Currently we are sharing an international conversation as Stephen Krashen has appeared as the 'star speaker' in an event in South America. Teachers have raised their worries, however, because Krashen's views of education do not align with their own knowledge and experience about the need for, and effectiveness, of systematic synthetic phonics teaching - consequently conversations are being shared via email.
This is the paper by Krashen that was being circulated and questioned by teachers:
http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articl ... _early.pdf
Grace went to some considerable trouble to read, re-read and write her thoughts about Krashen's paper and so I thought it would be well worth flagging up her commentary on what she read here:
How right Grace is.I read Krashen´s paper in depth this morning again, and trying to restrain my growing irritation that arises every time I come across this kind of papers .... How can they not understand????
Anyhow this is now my proper reply:
Conclusion:
Krashen´s quest is against American Educational Policy which focuses on early direct teaching enforced through intensive testing, starting in preschool. He is also very against it, in that it does not support the 24% of children who live in poverty with inadequate diet, health care and less or no access to books.
(We might be in favour of all these!)
All of the bibliography stated in his paper is before 2007 being only one of 2009 but written by him himself! Most of the bibliography is his, by the way. There is none from the UK, and after 2007.
So,
what is the audience of this paper? US educational policies
what is the purpose of this paper? Show US Edu.department that they are wrong and they must address the nation´s needs!
The thing is that by doing so, he is mixing everything and what is worse, he is misleading to a misunderstanding of what is reading acquisition and what about writing? and what about ESL reading and writing acquisition..?
Krashen has developed a theory of second language acquisition which is of good value and many things he states are true. From the point of view of language acquisition it is more than advisable the naturalistic approach against the rule based approach. He is an advocate for whole language approach....
Krashen does not have an expertise on the acquisition of teaching children how to read and write. And the aspect of him being American is an issue, taking into account US culture and social policies towards less advantage population (health care and education specially)
Krashen focuses on Reading COMPREHENSION.
I agree that reading comprehension is the objective for reading, what he does not understand is that in order to get efficient reading comprehension there is an earlier stage or step to be covered, which is the basics of reading: Phonics.
Thing is that he does not understand thoroughly what SYNTHETIC PHONICS (SSP) is, (he does not mention SSP in his paper, but intensive phonics instruction).
In SSP if a word is within the oral vocabulary of the reader, the decoding process will automatically activate the meaning of the word. Good alphabetic code knowledge and efficiency in the blending skill supports the comprehension of text. (Floppy´s Phonics, Debbie Hepplewhite, 2011)
He talks about learning rules, not SKILLS. Nobody learns by rules only, rules are set to understand why things are done in certain way and to be followed, out of context. Rules are authoritative statements of what can or cannot be done in a particular system or situation, in this case would be spelling and pronunciation rules.
Skills are abilities, skills are the learnt abilities to carry out a task, skills are abilities that one possesses.
Phonics teaches abilities, domain specific skills: blending and segmenting; and teaches the English Alphabetic Code. Phonics does not teach the rules of the letter sounds correspondences! This is his mistake. Krashen does not understand that phonics teaches letter sound correspondences and its alternative spellings together with the two important skills of blending and segmenting for writing. (other issue he does not address: writing).
As he is all focused on Language acquisition and reading Comprehension, he overlooks writing.
Regarding PA (phonemic awareness), children with or without PA training can learn to read and "write". PA is not a must for learning to read and write. But PA helps the process enormously and that is proven all around the world and in a variety of languages apart from English.
50% of childrern can learn to read without a specific method or in spite of it or even with a bad reading instruction. These children can even learn on their own, they self teach, they have very good memory, they are motivated at home, they have wide vocabulary, they are healthy and live in good home environment generally speaking. These children might not need PA.
But there is another 50% who are not as able, and those take a lot of advantage from PA and direct systyematic phonics method specially synthetic phonics and not analytic phonics (AP)(phonics based by Krashen), what is more AP is totally not good for them and worse whole word approach or whole language for reading.
The other important thing Krashen does not understand is, that Systematic "synthetic" phonics (SSP) is NOT against reading comprehension, on the contrary, The Simple View of Reading from Sir Jim Rose addresses both areas: Language comprehension and word recognition.
Krashen does not know that SSP is the first step and then comes the higher reading skills such as inferring, deducing, comparing, contrasting, drawing conclusions and evaluating the text and...learning from the text. And he thinks that by teaching "his" intensive phonics all of the comprehension is not taken into account, which is not true, as all of the comprehension is dealt with even with isolated decoded words and whole texts read by the teacher in the first instances which are analysed in terms of comprehension orally.
It is sad to see how this respected people such as Krashen, get mixed and entangled in a weak web of bla bla just to go against government.... or just to "be right", or some of them just to continue" selling their children´s story books" (Michael Rosen...?)
When I got to the part of his paper when he tackles the issue of "starting late" to read and then gets into The limited impact...and which rules?....oh...he lost it...
In Limited impact: all of what he states is from the 1990´s! and just the first paragraph is all about, again, government educational policies "...the ability of doing well in tests of decoding..."
In Which Rules? he states Johnson 2001 ! Krashen here clearly shows how little he understands about Synthetic phonics when he talks about teaching the rules such as a-e which is not taught as a "rule" but an alternative spelling of the first relationship phoneme grapheme /ai/, then all of the other spellings for that sound are taught in later stages and progressively for the acquisition and never as spelling rules unless the child asks for it. Children learn words with that certain sound /ai/ but which are spelt with other grapheme than the one they know.
So this is Krashen´s HUGE MISUNDERSTANDING or not understanding at all.
He then gives more examples: ho saying that it can be sounded in different ways such as: ho in hot, ho in hoot, ho in house, ho in hour, ho in honey.....Oh how is he so confused!!!
/h/ is one phoneme and /o/ is another and /00/ is another and /ou/ is another....!!! so /h/ /ou/ /se/ are 3 phonemes not ho and then u and the s and e.....!!!! If he knew he would have stated that /o/ /ou/ /our/ /o-e/ are all different phonemes which contain the letter o in common, and he could have gone further saying that for the phoneme /ou/ there are other two ways of spelling it: ow and ough! This shows how little he knows about the English Alphabetic code...well ...does he know it exists? as he never mentions it!
Regarding learning to read and write as a second or foreign language, he does know little of it too.
The acquisition of any language starts ORALLY first, i.e listening and speaking and then comes reading and writing. It is very good to teach the second language the more "natural" as possible and in context such as Krashen states, but teaching to read and write is something different, it cannot be left so "natural", as reading and writing are representations of our spoken language, and in our case it is the alphabetic one.
For Second language synthetic phonics has proven to be most helpful in terms of the right pronunciation acquisition and spelling, in that helps children to identify the particular production of each of the English phonemes and their spelling correspondence in so avoiding the Spanish hypothesis or influence. SSP has brought light and clarity to the learning of reading and writing of ESL.
With SSP, Spanish speaking children are now very able to pronounce the English sounds more accurately and therefore spell well based on English hypothesis, making the whole process of acquiring reading and writing in English more simple and less frustrating and confusing.
Remember that I encourage schools from around the world teaching English as a second or new language to take advantage of the free provision of the English Year One phonics screening check.
I heard from one school recently, The British School of Costa Rica, where they did exactly that - and sent me their results for 2013 - 88%! The children achieved higher results than the national average result in England itself! Here the national average result for 2013 was 69% reaching or exceeding the 32 out of 40 words benchmark!
So, whilst Krashen and others promote a view of education which does not resemble the provision of systematic synthetic phonics teaching, more and more schools are just getting on with SSP and speaking of their fantastic results.
Note: Same teachers, same children, same issues, change of approach to systematic synthetic phonics, fantastic results for all the children!
