Synthetic Phonics:
8th January 2012, 11.02 am
The article below, Synthetic Phonics: a Flawed Approach to Teaching Reading, was written when I thought that the term ‘word recognition’, as used in the Rose Report of 2006, and the British government’s 2010 criteria for defining a synthetic phonic programme, included the meaning of the word, i.e. I thought that ‘word recognition’ included both the ability to pronounce the word and also understand its meaning.
The discussion on this thread on the RRF Forum has informed me that both (a) my initial understanding of the term ‘word recognition’ was wrong, and (b) the term ‘word recognition’ is used ambiguously and inconsistently in the Rose report.
I have not yet been able to work out the impact of this extra information on the original article. If anyone has insights into this, please will you tell me.
Synthetic Phonics: A Flawed Approach to Teaching Reading
In 2007/8 the British government published a set of criteria for publishers of phonic programmes and materials.
The first of these criteria said that the programme should:
Quote: present high quality systematic phonic work, as defined by the Independent review of teaching of early reading and now encapsulated in the Primary Framework, as the prime approach to decoding print.
In the autumn of 2010 the British government revised its criteria, such that the first criterion now said:
Quote: presents high quality systematic, synthetic phonic work as the prime approach to decoding print, i.e. a phonics ‘first and fast’ approach.
The new important word in this criterion is ‘synthetic’. This means that the government changed its approach from ‘systematic phonic work’ to ’systematic, synthetic phonic work’, and by doing so, it excluded ’analytic phonics’, as well as any clue from which the meaning of a word could be deduced, in its list of criteria. This is explicitly stated in note 7.
Quote: Children should not be expected to use strategies such as whole-word recognition and/or cues from context, grammar, or pictures.
By definition, the government has denied children access to ‘non-phonic clues’. These clues are often the only way children can get to the meaning of a word, and, without them, a ‘synthetic phonics only’ approach to teaching reading is nothing more than teaching children how to pronounce words.
Evidence in the Rose Report.
The Rose Report in 2006 put forward ‘The Simple View of Reading‘ as the recommended way to teach children to read.
The ‘Simple View of Reading’ links two factors ‘WORD RECOGNITION PROCESSES’ and ‘LANGUAGE RECOGNITION PROCESSES. (Correction needed here … It should be LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION PROCESSES not LANGUAGE RECOGNITION PROCESSES.)
On page 75, para. 12 it states the following: Two components of reading identified in the simple view of reading first put forward by Gough and Tunmer (1986) are ‘decoding‘ and ‘comprehension: according to these authors, ‘Reading is the product of decoding and comprehension’. We would not want to suggest accepting this statement as a complete description or explanation of reading; rather, we want to advocate the good sense of considering reading in terms of these two components.
Para. 13 states: However, it is important to be clear as to the meanings the authors ascribe to the terms used in the statement, so that we can understand what each component comprises. Gough and Tunmer make clear that by ‘decoding‘ they mean the ability to recognise words presented singly out of context, with the ability to apply phonic rules a crucial contributory factor to the development of this context-free word recognition ability.
Para. 14 states: They also make clear that by ‘comprehension’ they mean not reading comprehension but linguistic comprehension, which they define as ‘the process by which, given lexical (i.e. word) information, sentences and discourse are interpreted’. A common set of linguistic processes is held to underlie comprehension of both oral and written language.
Para. 15 states Quote: Gough and Tunmer further make clear that word recognition is necessary but not sufficient for reading because the ability to pronounce printed words does not guarantee understanding of the text so represented. Furthermore, linguistic comprehension is likewise necessary, but not sufficient for reading: if you cannot recognise the words that comprise the written text, you cannot recover lexical information necessary for the application of linguistic processes that lead to comprehension.
These two factors
1. Word Recognition Processes
2. Language Recognition Processes (correction needed here. It should say Language Comprehension Processes)
have been represented by the words ‘decoding’ and ‘comprehension’ in subsequent papers even though the authors of the ‘Simple View of Reading’ have clarified that
…..’by ‘decoding‘ they mean the ability to recognise words presented singly out of context, with the ability to apply phonic rules a crucial contributory factor to the development of this context-free word recognition ability.’
This means that the ability to recognise a word includes more than knowing how to pronounce the word i.e. decode it. It also includes knowing what the word means. Without a meaning attached to it, a word is not a word, and it cannot be recognised as a word.
This is where the government’s revised criteria of a ‘synthetic phonics only approach’ is flawed.
The statement ‘Children should not be expected to use strategies such as whole-word recognition and/or cues from context, grammar, or pictures’ denies children clues to the meaning of words.
Teaching children how to pronounce a series of letters, i.e. decode, does not necessarily mean they can recognise the word. They need other clues to deduce the meaning and to recognise the word. These clues may come from context, the children’s own spoken vocabulary or hints from pictures, but the sad fact is that the British government has excluded all such clues in its criteria. (Correction needed here after a post by kenm on the RRF Forum picked me up on this …… There is no exclusion to a child’s own spoken vocabulary in government documents.)
Having excluded clues to deduce meaning and set up approval procedures for match-funding, the British government has now had to introduce clues, i.e. pictures, into its own materials for the Year 1 Phonics Check.
It has had to come up with spurious guidance in its own programme Letters and Sounds to teach the words ‘the, go, no, to, I’ in Phase 2.
The British government has found itself unable to adhere to its own criteria. This is because it is impossible to teach children to read using a synthetic phonic approach only.
The government’s criteria of 2010 are flawed and they should be withdrawn.
Here are some pairs of words.
‘beg, begin; wax, was; fin, find; go, to; not, no; food, good; buzz, busy; done, gone; for, forest; out, you; love, move; come, home; oven, open; carrot, car; balloon, ball; does, goes; shoe, toe; whack, what; here, there;
If a child pronounces/decodes the second word in each pair in the same way as the first word, he/she will pronounce it wrong and experience failure.
Only if there is some ‘tweaking’, i.e. extra input from the teacher, via context, grammar or pictures to get to the meaning of the word, can the child say the word correctly. This means that a ‘synthetics phonics only approach’ is flawed because it forbids such inputs.
The statement ‘Children should not be expected to use strategies such as whole-word recognition and/or cues from context, grammar, or pictures’ makes the whole approach to teaching a child to read impossible, erroneous and deeply insulting to children and teachers who have enough commonsense to know it is wrong.