Why is SSP teaching still not having an impact in some schools?

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Susan Godsland
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Why is SSP teaching still not having an impact in some schools?

Post by Susan Godsland »

This week David Didau wrote a blog post that created a lot of comments. One of those comments was from a teacher, Jacqui MB, in response to a question from Michael Rosen.

David Didau's post: Do we teach children to love reading? Part 2
http://www.learningspy.co.uk/reading/te ... ng-part-2/

Michael Rosen asked why children who had been taught synthetic phonics through one of the government's recommended SSP schemes were unable to decode well in later years.

Jacqui MB responded:
It’s a really important question and I thank you for raising it.

The answer is that these children have been taught phonic knowledge following one of the schemes, but, at the same time, haven’t been taught to apply phonics when reading.

During 1:1 reading with their teacher, despite learning phonics from the same teacher in the same week, they have been told to read as *fluently sounding* as possible, as early as possible, reading whole words learnt by sight, guessing words from picture clues, guessing words from the rest of the sentence and, finally, by phonics. Current Y4 & 5 children I hear read were told in Reception (these are real comments with real dates taken from October of a Reception reading log book):

– 4/10 of Reception: ‘X started by sounding out the repeated words but by the end of the book he had started to recognise the pattern of the book and became more fluent.’;

– 12/10: ‘Well done, much better, X still insisted on sounding out ‘this’ but read the rest without as much focus on using phonics.’

– 18/10: 'Well done, X much more fluent. X is starting to use the pictures to help his fluency.'

The legacy of this approach, teaching phonics but then encouraging children not to apply them right from the off, is the flawed guessing strategy used by many struggling but also supposedly average readers in KS2 and KS3 and probably beyond.

We know that the pictures disappear and guessing synonyms from context is no help at all – it rarely happens in practice. More often lookalike words are inserted which resemble the misread word but are not close in meaning. Despite this, they carry on regardless. In Connie Rosen’s words, a ‘child’s response to a ‘sense of misfit’ is rarely to go back and re-read. He is more likely to accept it as one of the many things he doesn’t understand in life or simply to lose interest and discard the book.’ Even if the book is not discarded, if a sense of misfit occurs frequently, a grasp on overall meaning is lost.

Phonics is being taught in all primary schools, yes. But, without a committed approach to teaching children to apply their knowledge when they read, to use phonics to decode from the off and not to memorise words by sight and guess words from pictures in a bid to sound (artificially) fluent, poor reading habits set in for many. Spoken words are added to their own store of vocabulary – their comprehension increases with age – but, with a fading knowledge of the alphabetic code (either taught or deduced) and no habit to apply it when reading, they are stumped when faced with words they do not instantly recognise.

By Y4 and onwards, these children, the children who don’t naturally absorb the alphabetic code for themselves, are increasingly unable to decode words that they would otherwise understand. And for them, reading anything in print is not a pleasure, it’s frustrating.

Et voila!
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Susan Godsland
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Re: Why is SSP teaching still not having an impact in many schools?

Post by Susan Godsland »

In this post John Walker explains why the check has yet to have an impact on pupils attainment in the KS2 SATs.
http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016 ... culum.html
However, all of this this doesn’t answer the complaint that the phonics deniers make when they claim that phonics doesn’t impact SATs 2. There is some truth in this but not for the reasons they assert. As I have pointed out before, and as the DfE acknowledge, huge numbers of teachers are not teaching phonics as it should be taught, but are mixing phonics up with a variety of strategies that actually run counter to teaching reading accurately. Principal among these is the maladaptive strategy of encouraging pupils to guess.
John Walker also points out that SSP teaching needs to carry on after the phonics check in year one.
The hard truth is what pitifully few people seem to understand: the English orthographic code is complex to the degree that even into Key Stage 2, pupils need plenty of deliberate practice and explicit instruction. To read, never mind, spell words from the government’s recommended list, such as ‘mischievous’, ‘pronunciation’, ‘rhythm’ and ‘sufficient’, phonics is key. Children hot-housed for a few months in a desperate attempt to get them through the Screening Check never to do any phonics again are going to fall back on whole word memorisation and guessing to the detriment of their education and the chronic, long tail of underachievement will go on.
http://ssphonix.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/ ... ot-to.html
Why is synthetic phonics teaching not impacting?
Gordon Askew points out,
''that success in the Y1 PSC, whilst indubitably a vitally important indicator, does not in itself guarantee application of SSP as the route to decoding all unknown words. Here in UK at least, we have some schools that teach discrete phonics well enough to give children success the the check, but still encourage the use of multi-cueing when the same children are practising reading''
The Enemy Within:
http://ssphonix.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/ ... ithin.html
''Almost certainly the biggest issue of all in many schools around the country is that, although good practice and the new NC require that phonics is taught as 'the route to decoding print', this is not yet happening. Many (I would say most) schools that are teaching a discrete phonics session, even those teaching it very well, continue to encourage multi-cueing when children are practising their reading or applying it at other times in the school day. This means that the benefits of the phonics teaching are seriously diluted and even countered. Phonics does not become the habituated prime strategy and dependence on alternative, unreliable strategies is perpetuated. This will never raise standards in the way that true systematic synthetic phonics teaching indubitably can. To evaluate phonics on the basis of such bad practice is a nonsense. It is like evaluating vegetarianism on the basis of a sample who eat a vegetarian breakfast but then eat a diet including meat for the rest of the day''
The Enemy Within Australian Schools: Balkanism – decoding separate from reading comprehension?
https://notquitetabularasa.wordpress.co ... rehension/
In two separate conversations an odd approach was described to me: the schools in which the teachers worked had separate times in the day for the “Phonics Program” and the “Reading Program”. What was gobsmacking for me was that the principles of the two never overlapped. The approach described by the teachers goes a little like this:

In the morning kids come in and work on the grapheme-phoneme correspondence of the day, practise encoding using the graphemes they have been working on and read decodable texts. Then, later in the day, they head off to the “Reading Program” where they use “authentic” texts and multi-cueing strategies. In the “reading” session students aren’t expected to use any of the decoding strategies they learnt in the morning session to makes sense of the text they are reading. They wouldn’t point to a grapheme in a book they are listening to and enquire about the associated phoneme. They wouldn’t try to decode a sentence that contained words that the students were able to decode.
As 'shinpad' comments on this post,
''Yes, teaching phonics discretely is important. But you may as well not bother if you don’t make it explicit to the child that they need to apply these skills in their ‘other’ reading and writing''
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Why is SSP teaching still not having an impact in some schools?

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

I created a graphic to illustrate a range of reasons why in some schools, Systematic Synthetic Phonics teaching may not have the impact it could, and should.

Everywhere I observe phonics teaching, teachers and teaching assistants (who often get the responsibility to teach phonics to a group of children) are working very hard. They are doing what they have been led to believe is good phonics provision, but for a number of reasons, this provision is not as fit-for-purpose or content-rich as it might be.

I often find that whilst the teaching adult is working very hard, the children themselves don't necessarily get enough of the right kind of practice as individuals and phonics lessons are generally too short to enable sufficient practice.

In addition, the children may also not get enough reading practice if they are given reading books to read independently that do not match the alphabetic code they have been taught to date. Instead, they may get 'book banded' books which are designed on the basis of repetitive or predictable texts rather than cumulative, decodable phonics-based books.

Here is my graphic to illustrate that whilst all teachers may indeed teach SSP, this does not look the same school to school, or even class to class:

https://phonicsinternational.com/Simple ... chools.pdf
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