England: 'Why teachers won't teach children to read - or Marx would have taught synthetic phonics'

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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England: 'Why teachers won't teach children to read - or Marx would have taught synthetic phonics'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

'Reading Ape' has put a lot of time and effort into this thoughtful analysis of the scenario in England where resistance to 'systematic synthetic phonics' prevails even amongst teaching union leaders:
Why teachers won't teach children to read - or Marx would have taught synthetic phonics

October 2017
https://www.thereadingape.com/single-po ... ic-phonics
Certainly the list of ills associated with poor literacy skills make for uncomfortable reading: lower income; greater likelihood of unemployment; lower self-esteem; greater likelihood of school exclusion; greater likelihood of depression; lower levels of trust in others and greater likelihood of feeling unsafe (Literacy Foundation, 2017). It would seem that Kofi Annan’s proclamation that ‘Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope’ (un.com, 1997) has a resounding toll of veracity. And yet the very group within society with the greatest power to address this social and economic debility; the group explicitly trained to challenge it and charged with overcoming it, is the very group most resistant to adopting the means to do so.
In 2012 the National Union of Teachers (NUT), the second largest teaching union representing in excess of three hundred thousand teachers, denounced the introduction of systematic synthetic phonics as the promotion of a single fashionable technique with one NUT executive stating, "Most adults do not read phonically. They read by visual memory or they use context cueing to predict what the sentence might be…’ (Mulholland, 2014). The union was emphatic that phonics alone would not produce fluent readers and that ‘mixed methods’ were essential. The largest teaching union, the NAS/UWT, asserted that children, ‘…need to use a combination of cues such as initial letter sounds and illustrations to make meaning from text…’ (politics.co.uk, 2013). They were not the only institutional resistors. When the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s (QCA) redrafted National Curriculum document was rejected by The Secretary of State for Education as encouraging mixed methods of decoding and an emphatic amendment stipulating synthetic phonics inserted, the QCA failed to amend their website (Lloyd-Jones, 2013).
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 4:42 pm

Re: England: 'Why teachers won't teach children to read - or Marx would have taught synthetic phonics'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Mike Lloyd-Jones 'must read' and very readable short book on:
Phonics and the Resistance to Reading
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phonics-Resist ... B00F706P9I
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