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Gordon Askew’s Blog: ssphonix

Posted: Sun May 24, 2015 12:50 pm
by Anne Glennie
http://ssphonix.blogspot.co.uk/

Until May 2014, Gordon Askew was a Phonics Adviser to DfE. He is a former primary headteacher, consultant, lecturer, inspector and phonics trainer.

He also has a wonderfully detailed blog dedicated to children’s fantasy fiction, called Magic Fiction Since Potter which you can visit by clicking the link: http://magicfictionsincepotter.blogspot.co.uk/

Re: Gordon Askew’s Blog: ssphonix

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2015 10:46 pm
by Debbie_Hepplewhite
Gordon writes about England's teachers still using 'multi-cueing reading strategies' alongside their provision of systematic synthetic phonics teaching - which is a tragedy because the body of research findings does not support multi-cueing which, in reality, amounts to a lot of word-guessing from various cues:

http://ssphonix.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/ ... ot-to.html
Thursday, 1 October 2015

Why does phonics teaching appear not to be impacting?

Recent 'evidence' that the government's emphasis on phonics does not appear to be impacting on reading standards overall, despite clear improvements in outcomes for the Y1 Phonics Screening Check, is being leapt upon by detractors as a clear vindication of what they have believed all along: that the emphasis on phonics is too narrow and schools should return to a mixed strategy approach to reading.

However such a simplistic misinterpretation seriously distracts from the real issues and will lead us yet further away from the universal achievement of fluent reading which we all want for the country's children.
So when the detractors call for a return to multi strategy teaching of reading they are actually referring to the status quo in many schools - the strategy which in fact leads to the outcomes we are currently getting.

In answer to the initial question: it is not phonics that is failing to impact, but much of current teaching, which claims to value phonics but does not. I do not blame teachers for this. They are committed and conscientious professionals who want the best for their children. Unfortunately however too many of them are being mislead about how best to achieve this.

Re: Gordon Askew’s Blog: ssphonix

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2016 6:26 am
by Debbie_Hepplewhite
Gordon writes an important post about the damaging role of the Book Bands cataloguing system that continues to mislead teachers about the advisable (or not) reading book diet for beginners:
Too bound by Book Bands
http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... ?f=2&t=675

Re: Gordon Askew’s Blog: ssphonix

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2022 10:30 am
by Debbie_Hepplewhite
Update: Gordon Askew received a Queen's Birthday Honours MBE award for his literacy services to education in 2017.

He has now retired and resigned from the IFERI committee - and, sadly, he has withdrawn his excellent phonics blog.

We cannot thank Gordon enough for his decades of commitment and hard work to promote the findings of research into reading and the need for 'systematic synthetic phonics' in our schools and the need to provide children with reading books that they can actually read!

Gordon travelled to Scotland to support IFERI committee member, Anne Glennie, in the official hearing as a consequence of Anne's petition which you can read about here:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=911

Gordon continues to provide excellent book reviews via this blog:

http://magicfictionsincepotter.blogspot.com