A new post from Marsha Bell

Wednesday, 10 February 2010

Teacher training is trickier
When all spellings have reliable sounds and the total number of spellings used is only 50 or fewer, as in all European languages other than English, teaching children to read needs very little training. Almost any literate adult can do it. It took my grandmother just a couple of weeks to teach me the sounds of Lithuanian letters and their common combinations, and I was able to carry on improving without further individual help from anyone. Most European languages can be learned equally easily. In Spain, nearly all children learn to read before they start school.Because English uses 185 spellings, 69 of which have variable sounds (as shown in my Dec 09 postings) and make learning to read much harder, it has to be taught by well-trained professionals. Government surveys in the UK have nearly all blamed its disappointing literacy levels on inadequate teacher training and poor teaching (e.g. Bullock [1975], Moser [1999] and Rose [2006]).Unfortunately, there is no complete agreement on what the best method for teaching reading is. There have been intense disagreements about it in all English-speaking countries since the 1950’s, ever since literacy standards began to be more carefully monitored and have invariably been found disappointing. Government advice on literacy teaching has since been repeatedly modified.Prior to the 1950’s, the approach was mainly that recommended by James Dunn in his 1766 book 'The Best Method of Teaching to Read and Spell English':1) begin with words that are absolutely regular,in the sense that they are pronounced in the way children would expect;2) build into the exercises material that unobtrusively revises earlier work;3) give special emphasis to the pronunciation of c and g, the first big difficulty;introduce other difficulties progressively.This common-sense method is quite similar to what is now called ‘phonics’ and which is in general use for initial literacy teaching once again. For most children, it works well. Teachers began to look for new approaches in the 1950’s only because regular testing was revealing that it left around 1 in 5 pupils functionally illiterate.Some schools tried introducing children to real books much earlier than was normal practice, reducing the use of specially constructed phonic texts which tend to be rather tedious. Others experimented with teaching more whole-word reading, with less emphasis on the sounding out of letters. Some schools even used a more regular way of spelling English (the Initial Teaching Alphabet, or i.t.a.) for the first year of literacy teaching, before switching to traditional spelling.Such experiments were carried out for several decades in all English-speaking countries, but since the early 1990’s, there has been a gradual return to greater use of phonics. The different experimental approaches did not reduce the 20% level of functional illiteracy any better than the 250-year-old traditional approach. But although phonics is now the most used method for initial literacy teaching in all Anglophone countries again, there is still lack of complete unanimity on the subject among teachers and education experts.There is disagreement about how early phonics teaching should begin, how long it should last and which particular phonic method is best (synthetic versus analytic). Publishers have produced many different phonic schemes, and deciding which one to adopt has become the latest headache for teachers. When they are doing what they are advised to do and working as hard as they can, but some of their pupils still continue to have serious difficulties with learning to read and write, it is easy to think that they must be using the wrong teaching materials.The fact that spelling inconsistencies make learning to read and write English uniquely difficult tends to be ignored. Many prominent advocates of phonics, such Debbie Hepplewhite in the UK, concede, “If only the code was as simple as a letter, or group of letters, representing any one particular phoneme, then the teaching and learning of the code would be speedy and straightforward”. This does not stop them maintaining that greater use of phonics and better teacher training is the answer to English literacy problems.
Posted by Masha Bell at 23:41
Labels: i.t.a., phonics, real books, teaching methods, whole-word