[senco-forum] SP is boring?

Maggie

I think it is important to read the mails more carefully. Nowhere in any mail have I ever claimed or implied that 'most children enter school able to read!   I do believe that about 3% of children enter school at age 5 able to read but no higher. You can be as forceful and challenging as you wish in any response to any claim that I make but you should be honest and not disingenuous in these challenges if you want your views with treated with amny respect at all.  There are already a sufficient number of SP supporters who are damaging the case for SP by such tactics.

Brendan and I are two individuals with different backgrounds of experience whose views are similar in some respects but not identical. There is  nothing odd about us expressing different views?  I have claimed that about 80% of children crack the phonics code by age 6 without formal SP tutoring. The evidence is in your own examples of the boring nature of whole word 'Peter and Jane' which were used to teach a whole generation of children and in spite of the awfulness of this approach, about 80% of them of succeeded in becoming quite literate - many of them even, very literate.  There are whole areas of the US where the only approach used is 'whole word'  This does not mean that none of these children become literate - it means that only about 80% become literate and that is a scandal for the 20% who were failed by it. 

I certainly share Brendan's view that it is not advantageous to bring formal tutoring to ever younger children. In countries where formal schooling begins at age 7, their literacy statistics are generally higher than ours, not lower.  I think that anyone who does not see this simply does now want to see it. I am greatly in favour of nursery schools but I would rather see them all closed down than see a system of obligatory formal teaching of SP to nursery age children. At that tender age, there is more education in letting them play together than any formal tutoring sessions in anything.

Eddie C.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Maggie Downie 
  To: Eddie Carron ; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk 
  Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 11:08 PM
  Subject: Re: [senco-forum] SP is boring?

  Eddie Carron <eddiecarron at btconnect.com> wrote:
    . It is surely beyond dispute that a very high proportion of children develop phonemic awareness quite naturally and at a sufficiently early age, from their own quite limited reference library of sight words, acquired naturally, unavoidably without formal tutoring.

  On the contrary, it could be very much in dispute.  Just how many 4 year olds enter YR able to 'read' a few words that they have become familiar with?  Figures and references please! We can't have a debate based on unsubstantiated assertions. And how are they meant to deduce the whole of the alphabetic code from those few words?

  And, how many of them are able to spell?

  This is getting very odd.  On the one hand we have Brendan saying that children shouldn't be taught to read until they are 7.  On the other hand we have Eddie asserting that most of them enter school already able to read.

  Maggie

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