Cut to the chase with 'phonics' teaching and spend sufficient time on appropriate teaching

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Cut to the chase with 'phonics' teaching and spend sufficient time on appropriate teaching

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Thanks to Nick Cowen for providing this link via Twitter:
Helping children with reading difficulties: some things we have learned so far

Genevieve McArthur & Anne Castles
A third key finding is that only one type of intervention produced a statistically reliable effect. This was phonics training, which focuses on improving a proximal cause of poor word reading (i.e., letter-sound mappings). In contrast, interventions that focused on distal causes of poor reading did not show a statistically reliable effect in poor readers. The outcomes of this systematic review suggest that interventions that focus on phonics—a proximal cause of reading behaviour—are more likely to be effective than interventions that focus on a distal cause. In other words, the “closer” the intervention is to an impaired reading behaviour, the more likely it is to be effective.
http://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0008-3

And this made Dr Bonnie Macmillan's article spring to mind in an archived Reading Reform Foundation newsletter, see page 13:
Classroom Research Findings and the Nutshell Programme

by Dr. Bonnie Macmillan
http://rrf.org.uk/pdf/nl/46.pdf
Interestingly, it was found that out of these ten activities, only two were highly correlated with success in reading and spelling. These two were: ‘phonics’ (which included all phonics activities involving print, letter- sound correspondences, blending, segmenting, detecting sounds in words all with printed form of the word), and ‘letter formation’ (which involved talking about the shapes of letters, writing letters and words in context of learning letter-sound relationships). These were the only activities that mattered in terms of subsequent reading and spelling performance.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Cut to the chase with 'phonics' teaching and spend sufficient time on appropriate teaching

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

So Greg Ashman flagged up the Castles and McArthur paper via his blog 'Filling the Pail':
Proximal versus Distal

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2017/0 ... %EF%BB%BF/
One way you can roughly evaluate a proposed mechanism is to ask: How far removed is the intervention from the desired result? Is it proximal (close) or distal (far away)? It is much easier to understand the mechanism of a proximal intervention than a distal one. A distal intervention is likely to rely on a chain of influences, none of which correlate 100%, so by the time you pass through a few of the links in the chain, any effect may have washed out.

This distinction is made by Castles and McArthur in a fascinating new Nature paper about reading interventions. I met one of the authors, Ann Castles, at the recent Language, Literacy and Learning conference in Perth.

Castles and McArthur suggest that proximal reading interventions such as phonics and vocabulary training have a much better evidence base than distal interventions such as fish oil, coloured lenses or, heaven forbid, chiropractic.

I wish that the Education Endowment Foundation in England would pay more attention to mechanisms. If so, they might pause before throwing even more money at Philosophy for Children, a distal intervention that is intended to improve English and maths.
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