Help with dissertation- phonics in reception - Forum
I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on phonics particularly in reception aged children.too young? There are lots of heated debates on this at the moments especially surrounding the screening check, I wanted to focus on this for my dissertation......
I responded to a query about phonics for someone writing a dissertation - and got a bit carried away at the time...! See my comments via the link above if you're interested in this issue.
I may as well share my thoughts, however, because the 'paper' with my general observations of phonics practice has yet to be written.
What worries me is teachers in schools around the world knowing about the previous government's 'Letters and Sounds' publication are starting to use it -and worryingly teachers are led to believe that this is a full 'programme' when it is not (although the authors no doubt think it is as did the previous UK government).
Letters and Sounds is, in reality, just detailed guidance with some suggested randomly-picked games and activities and some examples of cumulative words and captions.
The underpinning synthetic phonics teaching principles are in the main fine, but no teaching and learning resources are provided, nor a 'mnemonic system' (aid to memory for learning the many letter/s-sound correspondences) although the use of a mnemonic system is recommended.
So, schools stating that they 'do' Letters and Sounds cannot really give you a proper notion of what that practice looks like - as school after school has had to resource Letters and Sounds to attempt to turn it into a body of work, that is - a full programme.
It is high time that the practices and consequences of Letters and Sounds Schools were more thoroughly examined, understood and compared with full systematic synthetic phonics programmes and practices.
Definitely general standards of reading and spelling in the infants have risen since Letters and Sounds was published - but general SP practice based on using Letters and Sounds, arguably, is in danger of not reaching the levels possible - nor fulfilling the potential of every child.
I'll be writing much more about these issues later and when I get enough time.
By the way, if you're interested in following the link above, I appear as 'Anonymous' although I'm not sure why. I think I inadvertently contributed to a specific forum where I needed to register to join under my own TES (Times Educational Supplement) user name of 'debbiehep'.