Decoding and word recognition

1. Decoding and word recognition PGCE English Tuesday October 12th 2010

2. OfSTED requirements • Trainees should be prepared for rigorous assessment of individual pupils’ phonic knowledge and skills • Trainees should understand links between phonic skills for early reading and for writing • Trainees should observe good teaching and assessment of early reading, including systematic phonics • Trainees should be observed teaching early reading where the feedback they receive from tutors and school mentors is quality assured so that it is sufficiently subject specific. • Trainees should have a clear understanding of the place of systematic phonics in supporting weaker readers in KS 2

3. Q14 & 15 • Have a secure knowledge and understanding of their subjects/curriculum areas and related pedagogy to enable them to teach effectively across the age and ability range for which they are trained. • Know and understand the relevant statutory and non-statutory curricula and frameworks, including those provided through National Strategies……….

4. Two, possibly three, things you need to do… • Download the Early Reading Portfolio on the English page and look through prior to SE – this goes across both practices. • Complete the Early Reading Audit by Week 4 – you’ll get nudged beginning of Week 5 if not complete. You need 100% • If you’re in Key Stage 1 you will be observed teaching early reading.

5. What is its purpose?

6. The Rose Report (DfES,2006): what it actually said • Best practice for beginner readers provides them with a rich curriculum that fosters all four interdependent strands of language: speaking, listening, reading and writing. • Far more attention needs to be given, from the start, to promoting speaking and listening skills • Despite uncertainties in the research findings, the practice seen by the review shows that the systematic approach, which is generally understood as synthetic phonics, offers the vast majority of children the best and more direct route to becoming skilled readers and writers.

7. Word recognition and text comprehension ‘Different kinds of teaching are needed to develop word recognition skills from those that are needed to foster the comprehension of written and spoken language.’ Rose (2006) Independent review of the teaching of early reading, Appendix 1, paragraph 18, page 77, London: DfES

8. OfSTED (2010) “Reading by Six” • “The foundations for competent reading and writing are laid down from the age of three to seven….. but the evidence suggests that we have not done these things consistently and persistently across all schools in the country.” (p.3)

9. Systematic synthetic phonics • Despite uncertainties in the research findings, the practice seen by the review shows that the systematic approach, which is generally understood as synthetic phonics, offers the vast majority of children the best and more direct route to becoming skilled readers and writers. (source: DfES (2006) The Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading)

10. Effective teachers of literacy “The ‘effective’ teacher of literacy uses an unashamedly eclectic collection of methods, which represents a balance between the direct teaching of skills and more holistic approaches. This means that they balance direct skills teaching with more authentic, contextually grounded literacy activities. They avoid the partisan adherence to any one sure-fire approach or method.” Hall, K & Harding, A (2003) A Systematic Review of Effective Literacy Teaching in the 4 - 14 age range of mainstream schooling in, Research Evidence in Education Library, London: EPPI Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education

11. But at the heart it should be about this… • Analysis of data showed that students whose parents have the lowest occupational status but who are highly engaged in reading obtain higher average reading scores in PISA than students whose parents have high or medium occupational status but who report to be poorly engaged in reading. Therefore, the researchers conclude that working to engage students in reading may be one of the most effective ways to break cycles of educational and social disadvantage. There was also evidence that reading newspapers, magazines and comics could be just as effective as reading books. Parents who discussed books, articles, politics and current affairs with their children also helped boost their literacy skills. • A seminal report - OECD (2000)

12. Word Recognition? Decoding and cracking the code

13. So, what does it look like? Watch: Chris is working with a small group of children who are in a Catch-Up group. This is Year 2, Autumn Term. There are four parts to a phonics lesson: Revise Teach Practise Apply What do you notice? What is important? What’s the learning?

14. Why is it so important that children learn word recognition and decoding? • Try decoding the following words by articulating each phoneme. How many can you actually read in this way? • and the bin dog too day • as me in off of pig • why with on to stop cat • Is up down pot tin pea

15. Letters and Sounds:The current PNS phonics resource • Developed by independent experts in partnership with the PNS • Meets criteria for systematic, high quality phonic work as set out in Rose (2006) • Notes of Guidance • Six phase teaching programme • DVD • CLLD website

16. Letters and Sounds • Phase 2 (p.48 - 50) • The letters, the sessions, the timetable • The how (p. 51 – 71) • Teaching sets • Practising letter recognition • Practising oral blending and segmentation • Teaching and practising blending for reading VC and CVC words • Teaching and practising segmenting VC and CVC words for spelling • Teaching and practising high-frequency (common) words • Assessment

17. Multisensory games • Phase 1(Nursery): games focus on hearing environmental sounds and later on letter sounds • Phases 2 – 4 (YR): games focus on hearing sounds in words, and on building up knowledge of all phonemes and their common graphemes • Phase 5 (Y1): games focus on consolidating phonic understanding and on developing use of more complex graphemes for spelling • Phase 6 (Y2): games focus on spelling complex graphemes and on parts of words (morphemes) like prefixes and suffixes

18. The code • 44 (ish) phonemes • phoneme: smallest unit of sound in a word • A phoneme can be represented by 1, 2, 3 or 4 letters: to, shoe, night, through • A phoneme may be represented in different ways graphemically: rain, may, lake • The same grapheme may represent more than one phoneme: mean, deaf

19. For example • Phoneme /ai/ ( is heard as a long vowel sound) • Graphemes way, weigh, grey, rain, feint, skate,

20. The code within the code • Onset and rime (w-ay) • Digraph (rain) • Trigraph (night) • Quadrigraph (weigh) • Split digraph (skate) • Consonant blend (feint), • Morpheme

21. Tricky words • These are words that are inaccessible with simply blending and segmenting because they don’t conform to common letter-sound correspondences. • Yacht, meringue, what, the, by, some • An effective phonics package will explore these and support children in reading and spelling high frequency irregular words

22. What matters in phonics teaching • It matters that: • You know the 44ish phonemes and their various graphemic representations • You understand that children need to both blend and segment using the letters and sounds that they have learned • You use a multisensory approach which develops children’s phonemic awareness and lets them have some fun with sounds and spelling • You understand the details of the particular phonics programme you are teaching with (and how it is enhanced/supported by using resources from another if this the case) • That you understand how children develop as readers by reading empirical research in to early reading development. • That you are engaged with the most recent debates on the teaching of phonics and with the recommendations of the Rose Report (DfES, 2006)