It draws attention to the potential damage and misunderstanding perpetuated by influential people such as children's author, Michael Rosen, and literacy organisations such as the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA):
I urge you to read Jacqui Moller-Butcher's excellent response - no wonder David Didau decided to highlight this development! See here:Reading for pleasure: A reader replies to Michael Rosen
December 28, 2015
Back in July I wrote this post on how we might encourage children to read for pleasure to which children’s author Michael Rosen left a long & detailed comment critiquing my ideas. The comment included this statement:
When children are deemed to be ‘not reading’ i.e. being unable to pass the Phonics Screening Check, some teachers are being asked to do more of the same, rather than do anything different, nor to investigate whether there are multiple reasons for a) not passing the phonics screening check or b) finding out whether some children can read pretty well but fail the PSC anyway. Indeed, there is now some evidence to suggest (UKLA) that ironically some ‘middle class’ children how have learned to read at home with their parents using a variety of methods find the PSC confusing. Some have been observed ‘correcting’ the nonsense words, e.g. ‘strom’ to ‘storm’. So they do not pass.
A few weeks ago, another correspondent, Jacqui Moller-Butcher left what I thought was a very interesting and thoughtful response to the point above and has kindly agreed to my request to post her reply as a separate post. Here it is.
http://www.learningspy.co.uk/featured/8840/
Some of the readers' comments are very telling. Note that despite the Rose Report in 2006 and subsequent government guidance promoting Systematic Synthetic Phonics with NO multi-cueing guessing strategies (that is, guessing unknown words from word shape, initial letters, picture cues and context), multi-cueing strategies DO prevail but increasingly teachers of older children are beginning to understand (or already understand) that damage is caused by teaching or promoting multi-cueing - or allowing children to default to guessing in place of effective and accurate decoding.
England is in the fortunate situation of successive governments getting on board with the need for Systematic Synthetic Phonics teaching with no multi-cueing - but sadly the 'message' to teachers has been a mixed one because at the same time as SSP was promoted, so was the multi-cueing reading strategies intervention programme, Reading Recovery. Different influential people in government allowed this contradiction to take place - and there has been much criticism of this - including, for example, the findings of the Science and Technology select committee in 2009.