This section, covering the teaching of reading, is necessarily long as it is the most crucial area where a child's educational development and progress is concerned.

According to the Director of the National Literacy Trust (Guardian Education Oct 7. 03) there was no 'golden age' when the majority of our children were readers. History says otherwise. Prior to 1870, before state education was introduced in the UK, literacy was 92% (E. G. West p163). 'The Poor Law Commission in 1841 found that 87% of workhouse children in Norfolk and Suffolk between the ages of nine and sixteen could read...' (Mount p178) Literacy was 98% in the USA, before 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state to introduce compulsory schooling (Richman) Literacy was considered essential so people could read the Bible, but writing was not taught as it was thought that too much education would give common folk ideas above their station and result in civil unrest; Hannah More (1790), who established Sunday Schools for working class children, is quoted as saying, 'I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make them fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety' (Kerr. p85).

Back in the days when parents assumed complete responsibility for their children’s education, reading was instinctively taught in the only common-sense way using phonics and sounding-out. There was none of today's ‘balanced literacy’, ’fit the method to the individual child's learning style’ or ‘predict (guess) the word from the context, the picture, first letter or its shape’ (!!) nonsense. Children were taught HOW to read, not left to decipher the alphabet code for themselves. Nowadays the same ‘miracle’ of 90+% literacy AND children who love literature does still occur, but you have to go to schools which have ditched the old, flawed DCSF programmes and are using a genuine, synthetic phonic programme first, fast and exclusively (and enthusiastically!), to see it happening.

In 1911, G. Stanley Hall, an American professor of education wrote regarding dyslexia, 'It is possible, despite the stigma our bepedagogued age puts on this disability, for those who are under it not only to lead a useful, happy, virtuous life, but to be really well educated in many other ways' (Quoted Ravitch p358) Attempts to put a positive 'spin' on dyslexia still occur today - dyslexia as a gift! Guy Hands, who owns music giant EMI and has severe dyslexia, 'hates people who say "dyslexia is no bad thing, look at all the famous people who have got it". He will not shirk from saying: "I really wish I could read" (Observer. 13/01/08)

Martin Turner, (former) head of psychology at the Dyslexia Institute (now Dyslexia Action), thinks it is a 'travesty' to talk about dyslexia as a bonus when it causes such suffering:'' It's a myth that there are compensatory gifts. Dyslexics go into the visual arts like sheep head for a gap in the hedge. They aren't more creative, they are more stressed.'' (Jardine) In a review of the research on dyslexia, Dr. Rice and Professor Brooks came to the same conclusion. ''On anecdotal evidence (Davis, 1994; West, 1997), the belief that ‘difficulty in learning to read is not a wholly tragic life sentence but is often accompanied by great talents’ (Stein & Talcott, 1999) may seem attractive. However, systematic investigation has found little if any support for it.'' (Rice/ Brooks p18) The 'dyslexic' journalist A A Gill confirmed this view when he wrote, 'In truth, of course, dyslexics end up in the art room or the music studio or the drama class after school, because it’s the only place they aren’t special-needs remedial. They get good because they can’t do anything else.' (Times 08/04/07 The Fish Club)

The ability to read and write well is central to an happy and successful passage through life in our society. Professor MacDonald says, 'My own research on the psychology of adult illiteracy has amply demonstrated that the ability to read is probably the most significant factor (out of many) in determining a person's sense of autonomy and self-worth.'(MacDonald p5) Intellectual independence also relies on good reading skills.'Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself.'(Gatto p56) Reading failure correlates with aggressive, anti-social behaviour more strongly than any social or economic indicator. (Turner/ Burkard p13)

You do not have to delve very far into the world of educational academia to discover the so-called 'Reading War'. This is a long running and acrimonious debate between those educationists who say that children should be taught to read using phonics only and those who insist that mixed-methods work just fine. (Kohn p159) The controversy extends into the progressive education community where many members take the more extreme 'whole-language' position. They insist that all children can and will learn to read through informal 'discovery' methods only, given enough time (and a print-rich environment) just as they learnt to walk and talk. (Fortune-wood p47-8, Williams p75) see method 1 'The essential constructivist principle is that teachers should teach nothing directly, but rather function as coaches while their students basically teach themselves'. Professor Stephen Krashen, 'a self-described 'staunch defender' of whole-language strategies, believes that "(A)ny child exposed to comprehensible print will learn to read, barring severe neurological or emotional problems...Kids learn to read by reading'' (Allen)

For an idea of the difficulty involved in learning to read using an alphabet code, look at this re-coded, first line of a well-known nursery rhyme and work out what it says: ytoxto hruxsz ub ldyyuos xtmo (Answer at the base of this page) This example provides the adult reader with some idea of the child's first experience with print. If you stared at this passage for years, you wouldn't have the slightest idea how to decode it. Why then should we expect a child to decipher the English alphabet code, one of the most complex ever designed, without direct instruction? (McGuinness WCCR p17)

Advice, commonly given, that the choice of method to teach reading should depend on your child's particular learning style, is totally incorrect (Lowe/Thomas p19 Armstrong p60-63). Although this advice sounds, on the face of it, sensible and reasonable, it does children no favours. See Learning Styles for information and research. The multi-SENSORY issue is too often used as an excuse to promote multi-STRATEGY teaching, i.e. a mixture of methods (see Reading method 2 ).

Research shows that all children are predominantly reliant on auditory skills to learn to read successfully (Macmillan p126-132) As Mona McNee says, 'We read with our ears. We spell with our ears' (McNee p3) Children who have acquired a dominant visual (whole-word) learning habit as a result of poor teaching need more practice in the auditory aspects of reading and will not be helped by any method that reinforces their strong visual tendencies. This does NOT mean that time should be spent solely on listening (phonological) skills. Research shows that what develops children's reading skills best is time spent working with the sounds AND letters together. “Teaching children to manipulate phonemes using letters produced greater effects than teaching without letters (NRP. 2000). Lessons should be multi-sensory with lessons designed so that spelling and reading are connected at every level of instruction via looking (visual memory), listening (auditory memory) and writing (kinaesthetic memory).

It's true that for the majority of children it doesn't seem to matter which method or combination of methods is used to teach them to read. Even if taught with purely whole-word methods many children eventually discover that there are patterns in words and 'take off' (Macmillan p55) Sadly, a large percentage of these supposedly 'good readers' will have had a more difficult time learning to read than is necessary, will remain poor spellers and may be unable to read the more unusual words found in adult level literature and advanced educational texts (school English books contain around 88,500 different words (D.McGuinness ERI p216). The insidious effects of whole-word methods create young people who dislike reading and writing and are the cause of the vast numbers of teenagers who 'stall' in their studies at the secondary stage.

Parents may be concerned that their children will be damaged if they start to teach them to read at too young an age, having heard that it is dangerous to impose anything 'developmentally inappropriate' on young children. There is no scientific basis to this idea. Jim Rose noted that, ''(T)here is ample evidence to support the recommendation of the interim report that, for most children, it is highly worthwhile and appropriate to begin a systematic programme of phonic work by the age of five, if not before for some children...'' (Rose Review. 89) ''...an appropriate introduction to phonic work by the age of five enables our children to cover ground that many of their counterparts in other countries whose language is much less complex phonetically do not have to cover''(Rose Review. 99)

Many parents have successfully taught children much younger than five to read, using a suitable synthetic phonic programme. 'Once a child can read independently, the growth of many other skills is promoted…' (Research cited- Macmillan p72) 'Reading...opens some important doors...it gives the young learner a degree of autonomy and independence...also gives a child access to the whole culture of literacy. Reading makes it possible... to have access to vast quantities of stored knowledge...' (Howe '97 p154) The increased reading experiences of children who crack the spelling-to-sound code early..have important positive feedback effects. Such feedback effects appear to be potent sources of individual differences in academic achievement (Stanovich. Matthew Effects p364) Furthermore, delaying the start of formal instruction can be detrimental to boys, '...the largest reading ability sex differences in the world occur in countries such as Denmark, Finland and Sweden where children don't start school until age 7.' (RRF 51 Macmillan)

''Currently, the most vehement opponents of synthetic phonics are the Early Years lobbyists. Their belief system has it that teaching five- year olds to read is detrimental to their physical and mental well-being. They quote Finland where children do not begin ‘formal teaching’ until much later and learn to read easily to bolster their case...But there is nothing ‘formal’ about synthetic phonics teaching. It is multi-sensory and fun and can be achieved in 30 minutes a day, leaving several hours to be filled by child-initiated play, sand, water, painting, outdoor play, you name it.'' (Shadwell)

Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, is one of those who tars synthetic phonics with the 'formal' brush (and advocates the 'balanced' approach to literacy teaching www.suepalmer.co.uk/balance.php which results in reading failure for a large percentage of children) yet she freely acknowledges the huge benefits of being able to read and write; 'The very process of learning to read, 'the getting of literacy', is a hugely important part of children's intellectual and social development. (R)eading leads to a significant expansion of children's ideas, vocabulary and the capacity to express themselves.' (Palmer 2006. p200-1)

The term ‘formal’ in the pejorative sense in which phonic work is sometimes perceived in early education is by no means a fair reflection of the active, multi-sensory practice seen and advocated by the review for starting young children on the road to reading (Rose Review. Summary p3)

The Early Years opponents of synthetic phonics prefer to ignore the evidence from Denmark. 'Danish shares with English the features of a deep orthography and a complex syllable structure. In Denmark children do not enter primary school until they are 7 years old. Despite this 2-year age advantage, they experience difficulties in acquiring the logographic and alphabetic foundation processes which are comparable to those observed in English, although less extreme' (Seymour/Aro/Erskine)

'In countries with a straightforward alphabet writing system, where each sound is represented by only one symbol, learning to 'crack the code' takes about twelve weeks for all children' (McGuinness GRB p9) '(C)hildren from a majority of European countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year'(Seymour/Aro/Erskine). Also, unlike in the UK, many European countries teach literacy using a quick, simple and confidence-building method - synthetic phonics; letter names and sight words are not taught. The result of this combination of a transparent alphabet code and the synthetic phonic method is that, 'poor readers (children who can't decode) are rare to nonexistent in many European countries' (McGuinness GRB p240)

''(O)ur alphabetic system is not transparent as it is in Finnish, where there is only one way to spell each sound in the main. Our code needs to be introduced carefully from the simple to the more complex by teachers who understand it themselves. Left until six, our children will already have developed look and stare strategies, along with guessing and be well on the way to making a dog’s dinner of understanding the code.''(Shadwell)

http://www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=22 Sue Lloyd's timetable for the introduction of reading and writing skills.

Evidence suggests that many readers who have been taught through the use of whole-word 'discovery' methods are handicapped by their lack of phoneme awareness ability and knowledge of the alphabet code. As a result they have difficulties reading unfamiliar real words, pseudowords and with spelling. Test pseudoword ability with Ruth Miskin's Nonsense Word Test: http://www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=103

This evidence is further supported by some fascinating research carried out by Just and Carpenter which looked at the eye movements of readers. This showed that, despite appearances, expert readers do not skip words or look at words as 'wholes' but attend to and process the individual letter/sound correspondences in every word as they are reading (Research cited -Macmillan p68)

Individual letter analysis is necessary because many words differ from another by only one or two letters - sad/said house/horse treat/threat. If, during reading, many words are guessed at and misread it can completely change the sense of the text making it a meaningless, confidence-sapping exercise.

The eye movement research underlines the fact that there are two meanings for the term 'sight word' - there is the most common understanding of 'sight word' as a word which is learnt as a global whole by memorising its shape and prominent letters. This is advocated by teachers who use mixed-methods. They say it gives children a quick start as once a few of the high frequency words have been memorised the children can go straight into story books and feel that they are real readers.

The second meaning of 'sight word' is a word that a EXPERT reader has read many, many times before. As a consequence they read it so fast that they APPEAR to read it as a whole-word. The eye-movement studies show that they are still decoding all-through-the-word but this is done at a subconscious level. Only when the skilled reader comes to an previously unencountered word do the skills of decoding come back into consciousness.

Read the following (real) book title to examine your own decoding skills. As a expert reader who implicitly understands how the Alphabet Code works, you'll find yourself tracking through the unusual words slowly left to right, one sound unit at a time, blending the sounds as you proceed. 'Nonscience and the Pseudotransmogrificationalific Egocentrified Reorientational Proclivities Inherently Intracorporated In Expertistical Cerebrointellectualised Redeploymentation with Special Reference to Quasi-Notional Fashionistic Normativity, The Indoctrinationalistic Methodological Modalities and Scalar Socio-Economic Promulgationary Improvementalisationalism Predelineated Positotaxically Toward Individualistified Mass-Acceptance Gratificationalistic Securipermanentalisationary Professionism, or How To Rule The World'. Brian J. Ford (Wikipedia. Nonscience)

'(R)ecent brain studies show that the primary motor cortex is active during reading, presumably because it is involved with mouth movements used in reading aloud. The process of mentally sounding out words is an integral part of silent reading, even for the highly skilled' www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/pspi/reading.pdf

The most important socialising force for a child is their peer-group. The influence is especially strong during middle-childhood (6-12 yrs) (Harris p226). This factor needs to be considered in the reading equation. A child, whose everyday, same-sex companions, in school or out, consist of other children who think that reading is not 'cool', will copy those attitudes, ignoring those held by parents or other significant adults. This is another important reason for teaching children to read as early as possible, before any anti-book, peer-group influence takes hold.

All early language stimulation will accelerate a child's mental development with permanent advantages. 'All the evidence shows that the major predictor of becoming a good reader is the development of good language skills during the early years of life.' (McGuinness GRB p9-10) With this in mind, looking at books and reading together should begin in babyhood and be an active exercise. Good preparation for learning to read, with nursery age children, is the practice of oral segmentation; as you talk to your child split the sounds of key words such as 'drink your j-ui-ce', 'it's o-n the ch-air', 'find your c-oa-t', 'here are your sh-oe-s'...This is a gentle introduction to how words work.

Being able to read is not purely a matter of intelligence. Children with low IQs and mental handicaps can learn the mechanics of reading (decoding). This can be seen clearly in a condition called hyperlexia; the children concerned are amazingly good readers but because of the accompanying mental disability, their reading comprehension is poor. Mona McNee, founder of the UK Reading Reform Foundation, taught her own son to read using synthetic phonics, despite the fact that he has Down's syndrome (McNee p8). The researchers Cossu, Rossini and Marshall found that Italian Down's syndrome children could 'read' quite competently having been taught the transparent sound-symbol correspondences of the Italian alphabet code but they lacked comprehension of what they read. 'Overall, a broad range of studies from a variety of disciplines show that no child, short of being deaf, mute, or grossly mentally disabled, is prevented by a language delay or deficit from learning 'reading mechanics'. (McGuinness LDLR p12)

There is a widely circulated myth that too much emphasis on phonic instruction causes children to 'bark at print / word-call'. 'There is no research evidence indicating that decoding a known word into a phonological form often takes place without meaning extraction. To the contrary, a substantial body of evidence indicates that even for young children, word recognition automatically leads to meaning activation..when the meaning of the word is adequately established in memory. (RRF 50 Stanovich p8)

''Experienced practitioners and teachers point out that, in the course of phonics teaching, as children 'start to get the hang of it', they begin to self-teach and 'need to read a lot to consolidate their skills', that is, to develop effortless reading and focus more and more on comprehending the text. At this point, children may appear, some would say, to be 'barking at print' without fully understanding what they are reading. Although this is often levelled as a criticism of phonic work, such behaviour is usually transitional as children hone their phonic skills. Given that even skilled adult readers may find themselves 'barking at print' when they are faced at times with unfamiliar text, it is hardly surprising that children may do so in the early stages of reading'' (Rose Review 49)

Research, studying factors that predict children's reading ability, showed that in Britain the strongest predictor at age seven was the mother's level of education rather than the child's IQ (McGuinness WCCR p29). 'When teachers don't teach, the education children receive from their parents becomes of paramount importance, and the children of ill-educated parents are at an overwhelming disadvantage' (Burkard.2007.p30)

It's interesting to note that a small number of children (mostly girls) learn to read when they are very young without any formal instruction, seemingly by 'osmosis' of the words around them. They have inherited a natural talent for hearing and monitoring the phoneme level of speech, a good auditory memory and a gift for visual detail. In addition they will have had a great deal of parental interaction where books are concerned. With this lucky combination of nature and nurture they have managed to figure out on their own how the alphabetic code works.

Parents need to be aware that widely varying degrees of the inherited subskills helpful in learning an opaque alphabet code can occur amongst siblings. It is not unknown for one child in a family to have learnt by the 'osmosis' method whilst another has the 'potential to muddlement' (McNee p81). Time spent on a effective programme (see Resources10) will be worthwhile and the younger the child the easier and less onerous the job will be. Parents have a big advantage here as evidence suggests that how fast a child learns to read is directly related to the amount of one-to-one instruction received (McGuinness WCCR p30)

The alphabet is used as a letter code for the phonemes in speech and like all codes it is difficult to decipher without the correct, and complete 'key'. The English alphabet code is particularly difficult to learn. It is 'opaque' due to the Norman-French, Danish, Latin and Greek spelling systems which, over time, were mixed in with the original (635 A.D) transparent, Anglo-Saxon system. 'For example, ch is used to spell /ch/ in Anglo-Saxon words such as chair; is used to spell /k/ in Greek derived words such as chorus; and spells /sh/ in French-derived words such as charade and Charlotte (Moats)

English, French and Danish are the European languages with the most 'opaque' alphabet codes. English and Danish also have a complex syllable structure. Finnish, Spanish, Swedish, German, Norwegian and Italian are much easier to learn as they have a majority one-letter/one sound correspondence.

Because our alphabet has only 26 letters (graphemes) many of the 44 sounds (phonemes) in our language have to be written as combination of two letters- a digraph (e.g. wh), three letters - a trigraph (e.g. igh) or even four letters (e.g. eigh). Most sounds can be represented in several different ways (e.g. the sound /s/ can be spelt sip, house, city, sword, castle...) and some graphemes represent more than one sound (e.g. great, clean, bread / touch, sound, soup). There are 176 common ways to spell the 44 phonemes, accounting for around 90% of words in print.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article2701376.ece Ruth Miskin has made it her mission to cut through political correctness and bring C-A-T reading back into schools. The former primary head teacher believes it is a scandal that primary schools can be judged 'satisfactory' if children leave illiterate and that by using phonics every child can be taught to read.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article696238.ece Some Sound Reading Advice: With one in five 11-year-olds unable to read properly, Ruth Miskin offers advice on teaching to concerned parents ''For parents I have one message. To make sure your children don’t slip through the holes in any future reading nets, never again assume that the responsibility of teaching your children to read belongs solely to someone else. Try doing it yourself too, using a phonics strategy. Let’s have no more casualties in the reading wars'' (Sunday Times 26/03/06)

www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmeduski/121/121.pdf House of Commons Education&Skills Committee publication: Teaching Children to Read, published March 2005.

www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/phonics/report.pdf Rose Report: 'Independent review of the teaching of early reading', published March 2006.

James Delingpole: My kids can read, in spite of school: Educationists have long known there is an idiot-proof method of helping our children to become literate. So why are pupils being denied the key to all learning?
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article3215774.ece

www.ruthmiskinliteracy.com/pdf/comprehendingdecoding.pdf Comprehending Decoding.

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring_sum98/cunningham.pdf
Why learning to read early is so important

www.uoregon.edu/~bgrossen/pubs/cdp.htm Child directed practice

http://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa/v4n8.html Developmentalism.

www.educationnext.org/2001sp/34.html Romancing the Child.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,746473,00.html Lost for Wurds

www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring2003/AE_SPRNG.pdf Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge..

www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/pdf/pspi22.pdf How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading. For more information on eye-movements in reading, see p46-48

www.sntp.net/education/The_Reading_Wars.htm The Reading Wars.

www.americanreadingforum.org/98_yearbook/html/01_monaghan_98.htm Phonics and Whole Word/Whole Language Controversies, 1948-1998:

www.minettemarrin.com/minettemarrin/1998/12/ Scroll down to: December 17. The teachers' plot to make our children into failures.

www.minettemarrin.com/minettemarrin/2002/12/why_do_they_mak.html Why do they make teaching reading harder than ABC?

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1641343,00.html Spelling out why black schoolboys fail

www.nrrf.org/87_med_mal.htm Medical Malpractice and its Reading Instruction Analogy.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1418481,00.html 'When words fail them: Shockingly, a quarter of our children leave primary school illiterate. So why ignore the solution?'

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-958696,00.html The secret life of a French schoolteacher. France.

www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAAD6.htm A French Lesson.

www.lire-ecrire.org/ Le site de l'enseignement de la lecture et de l'écriture. France.


www.donpotter.net/PDF/Illiteracy%20in%20America.pdf Illiteracy in America - Free, online book.

www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/index.htm Interviews with some of America's finest teachers, literacy institution leaders, brain scientists, and others involved with the teaching of reading.

www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/pspi/reading.pdf
How should reading be taught?

http://mams.rmit.edu.au/i1n9s3d6xzi5.rtf Literacy quotes compiled by Kerry Hempenstall.

www.sedl.org/reading/topics/jabberwocky.pdf Decoding and the Jabberwocky's song.

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
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''The child who can't read says, "What is this word?" The child who can read says,"What does this word mean?" (Ruth Miskin. TES. 13/1/06)
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Answer: London bridge is falling down

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