[senco-forum] Literacy

I'm very curious as to where this figure of 20% of children who can't learn to read with synthetic phonics has come from.  In the Clackmannanshire study I believe it was only about 5% of the children who still struggled and the ones who were given more intensive phonics teaching did learn and improve.  I think there is a bit of muddlement going on here!

Bonnie MacMillan, in her book 'Why Schoolchildren Can't Read' says that 50% of children will learn to read whatever the method (because they work out the phonic principles for themselves; and I recently had a Y11 boy tell me how he did exactly that), 25% will learn to read, but never spell very well and 25% will be baffled!  I don't have any references for her statement, but I'm sure she didn't pull her figures out of thin air!

Ruth Miskin, at the recent RRF conference said that she reduced her SEN register to 8 children.  Sue Lloyd (developer of Jolly Phonics) told me that in a long teaching career she only had ONE child who failed to learn to read.  A poster on the TES forums, who works with  children with hearing difficulties, said that s/he had only very rarely encountered children who could not learn to read with synthetic phonics, and that was usually because they had had  a severe impairment (such as glue ear) at a crucial point in their early childhood.  Now, this may be anecdotal evidence, but it cannot be that these practitioners have just been 'lucky' with the children they have taught over the years, yet they report far fewer than 20%.

I don't understand Eddie's references to phonics being boring, or his distaste for 'fundamentalists', when he himself has always supported the use of synthetic phonics for the initial teaching of reading (or have I misinterpreted his statements in the past?).  The inescapable fact is that there is a body of knowledge directly related to the way that the written word is constructed by the representation of the sounds which comprise it by a letter or letters, which children have to be taught in order to read competently.  And the experience of practitioners is that children don't find synthetic phonics boring.  What is boring about being able to learn to read very quickly? It enables the high fliers to fly higher and most of the rest to access and enjoy all sorts of texts.  

The only children I've encountered who are bored by reading are the ones who can't read..

Maggie

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