Article in SEN - THE JOURNAL FOR SPECIAL NEEDS

[debbie]

I'm very pleased to say that I have just had an article published in this SEN magazine.

www.SENMAGAZINE.CO.UK

My article is about the contradictions which are evident in official advice in England. I provide plenty of evidence to show this!

No joined-up thinking

Government recommendations for teaching reading are putting out contradictory signals, says Debbie Hepplewhite. So which reading instruction methods are teachers expected to follow?

"As the synthetic phonics teaching approach positively excludes the use of multi-cueing reading strategies, a school cannot claim to be a 'synthetic phonics school' if it also uses the Reading Recovery type approach for intervention. Teachers and parents need to be alerted to this fact."

If anyone is concerned about being told or expected to use multi-cueing strategies for their weaker readers, then this article will be of very great interest.

[debbie]

For those of you who are new to how best to teach reading, please note the difference between multi-cueing reading strategies and multi-sensory teaching.

Multi-cueing reading strategies is a teaching approach which gives validity to techniques which can be very damaging to students learning to read. These include:

1) Learning words as 'whole shapes' for an initial sight vocabulary

2) Guessing words from various 'cues' or 'clues' such as pictures, first letter or letters of the word, the context of the sentence or the word 'shape'.

In contrast, multi-sensory teaching is about hearing words and sounds, seeing printed words and graphemes (letters and letter groups) in relation to their sounds, using high quality teaching and learning aids such as grapheme flash cards, purpose-designed posters, grapheme tiles for spelling words, handwriting - simple mnemonic aids as appropriate (aids to memory).

In the UK, a well-respected gentleman, Jim Rose, was commissioned by the government to undertake an independent review of the way reading was taught in the 'National Literacy Strategy'.

Jim Rose wrote a historic report (Rose Report, March 2006) which rejected the government's 'Searchlights' multi-cueing reading strategies. Rose made it clear that weaker readers should be given additional time and help to learn the same systematic phonics instruction that they received in mainstream teaching. In other words, the special needs intervention should reflect the SAME synthetic phonics teaching.

Whilst the UK government totally endorsed Rose's report and then brought out their own teaching guidance 'Letters and Sounds', other members of the government went on to promote a whole language intervention programme which is the opposite to the Rose recommendations (Reading Recovery).

In effect, this means that the strongest schools with the strongest pupils will provide synthetic phonics teaching - but the weakest schools with the weakest pupils will undermine any class phonics teaching by providing the opposite methods of Reading Recovery - or cheaper equivalent intervention programmes.

If anyone is interested in this state of affairs, you can read about it in great detail on the UK Reading Reform Foundation message forum at www.rrf.org.uk .