In
The Sydney Morning Herald, this piece describes the push back against implementation of a phonics check in Australia:
'Plood, pove, moul': teachers push back against year 1 phonics test
Pallavi Singhal
http://www.smh.com.au/national/plood-po ... 4z02l.html
About 150 primary school teachers sat in a lecture theatre at the University of Sydney on Saturday morning, struggling to read three words: plood, pove and moul.
Some thought plood should rhyme with blood, while others said it should rhyme with food.
But if the people who led the conference and the teachers' 'push back' had done their reading-up of England's phonics check, they would know that the nonsense words are very carefully selected to avoid the kind of ambiguity of pronunciation that is headlining this piece!
This is good to hear:
The test is modelled on the UK's phonics screening check, which asks children to read aloud 40 real and made-up words, and received the strong support of an expert panel that was asked to provide advice to the government on the development and implementation of the test.
The South Australian government, which trialled the check in about 50 primary schools last year, is now preparing to roll it out across the state, Mr Birmingham said.
And this is a crazy statement (below) - the phonics check is nothing like an exam - and surely the parents of the beginning readers WANT their children to be learning about the most complex alphabetic code in the world and how to use it to decode new words - that is, to be able to lift any words off the page - new or unknown!
Meanwhile, Queensland's then-education minister Kate Jones rejected the tests, saying that "no parent wants more exams for their children".