iferi.org

http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/

John Walker has been a teacher, teacher-trainer and university lecturer for over thirty years. He is a co-founder of Sounds-Write Ltd. Sounds-Write runs courses in how to teach reading and spelling for teachers, teaching assistants, parents and educational psychologists.

John's posting describing his experiences of complex spellings with Year 2 children - and why phonics is not just the domain of infant teaching:

Meaning no harm...

http://literacyblog.blogspot.com.au/201 ... -harm.html

As I was teaching a Year 2 class how to read and spell polysyllabic words, I thought it would be helpful to make use of the fact that they were collecting for sufferers from leprosy and integrate it into our phonics lesson. Only a matter of weeks before, I’d happened to read an article in the New Scientist on this very subject. The article explained that there were two main types of the disease: paucibacillary and multibacillary leprosy.

John writes a very interesting post:

The hunt for word combining elements

http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015 ... ments.html

...From the perspective of teaching learners to read and spell, is it worth entering the territory of morphology to teach how affixes are structured? As you’ve probably guessed – otherwise why would I be writing this post? – the endeavour is well worth the trouble. Through the medium of bound morphemes, learners can learn a huge amount about decoding, about meaning and about derivation, all of which are interrelated and bound up together...

Note, however, that regardless of word-meanings and word-parts, the need to have alphabetic code knowledge and the phonic skills of decoding and encoding are still fundamentally important:

Nevertheless, and the point needs to be made, none of this could be achieved unless he could decode: thus /h/ /er/ | /b/ /i/ | /v/ /ore/. Only by saying or sub-vocalising the sounds to build syllables and then combining the syllables to create meaningful words can we then begin to talk about the meaningful semantic and grammatical elements that combine together to form the word.

Do read the full post as it is well worth it.

I particularly like this post:

The ill-conceived idea of 'regular and 'irregular' spelling

http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016 ... l?spref=tw

John writes yet another good post, this time with the theme:

Phonics across the curriculum

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.

It's proving very difficult, even in England where systematic synthetic phonics is statutory, to shift the practice of teaching, or allowing by default, multi-cueing word-guessing strategies.

John's journey into phonics teacher-training described first hand in an interview:

Exclusive Interview With John Walker – Teaching Reading and Spelling

This week I have the pleasure of welcoming John Walker to the Top Notch Teaching Community. John is one of the creators and trainers of the Sounds-Write program[/b].

https://topnotchteaching.com/reflective ... g-reading/