The new National Curriculum now requires teachers to use decodable texts with children learning to read. Children are offered ‘controlled’ texts that include words they can decode independently, using the phonic knowledge they have been taught. These decodable texts enable pupils to focus on a specific spelling or group of spellings at each level. Pupils can become proficient, confident and independent at each stage of learning to read.
Why is this important?
When teaching children to read with Synthetic Phonics, teachers are trying to achieve two main goals:
- the recognition of spellings (graphemes) within words and the sounds (phonemes) they spell
- the use of blending as the primary strategy for decoding new words.
New concepts, knowledge and skills need to be practised so that they are remembered and internalised. When we teach children number bonds, we give them exercises to practise each specific skill. We don’t slip in a few multiplication sums when multiplication skills have not yet been taught. We isolate what we are trying to teach so that the pupil becomes proficient and fluent. Once pupils have learned a skill or gained knowledge, they are able to progress to the next level. That is the scaffolding needed for teaching anything new.
What happens if we offer children books to read with words they cannot yet decode?
Children who cannot decode a word seek other cues on the page: pictures, context, grammar, initial sounds or a part of the word they can read. This encourages them to guess. Guessing is unreliable and leaves pupils stranded once pictures are no longer there. It also leads to inaccurate reading and poor comprehension.
For example, if a pupil uses the first few letters of a word to guess it, they may easily guess the word incorrectly: could it be ‘response‘? ‘responsibility’? ‘responsible’? ‘responsive’? Take a sentence like this: ‘It is the responsibility/response/responsible/responsive of the community to provide services for the elderly.’ A pupil who cannot decode the word accurately will not comprehend the sentence.
In the past, there has been a mismatch between the phonics lessons taught and the books that children are then offered to read. In the lesson, the teacher may have followed a phonic programme, but the reading books that followed did not reflect the reading level of the pupils. They did not restrict the text to what the pupils could read independently, using what they had been taught; therefore, guessing was encouraged.
Offering children decodable texts to read is offering them reading exercises. This is needed at only the early stages of learning to read. Once children are fluent, they will take off, equipped with good strategies to work out any new words they encounter.
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.
Very interesting article….our kids always used http://kidslearntoread.net instead of hooked on phonics, but the teaching principles are similiar. Certainly the books they receive from teachers don’t take into account their individualized past learning.