Return-Path: <nifl-aalpd@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id i1KAAFI06132; Fri, 20 Feb 2004 05:10:15 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 05:10:15 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <20040220100918.64505.qmail@web14303.mail.yahoo.com> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-aalpd@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-aalpd@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-aalpd@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: tom zurinskas <tzurinskas@yahoo.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-aalpd@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-AALPD:1100] teachers constraints X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Status: O Content-Length: 6154 Lines: 156 Are teachers under needless constraints? See article below. (Apparently a future article written in 11-02-04?) Note that the author, Chris Jolly, has put out a dictionary that replaces the foolish pronunciation guides that are in most dictionaries with an easy to use one similar to present spelling. Unfortunately it uses a few special symbols so it's not keyboard friendly. Truespel pronunciation guide spelling is the only one that's keyboard friendly. Tom Z Teaching phonics on the sly in the UK - Daily Telegraph 11/02/2004 p21 Education. The author is managing director of Jolly Learning Ltd, publishers of the jolly Phonics programme; It's as easy as 'sh', 'th', 'ng' Many teachers are ignoring the advice of the Government's national literacy strategy and are teaching children to read using phonics, writes Christopher Jolly David Bell, the head of Ofsted, said last week that primary schools were spending so much time teaching literacy and numeracy that they were failing to give their pupils a rounded education. And yet, he added, the national literacy strategy appeared to have stalled, leaving one pupil in four unable to read and write properly. So how has the literacy strategy - supposedly one of the jewels in the Department for Education's crown - resulted in a double failure across the primary curriculum? The simple answer is that it is blind to what works. It has tried to achieve its aims by bluster and prescription instead of by research and understanding. Failure to teach reading is not a new problem. A recent report from the Basic Skills Unit showed that just over a fifth of adults are functionally illiterate. But it need not be so, for the failure is very largely the result of the way reading is taught. The national literacy strategy repeatedly uses the expression "to read on sight". But reading on sight - memorising how words look - results in a high level of failure. The alternative, which is infinitely more successful, is to learn to read words by the sounds of their letters. Learning to read this way is called phonics (or synthetic phonics). It has two main elements, both of which are relatively straightforward. First, the child needs to be taught each of the letter sounds. The alphabet is not enough as there are about 44 sounds in English. Some of them, such as "sh" and "ee", can only be described with two letters, and are called digraphs. By the time you include "th", "ng" and "oo", there are quite a few digraphs, each of them a single sound. The alphabet is not enough for another reason, too: it calls each letter by its name, when what the child needs is the letter's sound. The other element the child needs is to learn how to "blend" the sounds together to read words. Just making the sounds b-u-s run together to make the word "bus" is quite an achievement for young children. But they can be quick to learn and, with practice, they will become good at it. A child who knows the letter sounds and can blend is able to read new words that he or she has never seen before. By contrast, a child taught to "read on sight" will know only the words taught so far. Faced with new words - even a simple one such as "hat" - the child is likely to say that he or she has not done that one yet. The difference in the achievement of those taught by each method is stark. At the end of their first year at school, children taught with phonics in the way I have described typically have a reading age 12 months ahead of those taught to memorise words by sight. More importantly, their failure rate is far lower. Children whose teaching is based on sight vocabulary have a one in four chance of failing, with boys much more likely to fail than girls. With phonics, less than one in 20 have this risk, and boys do as well as girls. All this is well known and has been confirmed by one published study after another. The best start for children is to learn all the letter sounds as soon as they start school. Commercial phonics schemes are available that ensure this happens in the first term, and they are widely used by teachers. Sadly, the national literacy strategy recommends taking two and a half years to learn letter sounds. Yet reading with half the letter sounds is like trying to play cards with half a pack. It is the same with blending. Many published schemes make the blending of sounds central to their programme. In the national literacy strategy, the word "blending" does not appear at all in the first year. The failure to understand lies with the Government and the authors of the national literacy strategy, not with teachers. A study my company commissions each year shows that the majority of primary school teachers think "learning letter sounds and blending" rather than "learning the alphabet and using context and meaning" is the better way to teach. So we need a way out of this dilemma. We need the teaching of reading to be based on the use of phonics - which requires no extra time from other subjects in the curriculum - rather than on the advice of the national literacy strategy. To an extent, it is already beginning to happen. Fewer teachers now use the literacy strategy, and more of them are using commercial phonics schemes. Decisions about teaching methods should be made by teachers, not by ministers. The Government and Ofsted should limit themselves to setting objectives and measuring results. The best guidance on teaching methods comes from teachers who achieve excellent results with children of all abilities - something the teacher training institutions ought to remember. We need to do a lot more to reduce a level of failure that has been with us for too long. ===== Read all about truespel at truespel.com. Read “Truespel Book One: Analysis of the Sounds (Phonemes) of USA English http://www.1stbooks.com/cgi-bin/1st?partner~1st|type~6|Data1~16593 Convert text to truespel USA accent by copy/pasting it at: http://www.foreignword.com/dictionary/truespel/transpel.htm __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
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