2. Mixture of methods / Range of Strategies (NLS Searchlights) / Balanced Instruction (USA) / 'Mix and muck-the-children-up method' (thank you Jeremy H!) using: Analytic phonics / Intrinsic phonics / Embedded phonics / **Systematic (not to be confused with synthetic) phonics

''The definition of what reading actually is was hijacked by the whole language movement to fit in with their world view. Reading was to be reading for meaning, comprehension came from making meaning from the text. Quite how you were supposed to do this without being able to actually decode the letters on the page is how we arrived at the Searchlights model — by guessing, and by memorising, also known as ‘a range of strategies.’'(Shadwell)

Mixture of methods instruction starts with children memorising a bank of sight words as global wholes; the high frequency words (HFWs), even if they are phonically regular. This is based on the belief that children are biologically primed to view words as whole units at the start of reading instruction; 'Initially, whatever we try to teach them, young children recognise words as unanalysed wholes, making no attempt to map the component letters into speech sounds. [Frith] terms this the logographic phase..' (Prof. Dombey. Literacy Today, No.20, 1999). Aside from the fact that, as a recent invention, the way written language is viewed cannot be wired into the brain, research in Germany (Wimmer/ Hummer) has shown that children do not go through a logographic stage when they are taught with the synthetic phonics method from the very start of reading instruction (RRF 45. p6)

Instruction in mixed method classrooms follows what is believed to be a biologically dicated, developmental progression; that, as time passes, young children 'naturally' become able to perceive smaller and smaller units of sound (whole-words ->syllables->onset and rhyme-> individual phonemes) so teaching needs to follow this strict order too. The whole-language /mixed methods proponents strongly suggest that any digression from this clearly marked route, or anything but child-directed, intrinsic learning, will damage children's innate development of 'phonological awareness' and spoil their love of reading. Explicitly teaching synthetic phonics to children under the age of seven is, they warn darkly, likely to be ''Too much, Too soon'' (Open EYE conference 16/02/08)'. Much of this thinking has its roots in the dubious philosophy of Steiner education - see Room 101. As evidence they flag up Finland where all children achieve literacy within weeks of starting formal school, age seven. What they don't say is that Finland has a completely transparent alphabet code and most parents teach their children to read pre-school as it's so easy to do. They also omit to mention Denmark where, as in Finland, the school starting age is seven, but it has an opaque alphabet code. From the start of formal instruction, children take at least two years to achieve literacy in Denmark.

The use of whole-language (banded) books right from the start with beginning readers is considered necessary by those who think that it is important to give students immediate and extensive practice in using a 'Direct Lexical route' to reading and 'this captures the behaviour of adults'. This is based on the Dual Route theory; the belief that there are two 'routes' the brain can use to read words; a direct lexical route and an inferior, sublexical route (Coltheart). According to this theory, the brain naturally prefers the direct lexical route (global sight word recognition) where 'meaning is accessed before phonology' i.e. sound is by-passed and takes no part in the process, and all literate adults read the majority of words in this manner i.e. as global sight words. The sublexical route (decoding using sound) is, they say, only used as a back-up by the brain when the 'direct to meaning route' fails (Kerr p19-22/Stainthorp&Stuart) The evidence for this theory came from a study of a small group of adults who suffered brain damage and, as a result, acquired 'dyslexia'. This theory was challenged quite convincingly by Glushko back in 1979, who argued correctly that the brain automatically processes all the information available about the input signal in parallel. In addition, studies of the profoundly deaf (Aaron) have found that they are incapable of learning to spell words correctly after the age of 8 or 9 years, because they cannot decode via the phoneme-grapheme route at all, and have to rely on two visual processing modes: sight word memory, and by visual matching of spelling probabilities (the repetition of spelling patterns in various words). This latter is something the brain does automatically, and we are not aware of it. This research clearly shows that literate adults are not global sight word readers, as Frith and Coltheart believe, in adulthood. (see- D.McGuinness ERI. Ch10)  

Along with high frequency word memorisation, children will need to use other strategies in order to access the leveled/banded /predictable/ repetitive-text books that a 'mixed methods' classroom will expect them to 'read' from day one. Guessing (predicting) using picture and context clues (cues) is one of those strategies. Another is 'onset and rime'. When teachers say that they do or ''always have'' used phonics to teach reading, this is the type of phonics that they are usually describing; first the onset is sounded out (beginning consonants are taught as one unit) and then the rhyming family that the rest of the word belongs to, such as the 'ing' family - s/ing, br/ing, str/ing, th/ing. After much practise in orally breaking words into onset and rime (hence all the rhyme and alliteration activities used in mixed method classrooms), it is assumed that they will then be able to use this strategy with previously unseen words. 'Recognising word families and patterns helps children develop inferential self-teaching strategies. If they can read 'cake', they can work out and read 'lake' without blending all the individual phonemes' (Lewis/Ellis p4)

Dr Macmillan says, '…teaching children about onset and rime as a route to discovering individual phonemes is similar logic to thinking that a person can be taught to read music by memorising chords on, say a guitar or piano. Although it may be relatively easy for a person to learn the names of some musical chords and how to play them, there is little possibility that this knowledge will lead to the ability to read musical notation, to the ability to play individual notes on these instruments in response to the corresponding written symbols.' (Macmillan p82). Recent studies 'have shown conclusively that children do not use rhyming endings to decode words; hardly ever decode by analogy to other words; and that ability to dissect words into onsets and rimes has no impact whatsoever on learning to read and spell. (D.McGuinness WCCR p148)

'Teaching word parts, analogies and word families creates the "part-word assembler''. This is the child who searches for little, familiar word parts and assembles them into a nonsense word, hoping it will be close enough to guess what it is. Jane sees the word "watermelon", which has these parts in it: wa wat wate at ate ter term erm me mel el lo on. Which of these 13 parts would you use? Jane chose "weatermeon" (D.McGuinness.THE.29/05/98)

Following is an actual example of how a child taught with a mixture of methods is expected to tackle (analyse) an unfamiliar word: ''(I)f a child met the word ‘nightingale’ he would use a combination of initial sound (n), segmentation (night-ing-(g)ale), letter clusters (ight, ing), sight vocabulary (gale) and context (it’s a bird).’' (Fisher. Practical answers to teachers' questions about reading. UKLA p8) Note that, as only the simplest GPCs are directly taught and whole-language books are used from the very start, 'sounding out all-through-the-written-word', one of the central tenets of synthetic phonics, is not a useful strategy and is likely to be discouraged.

In her book, Language Development and Learning to Read, Diane McGuinness describes the decoding strategies that children taught in whole-language /mixed methods classrooms ACTUALLY use. 'In my research on children's reading strategies, I found that by the end of first grade, children in whole-language classrooms were using three different decoding strategies. A small minority were decoding primarily by phonemes (one sound at a time). Another group, whom I call "part-word decoders," searched for recognizable little words or word fragments inside bigger words. A third group ("whole-word guessers") decoded the first letter phonetically, then guessed the word by its length and shape – the overall visual pattern made by the letter string. Very few children used a pure sight-word strategy (the telephone number strategy -see Method 1*), and the children who did usually stopped reading before the end of the school year. Reading test scores reflected these strategies, with the phonemic decoders superior, part-word decoders next, and whole-word guessers the worst. When these children were followed to third grade, the whole-word guessers had not changed their approach and were the undisputed worst readers in the class. Some part-word decoders had graduated to phonemic decoding, but the majority of the third graders remained primarily part-word decoders. Once more, phonemic decoders were far and away the best readers. This shows that children are active learners, and when confronted with vague or misleading guidelines for how to read, they try out strategies to overcome this difficulty. The fact that these strategies are different, and that they tend to stay constant over such a long period of time, is strong evidence against a developmental explanation.'(D. McGuinness. LDLR p3),

Those who advocate a 'mixture of methods' for the teaching of early reading say that such a mixture is necessary because 'children learn in different ways' due to their different learning styles,(often expressed as 'one size does not fit all'). In his final report, Jim Rose responded to this very widely held view saying, '...all beginning readers have to come to terms with the same alphabetic principles if they are to learn to read and write... Moreover, leading edge practice (in synthetic phonics) bears no resemblance to a 'one size fits all' model of teaching and learning, nor does it promote boringly dull, rote learning of phonics.' (Rose Review. 34)

The opaqueness of the English alphabet code is another reason given for teaching with mixed methods. 'In Scottish schools there is a preference for a mixed method which combines the teaching of a vocabulary of sight words with the teaching of the letters and decoding procedures.These methods are well adapted [sic] for deep orthographies in which commonly occurring words contain letter structures which are inconsistent with the principles of simple grapheme–phoneme correspondence' (Seymour/Aro/Erskine)

Asking children to memorise scores of high frequency words (key words) as global 'sight words' is a dangerous practice and why no genuine synthetic phonics programme includes the learning of words as logographs. Firstly, because words viewed as whole units form abstract visual patterns which humans find difficult to memorise; examination of different writing systems reveals that the usual memory limit for whole words is around 2,000-2,500, since no true writing system, past or present, has expected users to memorise more than this number of abstract symbols. When children reach their visual memory limits they will struggle to read texts containing more unusual words if they haven't, in the meantime, been taught, or deduced, the complete alphabet code for themselves. Secondly, for most children memorising words seems easy at first and, if its use is encouraged, it will become their main strategy, subverting their phonological abilities and setting up a habit or reflex in the brain which can be hard to shift. This latter point has been conceded by whole-language proponent Professor Dombey; ''Children who have acquired quite a wide reading vocabulary in the earlier logographic phase may well need cajoling, repeated prompting and considerable support to tackle words analytically' (quoted in RRF 45 p8)

Homeschooling dad, Timothy Power, learnt the dangers of teaching global sight word memorisation the hard way. 'The skill of sounding out simple words, that she had been able to do shortly after she turned three, had been completely lost. If she didn't know a word by sight, she was stuck. Now, with that memory of hers that was able to memorize the 50 states by age two, she could get around this problem without too much trouble: she could just get someone else to read it for her a time or two, and then she would remember the word thereafter, and could even recognize it in new sentences. But this was still a work-around (although an effective one); even if a word was in her spoken vocabulary, she couldn't recognize it on the page if she hadn't seen it before in print, even if it was totally phonetically regular, with all short-vowel sounds. And when she came to these words she didn't recognize, she would try to guess, coming up either with nonsense words or with words that were similar-looking (same starting and ending letter, totally different middle), or with a synonym that bore no visual resemblance to the correct word on the page.' http://tdpower.blogspot.com/2007/09/phonics-vs-sight-recognition-reading.html

In a paper presented at the 2003 DfES phonics seminar, Ehri wrote “…when phonics instruction is introduced after students have already acquired some reading skill, it may be more difficult to step in and influence how they read, because it requires changing students’ habits. For example, to improve their accuracy, students may need to suppress the habit of guessing words based on context and minimal letter clues, to slow down, and to examine spellings of words more fully when they read them. Findings suggest that using phonics instruction to remediate reading problems may be harder than using phonics at the earliest point to prevent reading difficulties (www.rrf.org.uk/51%20In%20Denial.htm)

The mixture of methods is taught using books from whole-word reading schemes such as Oxford Reading Tree or storybooks chosen from Book Bands (a levelling guide published by the commercial arm of Reading Recovery). 'Today, most primary schools still insist that children read commercially available storybooks ('real books') or 'graded readers' before they have mastered the alphabet. This is equivalent to asking children to add or subtract before they can count to ten.' (Turner/Burkard. Summary) In stark contrast, in those schools that teach reading using pure synthetic phonics, (see method 3) 'children are not given books until they can read the words in them independently with reasonable accuracy.' (Turner/Burkard p22)

‘The selection of text used very early in first grade may, at least in part, determine the strategies and cues children learn to use, and persist in using, in subsequent word identification.... In particular, emphasis on a phonics method seems to make little sense if children are given initial texts to read where the words do not follow regular letter-sound correspondence generalizations. Results of the current study suggest that the types of words which appear in beginning reading texts may well exert a more powerful influence in shaping children’s word identification strategies than the method of reading instruction’(Juel and Roper/Schneider. Reading Research Quarterly 18)

Evidence shows that children perceive words in the way they have been taught to perceive them. The method used first, whether whole-word or synthetic phonics, forms a habit or brain conditioning that impedes the future use of the other method. This is the reason why it is more difficult to remediate difficulties in readers who have received faulty reading instruction for even a short period of time. With this in mind, parents should ignore the many publications available that advise parents to use whole word 'meaning' methods and encourage guessing. Typical of the type of advice given in these publications is, 'The 3P's, Pause, Prompt and Praise'; 'Pause if your child is unsure; wait a moment. Let your child look at the pictures and words to work out the meaning. Give a prompt or cue to encourage them to look more closely and have a go. Ask a question such as: What word might make sense? What would sound right? What does it start with? Praise all efforts. If your child is still unsure after trying, tell them the word so they don't lose the meaning of the story'

The children's author Dr. Seuss created his famous books using a controlled "scientific" vocabulary supplied by the publisher but was well aware of how useless this method was to teach children how to read. In an interview he gave in 1981 Seuss said, 'I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the twenties, in which they threw out phonics reading and went to a word recognition as if you’re reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds or different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. Anyway they had it all worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can only learn so many words in a week. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, " I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that’ll be the title of my book." I found "cat" and "hat" and said, the title of my book will be The Cat in the Hat. (Gatto p72-3)

www.syntheticphonics.com/pdf%20files/Synthetic%20&%20Analytic%20Phonics%20Teaching%20Principles.pdf What's the difference between synthetic and analytic phonics?

Diane McGuinness comments on the review of the Research Literature on the use of Phonics in the Teaching of Reading and Spelling, by Brooks, Torgerson and Hall www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR711_.pdf

www.ednews.org/articles/43/1/Abracadrabra-phonics-Balanced-magic/Page1.html Abracadrabra phonics

www.nrrf.org/essay_We_Do_Teach_Phonics.html What to do when you're told ' We do teach phonics'.

http://www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=79 Phonics and Book Bands.

www.coreknowledge.org/CK/about/CommonKnowledge/v19I_2006/v19_I_2006_greeneggs.htm Case for decodable text.

www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?t=1836 Goswami and the onset-rime theory

www.sitella.co.uk/sideline/diversions/rwt/ Victorian 'primer' Reading Without Tears

** Interestingly, since the release of the Rose Report there appears to be a government embargo on the use of the word 'synthetic' to describe the phonics method that they agreed to put into place. Labour government ministers use verbal gymnastics to avoid saying the 'S' word; ''REALLY systematic phonics'' or ''the approach we prefer'' (Ed Balls). Even Jim Rose seemed to feel it was politically expedient to avoid the 'S' word, if possible in his report and instead used the phrase 'high quality phonics'. This is unfortunate as the 'whole language' advocates have highjacked the word 'systematic' and regularly use it to describe their type of phonics (intrinsic /embedded phonics), with the justification that, ''the phonics concepts to be learned can still be presented systematically''.

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