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phonics

Can phonics help us spell better?

2016-06-13T13:12:39+01:00June 12th, 2016|literacy|

Children's author and high-profile opponent of phonics instruction, Michael Rosen recently wrote this blog casting doubt on the idea that learning phonics could help people spell. He was writing in response to an article written by Debbie Hepplewhite in Primary Matters. Here's the extract with which he takes issue: The job of teaching and applying the English alphabetic code for spelling is NOT done by the end of the infants - it is just the beginning of a long-term need to be attentive, and to get to grips with, English spelling as an ongoing part of reading and writing.* Michael's argument is that [...]

Reading difficulty is a teaching problem not an intelligence problem

2020-02-04T14:09:03+00:00February 4th, 2016|literacy, reading|

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate I've visited a lot of schools over [...]

Phonics is not a cure for cancer

2022-01-03T08:36:27+00:00December 30th, 2015|reading, research|

Do antibiotics work? Well, that rather depends on what you've got. If you've got a viral infection like influenza antibiotics will be useless. To fight viral infections you need to use antiviral drugs. Does that mean antibiotics don't work? Of course not. If you're suffering from a bacterial infection like brucellosis then an antibiotic might well be effective. This, I hope, is straightforward. So if I conducted a piece of research which found that antibiotics are ineffective because they don't cure viral infections that would be a bit stupid, right? Well, for some reason, professor of education Stephen D Krashen seems to have done something very similar. [...]

Only phonics? A reader replies to Michael Rosen Part 2

2016-09-11T17:31:40+01:00December 29th, 2015|reading|

Following yesterday's post from Jacqui Moller-Butcher in which she responds to Michael Rosen's anti-phonics arguments, one of the complaints that has repeatedly emerged is the idea that phonics is not the only important aspect of teaching children to read. Indeed not. Take this comment from John Hodgson for example: No-one knowledgable in teaching the reading of English would deny the value of a grasp of characteristic letter-sound correspondences. This is not the same as arguing that ‘phonics’ (a term that denotes a more or less intense focus on such correspondences) is the only important thing, and that children are being denied the gift [...]

From Scared Straight to Reading Wrong

2015-10-24T10:56:16+01:00October 24th, 2015|reading, research|

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alters things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end? Francis Bacon In 1978, Scared Straight! won the Academy Award for the best documentary film. It followed a group of teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks who, as part of a new crime reduction programme, were taken to a maximum security prison to be threatened, humiliated and intimidated by a bunch of murderers and rapists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri7G7xHj5LE The premise [...]

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