Commons Select Committee: Invitation to comment on strength of evidence for phonics instruction

Last week I was directed to this by Susan Godsland (thank you Susan).  Deadline is 12^th December if you’d like to submit a comment, my contribution is below (note: maximum 5000 characters):

The Education Committee invites views on the strength of the evidence in relation to the current policy on Phonics and various methods of learning to read.   http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/education-committee/dfe-evidence-check-forum/phonics/

My comment:

In terms of additional research focusing on synthetic phonics instruction in UK schools, I would like to direct the Education Committee to the following papers (see below).  I believe the strength of evidence for synthetic phonics instruction is increasing; however we need to be critical of the evidence, impartial and ensure we rely on high quality research to inform this debate.  In response to the paper produced by the UK Parliament, I’ve also commented on a couple of points:  

The following papers may be of interest to inform the discussion of phonics in UK schools:

Papers A and B below examine synthetic phonics in depth and show that this is a particularly effective method for children starting school with weak reading readiness skills (e.g., poor letter-sound knowledge) and also for children with weak language (i.e., vocabulary) skills.  Therefore it is important to consider individual differences (see point below) when considering the effectiveness of phonics instruction. In addition, for schools implementing a systematic synthetic phonics method of instruction, these papers show the skills children are relying upon as they learn to read by this approach:

A) McGeown, S. P., & Medford, E.  (2013). Using method of instruction to predict the skills supporting initial reading development: insight from a synthetic phonics approach.  Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 27, 591-608.

B) McGeown, S., Johnston, R., & Medford, E.  (2012).  Reading instruction affects the cognitive skills supporting early reading development.  Learning and Individual Differences, 22, 360-264.

Paper C compares the long term effects of synthetic phonics vs analytic phonics instruction in UK schools. 

C) Johnston, R. S., McGeown, S., & Watson, J. E. (2012).  Long term effects of synthetic versus analytic phonics teaching on the reading and spelling ability of 10 year old boys and girls.   Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 25, 1365-1384. 

Papers D and E deal specifically with concerns regarding the irregular nature of the English orthography and show that use of decoding skills/a phonological approach is actually beneficial, not detrimental, to irregular word reading.  This is evidence against the idea that the English writing system is too irregular for a phonics focused approach to be effective:

D) McGeown, S. P., Johnston, R. S., & Moxon, G.  (2013).  Toward an understanding of how children read and spell irregular words: the role of nonword and orthographic processing skills.  Journal  of Research in Reading, 37, 51-64.

E) McGeown, S. P., Medford, E., & Moxon, G. (2013).  Individual differences in children’s reading and spelling strategies and the skills supporting strategy use.  Learning and Individual Differences, 28, 75-81. 

Copies of papers can be accessed via: https://edinburgh.academia.edu/SarahMcGeown

Comments on points within the UK Parliament document specifically:

“UK and international research shows overwhelmingly that systematic phonics teaching,

in a language-rich curriculum….”. 

I think it is critical that you continue to highlight that phonics is an effective way to teach children to read new/unfamiliar words, but is not a method to teach children the meaning of these words.  I think this distinction is often confused (i.e., phonics is criticised because children don’t learn word meanings through this approach; however that is not the function of phonics).  Therefore phonics needs to be presented to teachers within a context; phonics is an effective method to teach children to read new words; however children should also be exposed to literature and a rich linguistic environment to develop their language and reading comprehension skills (e.g., via story book activities etc). 

“Sound evidence that systematic synthetic phonics programmes produce greater growth in reading than other reading programmes, and this is especially effective for younger, at-risk readers (National Reading Panel, 2000b)”

Again, I think this point is crucial.  There is huge variation among children in the reading-related and cognitive skills that they start school with and a systematic synthetic phonics method of instruction is potentially most effective for children starting school knowing very few letter-sounds and with weak language skills (see Papers A and B above).  However, teachers are experiencing very different student intakes and this may explain the differing views regarding the effectiveness of phonics instruction.  We need to appreciate that the effectiveness of a synthetic phonics approach may differ based on student cohort.  The argument that ‘one size does not fit all’ does not mean that we should be teaching children a range of strategies to read new words (e.g., former ‘searchlight’ model), but rather that we should be finding the most effective method to teach children based on their cognitive profiles (i.e., reading and language skills).

Acquiring reading and spelling skills – what’s the difference?

Being able to read and spell are two essential literacy skills which children acquire during their primary schooling.  Indeed, there is often a close correlation between children’s ability to read and spell (i.e., children who are good readers are typically good spellers and likewise poor readers are typically poor spellers).  Despite reading and spelling being similar skills (in that they are both literacy skills), they are different in several respects.  For example, of the two, spelling is typically harder; while reading requires the recognition of printed word(s), spelling requires the production of word(s).  In addition, in English, the writing system exhibits bidirectional asymmetry; that is, phoneme-to-grapheme mapping is more ambiguous than grapheme-to-phoneme mapping (Fletcher-Flinn, Shankweiler, & Frost, 2004).  In other words, there are more phonetically plausible ways to misspell words than there are to misread them.  Anyone who has seen children’s spelling errors, or carried out an analysis of children’s spelling errors will understand this.  For example, the word ‘circle’ can be spelt by children in a variety of interesting ways - serkul, sirkil, sircul, sercil, circel, cricel, cricle, and many more…..  Indeed, these different spelling errors provide us with good insight into the skills and strategies children are drawing upon as they attempt to spell (see McGeown et al., 2013).  In contrast however, the number of different ways in which the word ‘circle’ can be read (incorrectly) is fewer. As a result, higher quality lexical representations (i.e., a better ‘visual’ image of the word’s spelling pattern) are arguably more important for spelling than for reading. 

In a recent study, my collaborators and I distinguished between two different types of reading and spelling strategies (phonological and orthographic) using children’s reading and spelling errors and examined the relationship between children’s (n = 172, aged 6-8) use of these strategies and their performance on tests of word reading and spelling (words were chosen to be unfamiliar to children).

A phonological strategy reflected a greater dependence on using letter-sound rules (e.g., reading ‘pint’ to rhyme with ‘mint’ or spelling ‘tuna’ as ‘choona’), while an orthographic strategy reflected greater use of the visual/letter information in words (i.e., errors were orthographically (i.e., visually) similar to the target word, e.g., reading ‘wart’ as ‘want’ or spelling ‘knife’ as ‘knif’).  We assessed how use of these strategies correlated with irregular and standardised word reading and spelling performance. 

In reading, while a phonological reading strategy correlated strongly and positively with word reading skills, an orthographic reading strategy was inversely related with word reading skills.  Therefore, making use of letter-sound information seems to be a much more effective way to read unfamiliar (including irregular) words, than attempting to recognise the word as a visual whole.  On the other hand, for spelling, greater use of an orthographic strategy was positively correlated with spelling performance, while use of a phonological strategy was unrelated to spelling performance. 

So what are the educational implications of this research?  Firstly I would argue that children should be taught and supported to use a phonological strategy to read; that is, be given phonics instruction so that they can learn to effectively use letter-sound rules to read new and unfamiliar words.  This approach will be more effective than teaching children to recognise words as visual wholes and encouraging them to use a strategy based on this. However, the results for spelling were different; children need to have good ‘visual’ representation of the word to be able to spell it correctly.  How do they achieve this?  One way is through reading; once a child has read a word several times within text they will then have a better visual representation of that word and therefore be better placed to accurately spell it.  Therefore good reading skills can precede good spelling skills; ensuring children receive guidance in effective reading strategies is therefore crucial.

 

Correct spelling:  circle, tuna, knife

 

Examples of orthographic spelling error:  cricle, tunea, knif

Examples of phonological spelling error:  serkul, choona, niyf

 

References:

Fletcher-Flinn, C. M., Shankweiler, D., & Frost, S. J. (2004). Coordination of reading and spelling in early literacy development: An examination of the discrepancy hypothesis.  Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17, 617–644.

McGeown, S. P., Medford, E., & Moxon, G.  (2013).  Individual differences in children’s reading and spelling strategies and the skills supporting strategy use.  Learning and Individual Differences, 28, 75-81.

See link for Teacher Summary Poster: “Children’s strategies for reading and spelling irregular words”

https://edinburgh.academia.edu/SarahMcGeown/Summaries-for-teachers