[senco-forum] Pilot reading project

Dear Eddie,

Eddie,

Thanks for your explanation.  I think I understand your approach and I can see why it will work.

I'd agree with Mary about using standardised testing, rather than SATs results.  Presumably you would like your programme to be widely used; standardised test results would give more credibility than SATs, which, as Mary pointed out, are controversial.

Maggie

Eddie Carron <eddiecarron at btconnect.com> wrote: Hi Mary

No. I am not teaching word recognition. That I assume is what is called 
'whole word'  teaching.   I am not teaching anything.  There is no formal 
teaching  involved in this stratgegy at any point.  The children work on 
their own entirely without adult intervention.   All that happens is that 
poor readers are routinely and successfully exposed to the practice of 
relating graphemes to their associated phonemes. Nothing else.

Certainly, I am using word recognition as one part of a strategy in which 
children have concentrated experience of linking graphemes and phonemes.  I 
could however, just as easily (and indeed have done)  used groups of 
nonsense words such as frod   crat   drinf   grontle  brunk  broop sloub 
and then invited the children to'recognise'  one of them from a voiced 
representation.  I decided on this pilot to use real words because there was 
neither advantage nor disadvantage in doing so.

You are right that this work does not include 'language'  - it is focused on 
the core reading skill of decoding but, because I am dealing with already 
failed, older readers, I am seeking to achieve this end by an alternative 
strategy which in theory at least, has a lot going for it.

All good readers have healthy sight vocabs. All poor readers have very 
limited sight vocabs.   That is easily demonstrated.  Of course those who 
believe that there is no such thing as sight vocabulary and that every word 
is decoded, every time it is encountered no matter how frequently it is 
encountered,  will be unable to grasp these facts.

What tests I use are not really all that important to me because whatever is 
used, someone will always find it controversial.    I let the teachers 
involved decide themselves which test to use.

When children are taught to read by the synthetic phonics strategy, they 
learn the sound associated with each grapheme and how to synthesize them to 
form words which they recognise eg di - aw - gi  dog.  The outcome is that a 
child,  would be able to accurately voice a complex arrangement of letters 
which had no meaning whatsoever eg drinconsher  bripfled.    That is the 
whole point of synthetic phonics and there is no doubt that when children 
are taught by this route, there are fewer reading failures.   When children 
are taught to read by the 'whole word' method ie only by recognising 
familiar words, about a quarter of them will not become competent readers. I 
think the experience of the past four decades has put that beyond question. 
But that is not the business I am in!

Eddie C.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mary Kelly" 
To: "'Eddie Carron'" ; "'Maggie Downie'" 
; 
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2007 10:03 AM
Subject: RE: [senco-forum] Pilot reading project

> Dear Eddie,
> Since the skill that your pilot is addressing is that of word recognition
> (i.e. not language comprehension, inference, expressive language etc. 
> etc.),
> would you not be wise to use a test of word recognition (such as the WRAT)
> at the beginning and again at the end of the intervention? Any results in
> terms of SATs will be controversial because SATs are not standardised and
> they test a great deal more than word recognition. You might like also to
> consider having a control population that is matched for its word
> recognition scores at the start of the intervention?
> Good luck,
> Mary
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk
> [mailto:senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of Eddie Carron
> Sent: 09 August 2007 23:59
> To: Maggie Downie; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk
> Subject: Re: [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  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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