Views on Phonics

The BBC’s Mike Baker looked at the debate over the government’s backing of phonics as the best way of teaching children to read.

Here is a representative cross-section of the opinions he received on the subject.

Thank you Mike for one of the best summaries of the issues involved in ‘phonics’ that I have seen recently. Your report was very clear and explained the debate well.

I think you are right that teachers used to have great freedom as to how they taught reading but they did in fact mostly use the phonics method (which works).

Joyce Brooks, Matlock, Derbyshire

I have been a special needs teacher for the past 15 years and I have found that early use of synthetic phonics can help identify those children who have difficulties in phonemic awareness and reading. For some children where processing is an issue, this method of synthetic phonics is hard to grasp, so in many respects, it is teaching the child with the method they are most comfortable with.

Initial use of synthetic phonics is my preference as I am then able to identify the weaker students and have a good idea of where their weaknesses are.

Vidya Permanand, Sandhurst

English is fundamentally a phonetic language, despite there being many non-phonetic aspects to our lovely and complex language. A phonetic language needs to be taught in a phonetic way.

I have taught two boys to read, both aged 4, using synthetic phonics and they have both continued to progress in their reading age in a most impressive way. The oldest is now 8 and has the reading age of a teenager. The younger is now 6 and probably has a reading age of around 10. The great advantage of synthetic phonics is that it gives a child the tools they need to continue to develop their reading skills. They learn to “break the code” of the English language, and so can tackle a difficult word that they have never read before simply by applying the method. I have no doubt that literacy will improve across the nation by the introduction of synthetic phonics teaching in all schools. It’s been too long in coming!

Anne Kitchen, Birkenhead, England

As a supervisor of two reading clinics in the US, as a specialist who works with children in a professional setting, as a private tutor to numerous children who have failed to learn to read by a phonics approach to reading; and as a faculty member who taught graduates to become reading specialists, I cannot understand why the UK would choose one method to teach all children to read.

It is a fact, that all children cannot learn to read by one method. Those who advocate just phonics, should be looking at the research in the USA that clearly supports no one method over another, but does support that teachers of reading need to use a variety of methods to ensure that all children will read with comprehension.

Moreover, all teachers are aware that all children will never read with the same fluency or comprehension since all children are not the same.

Frances Shipps, Providence RI, USA

As a parent of a child who will soon be starting her school life, I am very concerned about the massive change that’s going to take place about something so crucial to my daughter’s educational future.

I am also concerned that I am starting to teach her to read right now – are my teaching methods going to clash with what she is taught in school? If the method is going to be so very rigid, I’m worried that home teaching is only going to create more confusion, rather than feeling confident that the teacher will be able to follow on from where I have started and take my daughter along the path she is most confident walking along.

Nichole Rowbottom, Wakefield, UK

Synthetic phonics does the opposite to making reading ‘joyless’ and ‘putting children off’ because it EMPOWERS children to be fluent, independent readers. What can be more motivating than that?

Children do all learn in slightly different ways; however, reading is a visual and auditory activity where children have to be taught to decode the various combinations of letters in a word representing the different sounds because that is how our written word was created. Any other methods e.g. predicting words, guessing words or remembering by their whole shape are just misleading and promote inaccuracies and generally more effort and struggle for those less able. I just can’t wait to see this get going and as long as it is done properly, to see the huge amount of success it results in. I am hoping that in a few years, we were wondering why on earth we hadn’t been doing this for years. So many parents and schools are wondering this already.

Vicki Lynch, Maidstone, Kent

If there were a sure fire way of teaching reading so that every child achieved using that method it would have been found long ago. No teacher wants the children in their care to miss out on learning. I think that should make all these experts think a bit harder about being so prescriptive.

What happens if in seven years time someone finds out that synthetic phonic programmes have actually failed to work and, even worse, allowed another generation of readers to be put off reading for life?

Lucy Cooper, Birmingham

So is this just a return to the old ITA system minus the weird characters? That managed to cause problems for a lot of children in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, many of whom ended up with appalling spelling. Why is it important to cram learning to read into a short period? Children learn best at their own pace and in their own time, not by being force-fed like battery hens.

Dave, Cambridge, UK

The trouble with the National Curriculum is that some proponents of the system seem to believe that ‘one size fits all’. This is patently nonsense. My mother is a “Reading, Writing, and Spelling” tutor. She was at school in the early 60s, and learned the ‘old’ way. Now, she teaches kids that have been let down by our education system.

Invariably, she finds that the ‘look and say’ technique has failed, and that children don’t have the faintest idea how to tackle a new word which they have never seen before. She finds that any version of phonics teaching (in its many guises) is much more successful than what these kids have had before.

Quite why people feel that one, specific, narrow band of this approach needs to be nailed down is beyond me. Teachers should be able to choose from the broad spectrum of techniques available to them. To ask them to use one specific method is akin to discrimination against those kids who don’t get on well with it, in my view.

James Herbert, Worcester, Worcs