[senco-forum] Reading

Eddie Carron <eddiecarron at btconnect.com> wrote:I always test the ability of older poor readers to recognise individual letters/sounds and they invariable score 100% on this test, yet the same children scored less than 20% on a sight vocabulary test!   Using synthetic phonics as the initial means of teaching reading will in all probability, produce a higher percentage of good readers than any other single approach.  It is not however, the holy grail for poor readers in secondary schools whose principal difficulty is the ability to acquire an effective vocabulary, invariably as a consequence of poor short term memory function.
If the children you test score 100% on letter/sound correspondences then they are way better than the children I work with at KS3.  'Mine' may know the one letter=one sound correspondences, 'th', 'ch', 'sh' and a few of the digraphs ('ee'', 'ea' and 'oo') but they don't know the rest of the 160ish common phoneme/grapheme correspondences that they need for competent reading.

Maggie 

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