Debbie Hepplewhite's SyntheticPhonics.com

[graeme]

i have recently been told by the SENCO at my school that a boy I am teaching to read is not ready for the level of phonics I am working on with him.
The boy in question is in year three and could not read any words when I first met him. He knew about half the letters of the alphabet.
He seems no less capable of learning GPCs than most children – in fact, he’s picking it up faster than some of the other children who were previously ahead of him. He’s still a bit wobbly on some diphthongs like ‘oa’ and ‘oi’, and he occasionally gets mixed up still about ‘p’s and ‘b’s. But he’s perfectly able to read words like ‘strap’ and ‘shelter’ – most of the phase four words in Letters and Sounds.

My question is:- given that I have been banned from continuing with any words with more than one syllable or with adjacent consonants, what is the best thing to do?

To give some more of the SENCO’s side of things – as far as I can understand what she said to me:-
"He doesn’t read text, he may decode flashcards but he guesses at the words in books. He doesn’t have enough words he can read on sight – he slowly blends almost everything.
We need to get him reading text, for which purpose we must give him only books from the very lowest few bands."

I am worried that his skill in blending and segmenting words will atrophy, because the lowest banded books in our school don’t seem to have much to do with phonics. They repeat a few simple words on each page (e.g. 'I am...') and one variable (e.g. 'laughing') - together with a picture of someone laughing.

I hope you might have some ideas for the best way I can carry on teaching this child to read.

[Debbie Hepplewhite]

You are absolutely right to continue to teach this boy the letter/s-sound correspondences and to be concerned about the use of the early books in the Bookbands catalogue.

If he is demonstrating that he can learn the elements of the alphabetic code as fast, and sometimes faster, than his peers, why has this poor lad arrived in Year 3 with just the knowledge of a few single letters - oh my goodness?

Sadly, this is usually the product of a school that isn't completely into phonics and where whole language type activities - including reading the type of books in the early bookbands catalogue - has weakened or undermined any phonics teaching. It may also occur when children transfer from other schools or had a slow start at learning when other children were taught the code.

If a school understands fully about the 'synthetic phonics teaching principles', then any child going up into Year 3 would already have significant alphabetic code knowledge and competent skills in blending all through the word for reading and segmenting all through the spoken word for spelling - and understanding that there are different 'spelling alternatives' with which to spell the sounds.

Sadly, it is not uncommon for some Reception teachers to get off to a good start with some phonics teaching, but then key stage one teachers don't know how to build on this - or simply don't have good enough programmes of work to give them the structure and content to continue early phonic work. Or, quite simply, even the Reception class may not have provided any background in phonics.

I am totally in agreement with you, also, about this business of 'what length' words learners should be provided with to practise their blending.

I have to say, however, that there has been some restriction on the UK government's guidance, Letters and Sounds, where the teaching stages are called 'phases' and where these restrict teachers from introducing words of cumulative letter/s-sound graphemes with a variety of word length and structure. I think this is misguided.

It means that no matter what the ability of the learners, they are all restricted with the word exposure. It means that learners are not seeing and hearing modelled longer words.

In any event, by Year 3 this 'phases' should have been presented to learners some time ago.

OK - let's work with the scenario you have described:

1) The Bookbands cataloguing system is designed on the basis of books where the early books consist of repetitive and predictable text with lots of picture clues. Leading edge synthetic phonics schools would not give children these types of books to go alongside the phonics teaching. They would give children books consisting of the alphabetic code that has been taught to date to ensure that children CAN blend the words and that children DON'T guess the words from multi-cueing (that is, multi-cueing includes guessing from the picture clue, the repetitive and predictable text, the context of the sentence and the first letter).

Some publishers of cumulative decodable text (the kind of books we need in infant settings whilst children get to grips with a fuller alphabetic code) have even declined to be 'bookbanded' and made the point that the Bookbands catalogue is not in line with synthetic phonics teaching.

[graeme]

I'm not sure if my computer might be malfunctioning, or there's something about the electronic protocol here that's eluding me, but your reply seems to terminate rather abruptly.
It's true that the school I teach in is less than rigorous in its approach to phonics (it runs Reading Recovery, Catch Up, and the SENCO herself is trained in RR), but I think the reception teachers are very good at it - I don't know if they have always been - perhaps this boy didn't do the reception year anyway. I really have no idea how he's got this far through his school career without being able to read.

[Debbie Hepplewhite]

graeme - I am so sorry - I DID end abruptly because I was interrupted by phone calls and then my three year old granddaughter arrived for me to look after her. Granddad is watching over her now for 'supper' whilst I complete my message and I found yours in the meantime!

Where was I?

Your further email puts everything into context for me. I can tell you that the Catch-Up programme and Reading Recovery are whole language, multi-cueing approaches and these are not at all in line with the Rose recommendations or the government's 'Letters and Sounds'.

This is a terrible dilemma. It means that the slower-to-learn children (for whatever reason and there are many) will be receiving an intervention approach which is not based on teaching the alphabetic code systematically, nor putting to use (in blending and segmenting) the code knowledge learnt by the learners.

Schools which use Reading Recovery and Catch-Up invariably use the type of reading books in the Bookbands catalogue which, as I said in my email above, are repetitive and predictable text - not cumulative, decodable books.

As a committee member of the UK Reading Reform Foundation and as an experienced primary teacher, I have been challenging the government's guidance for many years. First this was regarding the lack of research for the government's 'Searchlights Reading Strategies' model - in effect, multi-cueing - and then when the government changed its advice to synthetic phonics teaching as described in Letters and Sounds, it was basically inexplicable why the slower and weaker children were to be given the Reading Recovery and Catch-Up type programmes.

These programmes are established, well-known and associated with the universities of the Institute of Education and Oxford Brookes University. Is this about 'the establishment', then, and not about the research on reading?

At first the government and the Reading Recovery personnel have tried to argue that they are 'compatible' with the Rose recommendations and mainstream teaching - but they are not.

More recently, I have heard from a representative of Jim Knight's department (Jim Knight is Schools' Minister), that they acknowledge that Reading Recovery is not in line with Rose - but they claim that it is in line with Gough's 'Simple View of Reading' which is the model suggested by Rose as most representative of the processes involved in reading.

Of course this is to totally misunderstand the Simple View of Reading model and it is once again being very slippery. It is absurd to say that a programme is both not in line and in line all at the same time!

So, where does this leave you and your pupil in your school?

I hardly know where to start. You see, the problem you have raised is not about just your Year 3 boy who sounds like he has had mixed methods teaching which has not served him well - and which the school sounds as if they are set to continue if they use the RR and CU programmes! These are just 'more of the same' of what has failed the boy already. This is actually typical of the national scenario and the dilemma in many local authorities. Ed Balls, Gordon Brown, Jim Knight - and many others - have yet to account for their contradictory messages about 'what' methods teachers should use for 'which' learners. Jim Rose himself, however, makes it clear that the intervention programme should fit in with the mainstream programme and NOT the other way round.

Your options are many:

-quietly ignore the Senco and continue to teach the boy alphabetic code knowledge and rehearse the skills of blending and segmenting with words of a range of lengths and structures - basically as your common sense has already led you to try. [Note that whilst the authors of Letters and Sounds diplomatically dipped into various leading-edge phonics programmes for the letter/s-sound correspondence introduction and other aspects of practice, the other programmes did not have 'phases' and did not restrict word length].

-acquire some cumulative, decodable reading books as soon as you can and do your best to persuade the school to invest in this type of books for beginner readers and for struggling readers.

-if book acquisition is not possible, write some simple text which matches the code knowledge of the boy.

-and/or - draw to the attention of the school that Reading Recovery and Catch Up are not the best programmes for intervention - far from it - and point to the UK Reading Reform website and downloadable newsletters where we provide evaluations of these programmes at www.rrf.org.uk .

-lead the staff at looking at the various issues to do with methodology and testing.

-consider, if budget is available, investing in my Phonics International programme which will provide you, the boy and the school of everything it needs in terms of resources to teach synthetic phonics systematically and effectively - including cumulative decodable word banks of short words, longer words, sentences and text.

In other words, there is the easy way out and the more challenging way out - and it has to be your decision how to move forwards.

Good luck!

Have to dash again!

[Debbie Hepplewhite]

graeme - I am not satisfied with the fact I haven't helped you more.

If you email me privately, I'll provide you with some text.

Please can you tell me 'which' letter/s-sound correspondences the boy knows and which order you are teaching him in.

Have you seen my Alphabetic Code Overview Charts which are FREE for anyone to use with any synthetic phonics programme?

If you have, have you considered using them in school?

Look at my order of introduction and try to find the 'unit' which best fits where the boy is in terms of code knowledge.

See www.phonicsinternational.com .

There is also some new assessment material on the homepage of this website. How does you boy fare with the no. 13 Say the Sounds Poster assessment?

[graeme]

you shouldn’t feel bad that you haven’t helped me more – i don’t see what you can do, really.
The Special Educational Needs department of any school, I imagine, disposes of a considerable and growing budget. And it would appear to be in their best interests to mystify the process of learning to read. In my more cynical moments it seems to me they’d even be quite happy to ensure that some kids go through school matching up laminated pictures of cats and hats.

I had a good look at the order of introduction you use in your phonics method, and it’s so fundamentally different to the one used in Letters and Sounds (that I use, because the school does), that I don’t think you’d have any text I could use.
The boy I need to try and help knows the following GPCs – and I have taught him them in this order:-
s, a, t, p/ i, n, m, d/ g, o, c, k/ ck, e, u, r/ h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss/ j, v, w, x/ y, z, zz, qu/ ch, sh, th, ng/ ai, ee, igh, oa, oo/ ar, or, ur, ow, oi/ ear, air, ure, er.
In other words, phase three of this method teaches ONE grapheme correspondence to each of the vowel phonemes in English. Phase five introduces more grapheme correspondences.
In your method, you introduce a phoneme such as ‘eɪ’ and then give all the (non-split-digraph) grapheme correspondences (‘ai’, ‘ay’, etc) to that phoneme in that phase.
[It interests me that you introduce (say) ‘table’ in this phase, though. Why?]

At any rate, I suppose the text you have will be geared to your order of introduction, and the text i’d need would be geared to the L&S order – so I’ll just have to write some myself!
Again, please don’t feel bad about not being able to do much about this – you’ve given me some of your time and expertise, it’s made me feel a lot better, and I really appreciate it.

[Debbie Hepplewhite]

Graeme - I'm sure that the text I can provide you will serve both you and the boy well!

If he has learnt all those graphemes and he can blend (which you say he can), then he can certainly read the texts of my programme. You can easily highlight any graphemes within a piece of text which you might not have taught him yet - in fact, just go on to teach him!

Also, you may well be able to persuade the school to change from Letters and Sounds to Phonics International. I assure you that my programme has huge advantages over Letters and Sounds - not least being the fact it has a massive amount of colourful and cumulative material of every kind needed - and Letters and Sounds has none!

The reason I teach (at the end of unit 2), the single vowel letters as code for their 'long vowel sounds' is because this makes so many early useful words decodable pretty early on in the teaching cycle - such as 'he, me, be, able, table, [plus split digraphs], old, most, gold, kind, mind, find, my, try, fly' - and so on.

Letters and Sounds does not introduce this code until much later on in the programme.

For the boy's sake and yours, do email me for the material - no obligation to use it if it isn't suitable when you see it!

Note that I never succumbed to fitting in precisely with the Letters and Sounds guidance - because I've produced something much better.

I look forward to the comparative research if anyone wants to undertake it!

Time will tell.