and write English is quite difficult for all of us. It's partly why we all make mistakes reading and writing it. And it would help the whole fraught matter of talking about reading, if we could all admit to making mistakes.
So, following on from these problems with the way English is written, we should perhaps ask of synthetic phonics what they do about it. First of all, they say, that the problem with reading is that the problem all starts earlier than this complicated stuff I'm talking about here. That is, some children simply don't 'get' the very basic fact that letters make sounds. So what the synthetic phonics method does, is spend a lot of time getting the children to make the sounds when they're shown the letters (or combinations of letters) and then getting the children to link up those sounds ('sounding out') to make words 'rer' 'eh' 'der' makes 'red', and then 'rer' and 'ed' makes 'red' and so on.
I have no argument with this in itself. However, it is only one strategy that will enable a child to learn to read. Another strategy they will need is to recognise words that the sounding out method will not enable them to read. This is commonly known as 'look and say' as children used to use when they read with 'Janet and John'. So, if I see the words 'sound' and 'soup', I need a strategy to tell me that the 'ou' in each of these words is pronounced differently. There is no rule about this. The tough thing about English is that I will have to learn the two words from the sight of them. An important point here, is that I will be helped to do this 'look and say' because I will usually see the word 'soup' in and amongst words to do with eating and drinking and I will usually see the word 'sound' in amongst some words to do with noises and hearing.
Now what does synthetic phonics say about this? They say that these words that don't obey the simple rules are the 'tricky' ones and they lead children into getting them right by printing them in red. What is happening here is that synthetic phonics is moving out of being what it says it is, and becoming the very thing that it says can't deliver reading, which is 'look and say'. So, you cannot sound out the whole of the word 'because' and arrive at saying the word. You will end up saying, something like ber cah oo ser.
I think children, teachers and parents need honesty here, not fudging. We need everyone to acknowledge precisely that children are learning to read by both synthetic phonics and look-and-say. What's more, it is all helped by acknowledging that we all read by getting help from the words around the word we're reading, whether that's the sentence, the paragraph, the page, the book, or, for that matter, the cereal packet or football programme. This is particularly important for the words that we have to learn by 'look and say'.
So, if the government, or anyone else, is going to say that we need a good, rigorous programme for learning to read, I would like to see them lay out the different methods required and to offer support in each of the methods and not pretend that synthetic phonics can and will do everything.
2. The next thing that synthetic phonics on its own won't do, is get your child to be excited about books. To be fair, no synthetic phonics people I've met will pretend that it will. However, I think there's a problem creeping into schools that goes like this: schools have limited budgets. They have been asked to 'tool up' in synthetic phonics kits. These cost a lot of money. It requires a whole new emphasis in the way in which time is spent, particularly in the first eight terms of your child at school (Reception, Year 1 and Year 2). I will claim here (based on my experience with my own children and through going into schools but, admittedly, without any statistical evidence to back me up), that what is happening in schools is that teachers are spending less time reading whole books and poems and less time planning exciting things to do with books (like putting on plays, going to see shows, inviting authors in, restocking the school library, getting nice new exciting books into the classrooms).
This makes me worried. It worries me because I don't believe that some of the children will go much beyond reading just about OK, unless they are excited by the idea of books, poems and plays. It will be a matter of 'can read, don't read.'
This isn't just a matter of not being 'arty' or some such. Books offer every single person in society a way of a) supporting you in times of distress and joy; b) supporting any interest you have c) helping you take part in any of the decisions made about your life, from a matter like why your street is going to be demolished, right the way up to questions of war and peace.
At this point, I join forces with the synthetic phonics people and say with them, we must, must, must get every child reading. However, we must put as much effort into getting them to read - by whatever method works, as we do into showing children how exciting and amazing books are.
Now, this applies as much to the children who can read as for the children who are finding it difficult. The problem here is that quite often, the methods used on the children who can't read, become even more rigid, and, yes, more boring.
So, where children are being given 1 to 1 time, (and I'm a great believer in that) I would argue that some of that time must be spent talking to children about what they care about, and are interested in, and it should be the job of the school to find reading material to show that individual child how much knowing how to read can make life better for that particular child. Perhaps it might be football programmes of a boy's favourite club, it might be joke books for a child who loves jokes, it might be Disney comics for a girl who loves the Disney channel. This is not a trivial matter. Every single child I've ever met who hasn't learnt to read, is also a child who hasn't come to see why reading could help him or her. Just getting children saying 'I will read' or 'I will succeed' is not enough. They have to have an urge to read coming from wanting to be part of the reading thing, wanting books and reading matter to make their lives interesting and exciting. It's our job to show that child that reading isn't just any old skill, but it's a fantastic way of being part of the world around you.
I would say that such things matter just as much as whatever synthetic phonics and 'look and say' have to offer. This means making schools places where people talk about books, put on shows about books, the children make books themselves and so on. And when this happens, the youngest children in the school see their older brothers and sisters having a terrific time with reading and writing and they will want to be part of it too. Sadly, as I go about schools, I don't see anywhere near enough of this. Every child should be writing books to share with the others.
I have one other problem with synthetic phonics. We know that one group of children will learn to read by almost any method you use. That might be because of their background or because they are very good with shape and sound recognition, or whatever. Another group of children will need more help but they will get there in the end. There is another group of children who will only just about get it. And it's really only just about! And there is another group that won't get it all.
I don't know why we are bringing in a method of teaching to read for everyone, when there are some who don't need it anyway. This sounds illogical to me. If synthetic phonics can prove (and they haven't proved it yet) that synthetic phonics alone can teach the kind of child I've described as the one who never gets it, that's fine. But I don't see why this method has to be used for everyone. Yes, I realise that the synthetic phonics methods streams children, and the quickest stream will be fast tracked on to harder booklets. But these are children who don't need to spend hours and hours with phonics booklets. They could be reading funny, exciting, interesting books right from the start. What's more, their excitement and interest that they generate in class might be part of the overall strategy to get the whole class more interested in reading anyway.
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