2. Mixture of methods / Range of Strategies / NLS Searchlights / Three-Cueing System / Eclectic Approach / Integrated Approach / Balanced Instruction (USA) / 4 Resources (Aus.) / 'Mix and muck-the-children-up method' (thank you Jeremy H!) incorporating: Analytic phonics / Intrinsic phonics / Contextualized phonics / Analogy 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)

Instruction in mixed method classrooms follows what is believed to be a biologically dictated, 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. Danish children ''experience difficulties in acquiring the logographic and alphabetic foundation processes which are comparable to those observed in English, although less extreme'' (Seymour/Aro/Erskine) Additionally, they exclude evidence from the Netherlands. Children in the Netherlands start school at the same age as British children (5yrs.old) but, along with the majority of European children, they learn to read and write accurately within the first year of school. ''Foundation literacy acquisition by non-English European groups is not affected by gender and is largely independent of variations in the ages at which children start formal schooling'' (Seymour/Aro/Erskine p150)

Though slightly less likely in England since the introduction of synthetic phonics, mixture of methods instruction usually begins with children memorising a bank of sight words (the high frequency words/HFWs) as global wholes, even if they are phonically regular. This is based on the unscientific 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..' (italics added. Prof.Dombey. Literacy Today 20). 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)

Early reading instruction in the old National Literacy Strategy (NLS) was based on whole-language, multi-cueing strategies (Searchlights); the NLS directors stated that, 'More extreme recommendations from phonics evangelists to teach children not to use other reading strategies alongside phonics, should be treated with great caution' (Stannard/Huxford p189). Then, in 2006, all of the Rose Review's recommendations, including that the NLS 'searchlights' strategies should be dropped and replaced by the 'simple view of reading', were accepted by the government. Now, even if synthetic phonics is being taught in class*, the use of banded, predictable / repetitive-text books for reading practice, by the beginning readers, is one of the main indicators that a teacher is continuing, perhaps unwittingly, to use mixed methods. Beginner readers have absolutely no choice but to use whole language strategies in order to 'get through' this type of reading book.

See - 10 reasons why beginning readers should only use decodable books (scroll down)

The main whole language strategy is predicting (guessing) using first letter, pictures, syntax and context cues (clues); 'Every child also needs a third key, careful guessing from context' (Prof.Dombey. Guardian Comment 30/04/08) 'Reading without guessing is not reading at all' (F.Smith. Psychology and reading).The other common strategy is 'onset and rime'. Until very recently, when teachers said that they ''always used phonics'' to teach reading, this is the type of phonics that they were usually describing; first the onset is sounded out (beginning consonants are taught as one unit, a 'cluster') 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 practice in orally breaking words into onset and rime (hence all the rhyme and alliteration activities used in mixed method classrooms), it is assumed that children 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/S.Ellis p4) The 'onset and rime' type of phonics is still used by specialist 'dyslexia' teachers.

www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=23 The ‘Searchlight Reading Strategies’

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; 'Sounding out a word is a cumbersome, time-consuming, and unnecessary activity. By using context, we can identify words with only minimal attention to grapho/phonemic cues' (Weaver. Reading process & practice: From socio-psycholinguistics to whole language) 'Many ways of teaching reading rely on children learning to ‘sound out’ words they don’t know, but in Reading Recovery we are sceptical of the usefulness of this approach' (Running Record. Dec. '04 p8)

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 excuse 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 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) ''The phonological complexity of syllable structures in English, coupled with the inconsistent spelling system, mean that direct instruction at levels other than the phoneme may be required in order to become an effective reader'' (Wyse/Goswami p.693)

Asking children to memorise scores of high frequency words (Dolch 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 [see above] may well need cajoling, repeated prompting and considerable support to tackle words analytically'' (quoted in RRF 45 p8) - and they will require even greater 'cajoling, prompting and support' to tackle words at the phoneme level of instruction having acquired the whole word habit.

Homeschooling dad, Timothy Power, learnt the dangers of teaching global sight word memorisation the hard way. He says, of his small daughter, ''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

'If children 'receive contradictory or conflicting instruction, most children prefer to adopt a 'sight word' (whole word) strategy. This seems 'natural', it is easy to do initially, and has some immediate success, that is until visual memory starts to overload...becoming a whole-word (sight-word) reader is not due to low verbal skills, but is a high risk factor in the general population, and something that teachers should curtail at all costs.' (emphasis in original. RRF51 p19)

In a paper presented at the 2003 DfES (now DCSF) '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 produced by Reading Recovery -see Room 101). '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)

'Students tend to perceive words in the way they are taught to perceive them. This appears to be the case whether or not they are taught in a transparent orthography (Cardoso-Martens 2001)' (Rice/Brooks p34) 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 any publications that advise them to use whole word 'meaning' methods and encourage guessing. Typical of the type of advice given in these publications for parents is, 'If they get stuck, encourage them to use all the available information and everything they know to make a guess. They should look at the pictures and remember what has happened in the story. Their ability to predict and guess accurately will gradually improve', and,‘(P)ause, prompt, praise’ helps – wait before you correct a mistake so that your child has a chance to get it right themselves, then give your child clues to help them get the word right, and finally praise them if they get the word right or even try to!'

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)
....................................................................................................

The use of whole-language books and the learning of the HFWs as global sight words, right from the start with beginning readers, is considered necessary by some advocates of the Dual Route reading model. They think that it is important to give students immediate and extensive practice in using a 'Direct Lexical route' to reading. ''A useful strategy for learning [HFWs] might be to learn them as sight words rather than decoding through them. By learning such a sight vocabulary children can begin to set up the direct lexical route to word reading'' (Flynn&Stainthorp p50). Advocates of the model (Coltheart/M.Stuart/Ehri/A.Ellis and others) believe that 'word recognition is the product of orchestrated activity that occurs within a number of different cognitive sub-systems [modules] which operate at least partially independently one from another'(A.Ellis p24), and that there are two, independent 'routes' or pathways the brain uses to read words; a fast, lexical/semantic route (see familiar printed word -> sequence of letters matches those of a word trace in whole/visual word store -> word meaning store -> finally, pronounce whole word) and a slower, sublexical/phonological route (see unfamiliar printed word -> no letter sequence match found in whole word store -> 'map letters onto their phonemes' in GPC store -> sound out word -> word meaning store)

Dual route model supporters acknowledge that 'teaching phonemic and alphabetic knowledge' to beginning readers IS necessary, though many think that this can be done through 'exposure to print' with embedded phonics. They say that this knowledge is important because it 'gives children a means of decoding words' but also because it 'sets up the sublexical route of the dual-route model' (Flynn &Stainthorp p50) The belief is, that once a word has been processed correctly a few times along the 'slower phonological route', a 'permanent trace' of the word is made in a soundless and size-wise limitless 'orthographic store' in the brain, with 'all letters of the word in correct sequence' (Rose Review 54), From then on, on being seen in print, words already in this 'visual word store' can pass immediately to a 'pre-existing store of word meanings' (Rose Review 52), with no phonological decoding being necessary. This hypothesis ties in conveniently with the whole language advocates' rhetoric of 'reading for meaning' and, for that reason, they use it in support of their cause (Dombey). The sublexical / phonological word-reading route is, followers of the theory say, only used as a back-up by the brain when the 'direct to meaning route' fails or a new word is encountered (Kerr p19-22, 44-50) Most of 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' (Flynn&Stainthorp p41)

A theory can be wrong despite being supported by many authorities, including those such as Coltheart who oppose whole language. The Dual Route model sounds intuitively correct but, in addition to lacking a credible research base, it was challenged convincingly by Glushko back in 1979, who argued correctly that the brain automatically processes ALL the information available about the input signal from each and every word in parallel, processing multiple modalities simultaneously (much of which does not reach consciousness) and processing is NOT carried out in separate pathways. Brain studies show that 'the process of mentally sounding out words is an integral part of silent reading, even for the highly skilled'. In addition, studies of the profoundly deaf (Aaron et al.'98), who have no phonological sensitivity, have found that they are incapable of learning to spell words correctly after the age of 8-9 years, because they cannot decode via the phoneme-grapheme route at all and rely on two visual processing modes: sight word memory (which is limited to approx. 2,000 words (D.McGuinness / Mair)) and by visual matching of spelling probabilities (the repetition of visual spelling patterns in words). This latter is something the brain does automatically, and we are not aware of it. This research clearly shows that skilled readers do not read words as wholes or as a sequence of letters, eschewing sound, as Coltheart and others believe. Additionally, research by Share, Siegel and Geva revealed that struggling readers behave much like deaf readers, relying mostly on visual information to decode words as they lack knowledge of the phonological information contained in words; the alphabet code. (D.McGuinness ERI. Ch10 -see below )

http://books.google.com/books?id=geCphXcHm30C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Early+Reading+Instruction#
Read sections of Diane McGuinness's book Early Reading Instruction online

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

http://www.ednews.org/articles/abracadrabra-phonics-balanced-magic.html
Abracadrabra phonics

www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/educn/educn029.pdf
The harm done by 'look and say'

http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=45
Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of “Balanced Reading” Instruction

http://tdpower.blogspot.com/2007/09/phonics-vs-sight-recognition-reading.html
Homeschooling dad, Timothy Power, learnt the dangers of teaching global sight word memorisation, the hard way

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
The case for decodable text.

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

www.balancedreading.com/3cue-adams.html
Marilyn Jager Adams: an expose of the three-cueing system (UK:Searchlights Aus:4 Resources):

http://www.ednews.org/articles/the-three-cueing-model-down-for-the-count.html
Hempenstall- Three Cueing System

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/class/Psy338K/Gough/Chapter5/three-cueing-system.html
Gough - Three Cueing System

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

*In England, the now most widely used synthetic phonics programme, the DCSF's Letters and Sounds (L&S), was produced purely as a fall-back programme for schools. It was never intended to completely replace the fully-resourced, commercial, synthetic phonics programmes already available. For that reason it was produced without any essential resources including decodable books. Many of the schools which are now using L&S have simply carried on using the school's old, banded, whole language reading books with their beginning readers. There are also schools using whole language readers alongside commercial, synthetic phonics programmes, despite the fact that all the commercial programmes produce linked, decodable readers. The use of whole language books for reading practice with beginning readers will damage the effective teaching of synthetic phonics, creating reading difficulties for a significant minority of children.

See - 10 reasons why beginning readers should only use decodable books (scroll down)

**That weasel word 'Systematic':
When government ministers use verbal gymnastics to avoid using the word 'synthetic' and substitute the word 'systematic' (''REALLY systematic phonics''&''the approach we prefer'' (Ed Balls) ''a traditional approach to the teaching of phonics'' (Lord Adonis)) it can appear as though there is a government embargo on the word which most accurately describes the phonics method that they agreed to put into place. Even Jim Rose seemed to feel it was politically expedient to avoid the word 'Synthetic' as much as possible in his final report and, instead, used the phrase 'high quality phonics'. This is unfortunate as the mixed methods advocates have high-jacked the word 'systematic' and regularly use it to describe their type of teaching using analytic / embedded / analogy phonics with the justification that, ''the phonics concepts to be learned can still be presented systematically''. www.readingrockets.org/article/254

Describing phonics simply as 'systematic' is wide open to abuse by those who wish to keep genuine synthetic phonics out of the classroom or who have no real understanding of the synthetic phonics principles, as can be seen by the following definition of 'systematic phonics' by a mixed methods advocate: '(P)honics instruction becomes systematic once a teacher knows the developmental progression of concepts to be taught, understands when and to whom the concepts should be taught, has a plan for methodically teaching the concepts, and keeps accurate records of her teaching and learning related to phonics' (www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/reviews/sound_systems/) Note that programmes simply have to be 'systematic' to be listed on the DCSF's phonics website, many are not based on synthetic phonics principles.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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