[senco-forum] Pilot reading project

Hi Maggie

My programme doesn't purport to teach children anything .

What is does is create an environment in which the children themselves learn these correspondences intuitively. There is no formal teaching involved.

It uses words which are within children's receptive vocabularies  A group of such words are presented on the screen and the one of them is voiced - the child's first task to make the link between what s/he hears and what s/he sees.  In my pilot, children with reading deficits as great as six years managed (to my surprise) to cope with this requirement, apparently with little difficulty.

As a means of extending the time which these words are held in short term memory, they are also required to 'whisper-spell' each word before it disappears and then to spell it using an onscreen voiced alphabet.

It is neither intended to teach the children these words or that the words themselves should be 'learned.' The words are simply vehicles which contain the range of grapheme/phoneme correspondences which are necessary for the acquisition of decoding skills.

The strategy I  propose would appear to be acceptable to older children. It is a very short (20 mins) daily session. Teachers by and large seemed to be supportive in the pilot project .  Some even intend to carry on with it.  My larger project should, if the results are positive, be sufficient to convince everyone except perhaps those whose convictions are fundamental.

The sample used will be a credible one (over one thousand Year 6 poor readers) and the end test (Key stage 2 results) is a widely recognised one.

Surely no reasonable person could object to a remedial research project carried out in such a valid way at no cost to the taxpayer or the participating schools.  If the research shows that this strategy offers no significant advantage, I can live with that outcome but there are indications that it will prove otherwise.

I will be involving at least one thousand Year 6 children who are predicted to achieve less than Level 4 at Key Stage 2. If the project results in some of them in fact achieving Level 4 or higher, would you not regard that as a good thing?

Eddie C.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Maggie Downie 
  To: Eddie Carron ; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk 
  Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 11:08 PM
  Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Pilot reading project

  Eddie,

  How does your programme teach children the phoneme/grapheme correspondences that they don't know?  Or is it assuming that they do know them all?

  Maggie

  Eddie Carron <eddiecarron at btconnect.com> wrote:
    Aly - you'll be less confused if you read my mail properly. I said ' These need not even be real words.' I am still experimenting with the actual content but one version starts with nonsense words but that sort of challenge misses the point entirely.

    There is no question of children learning lists of words. There is only a question of children being exposed to the experience of all grapheme - phoneme correspondences so that they can become internalised as sight vocabulary.

    We know that all poor readers have limited sight vocabularies and that all good readers have very extensive sight vocabularies but no matter how extensive they are, there will always remain at least 25% of words in an average piece of text which have to be decoded. That is inevitable. I am only hypothesizing that a healthy sight vocabulary serves as an intuitive, internalised means of decoding and that sight vocab can be proactively primed so as to aid decoding. 

    Decoding is a core reading skill - I regard that as an undeniable fact.

    Eddie C.

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