http://www.smh.com.au/victoria/literacy ... xzu7d.html
I read pieces such as this and get very frustrated because there is so much more to say about the proposed phonics check, and phonics provision, than is indicated here.Literacy wars: the proposed reading test dividing schools
Henrietta Cook
How do you pronounce "splue"? What about "meve" or "zued"?
These are some of the made-up words grade 1 students could soon have to pronounce as part of the federal government's proposed new phonics test.
The most common suggestion put forward by politicians in favour of the check is:
But, teachers and teachers' organisations then protest that they already know how their children are doing and don't need a national assessment to tell them that.Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the checks would help teachers identify students who were falling behind so that they could intervene.
The most essential point of a national snapshot assessment, however, is the way in which this informs the teaching profession regarding the effectiveness of their phonics provision compared to like schools and schools across the nation as a 'bigger picture' understanding. This can provide a very important wake-up call, but this needs to be done in the context of supporting teachers for moving forwards, and not for admonishing or embarrassing them in any way. This should not be presented as a judgemental process but ONLY as a continuing professional development process (including for the teacher-training establishments, programme writers and book publishers!).
Who is teaching phonics and reading instruction effectively - and what are they doing to be so effective for teaching all the children?
This links to the issue of special needs. If teachers are teaching really effectively, we can see that this can significantly reduce special needs when it comes to literacy. This is not to say that there aren't children with greater inherent learning difficulties and/or socio-economic challenges, and/or language challenges, but we can see where despite children having those various difficulties, they can still be taught to read better than they would arguably have been taught without good phonics provision.
What is important now is a truly transparent look at the phonics and reading instruction in schools, linked to what we know about literacy from a wealth of research findings, and how schools with the best results are bringing about those results.
Australia now benefits from the example of England where year-on-year children nationally have achieved more highly in the statutory end of Year One Phonics Screening Check. Even in England, however, there is great variation in how phonics is taught, and with what content, and how reading practice is provided (for example, asking children to read predictable and repetitive reading books independently which causes them to default to word-guessing compared to providing cumulative, decodable reading material when asking them to read independently).
In the piece above is this comment:
[I added the red bits above.]"How do you know if it is lead /led/ or lead /leed/? You don't know until you put it into a sentence like the boy wrote with a lead pencil or the boy was born to lead," she said.
There is no correct way of pronouncing "nonsense" words and students could be unfairly penalised, she said.
In England's phonics check, great care is taken to avoid using any letter groups in nonsense words that can be pronounced in different ways in real words - precisely to avoid the problem mentioned in the article.
In the Sydney Morning Herald also, David Hornsby is quoted but he is misguided in his comment. David says this:
I refer to this issue regarding the use of nonsense words in the phonics check in a response I made to similar criticism by David Reedy on behalf of the United Kingdom Literacy Association. My full response might be interesting and helpful for some people as Australia goes through the same kind of criticisms that have been raised in England about the phonics check implemented from 2012:But former principal and education consultant David Hornsby said the tests were at odds with the Australian curriculum's focus on "meaningful" literacy, because they included "nonsense" words.
He said that in Britain, good readers were penalised when they sounded out "nonsense" words and then substituted a real word. "They were marked wrong on the test for trying to comprehend or read for meaning," he said.
https://phonicsinternational.com/reedy_response.pdf