Phonics-Practice, Research and Policy - 173p-1 PDF

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Phonics
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Phonics
Practice, research and policy
Edited by
Maureen Lewis and Sue Ellis
Paul Chapman
Publishing
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© Maureen Lewis and Sue Ellis 2006
Chapter 1 © Kathy Hall 2006

Chapter 2 © Morag Stuart 2006
Chapter 3 © Sandra Farmer, Sue Ellis and Vivienne
Smith 2006
Chapter 4 © Lyndsay Macnair, Sally Evans, Margaret
Perkins and Prue Goodwin 2006
Chapter 5 © Jackie Marsh 2006
Chapter 6 © Elspeth McCartney 2006
Chapter 7 © Laura Huxford 2006
Chapter 8 © Henrietta Dombey 2006
Chapter 9 © Moya Cove 2006
Chapter 10 © Michael Rosen and others 2006
Chapter 11 © Sue Ellis and Maureen Lewis 2006
First published 2006
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Paul Chapman Publishing

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Contents
Contributors viii
Introduction
Phonics: The Wider Picture 1
1 How Children Learn to Read and How Phonics Helps 9

Kathy Hall
2 Learning to Read the Words on the Page: The Crucial

Role of Early Phonics Teaching 23
Morag Stuart
3 Teaching Phonics: The Basics 34

Sandra Farmer, Sue Ellis and Vivienne Smith
4 Inside the Classroom: Three Approaches

to Phonics Teaching 45
Lyndsay Macnair, Sally Evans, Margaret Perkins
and Prue Goodwin
5 Involving Parents and Carers 60

Jackie Marsh
6 Developmental Issues: Speaking and Phonological

Awareness 71
Elspeth McCartney
7 Phonics in Context: Spelling Links 83

Laura Huxford
8 Phonics and English Orthography 95

Henrietta Dombey
v
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vi Phonics: practice, research and policy
9 Sounds Familiar: The History of Phonics Teaching 105

Moya Cove
10 Responses to Rose: The Final Report of the Independent

Review of the Teaching of Early Reading 113
Maureen Lewis, Sue Ellis, Rhona Stainthorp, Jennifer Chew,
John Stannard, Jonathan Solity, Michael Rosen, Dominic Wyse
and David Wray
11 Using this Book for Staff Development 129

Sue Ellis and Maureen Lewis
Glossary 135
References 143
Index 153
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Contributors
Jennifer Chew is a retired teacher of English to students aged 16-plus. It was

the spelling problems of these students, many of whom were academically very
able, which led her to become interested in the way that beginners were taught
to read and spell, and to realize that the methods used in Britain from at least
the 1960s onwards had under-emphasized the teaching of the alphabetic code.
Since 2004, she has edited the newsletter of the UK chapter of the Reading
Reform Foundation, an organization which was formed in 1989 to campaign for
phonics teaching to be restored to its proper place.
Moya Cove is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Glasgow

where she teaches on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in teacher
education. She has worked in partnership with a number of Scottish education
authorities to support national and local literacy initiatives and with the Scottish
curriculum body (Learning and Teaching Scotland) to develop national curriculum
support materials. Her research interests include the area of early literacy
development, formative assessment, early years provision and teacher education.
Henrietta Dombey is Professor Emeritus of Literacy in Primary Education at

the University of Brighton. Since the start of her teaching career, when she was
confronted with a class of 7-year-olds with very little purchase on written
English, she has been passionately interested in the teaching of reading. This
interest has encompassed attention to phonics, children’s knowledge of the
syntax and semantics of written language and the interactions between teachers,
children and texts that appear to be productive of literacy learning.
Sue Ellis was a primary teacher in London before joining Strathclyde

University. She is currently a Reader in Childhood and Primary Studies and her
main work involves research, teaching and consultancy in the fields of language,
literacy and children’s literature. Her publications speak to teachers,
policymakers and researchers, although her main research interests are in the
development of children as writers and in the pedagogies of home and school. She
teaches students on all four years of the B.Ed degree and also works with qualified
teachers on continuing professional development.
Sally Evans is a Key Stage 1 teacher and works in a London primary school. She
is subject leader for literacy and is fascinated by children’s literacy development
as they move through the primary years.
vii
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viii Phonics: practice, research and policy
Sandra Farmer is Senior Teacher Adviser in Lancashire, with particular

responsibility for Primary English and SpLD (Dyslexia) – from Early Years
through to Further Education. She has taught in a variety of schools – secondary,
primary and also in the arena of special education since 1970. Recently she
edited English Four to Eleven on behalf of the United Kingdom Literacy
Association (UKLA).
Prue Goodwin works part time at the University of Reading and spends the rest
her time working freelance for schools, LEAs and children’s publishers. She has
published several books including The Literate Classroom (2000), which she
edited, and Teaching Language and Literacy in the Early Years (2002), which she
co-authored with Margaret Perkins.
Kathy Hall is Professor of Education at the Open University. She researches in

the areas of literacy, assessment and classroom interaction and her work has
been published in numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is the
author of Listening to Stephen Read: Multiple Perspectives on Literacy (2003b) and
Literacy and Schooling: Towards Renewal in Primary Education Policy (2004). She
has directed a number of research projects and is currently completing a
project on rural childhoods in the Republic of Ireland. She is president elect of
the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA).
Laura Huxford was director of professional development in the National

Literacy Strategy in England, where she was responsible for the production of
materials for teachers on phonics and spelling: Progression in Phonics (DfEE, 1999a)
Playing with Sounds (DfES, 2003a) and Year 2 and Year 3 Planning Exemplification
and Spelling Programme (DfES, 2003b). Her background is in primary teaching,
teacher training and research into children’s developing ability to read and spell.
She is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford investigating
the development of children’s oral language.
Maureen Lewis is an independent education consultant and Honorary

Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. She has been a primary teacher,
university researcher and lecturer and a regional director for the National
Literacy Strategy (NLS). She has published many books, articles and classroom
materials and authored several of the NLS training materials. She is
currently involved in an action research project with a group of leading literacy
teachers, investigating how teachers can support the development of reading
comprehension.
Lyndsay Macnair is Deputy Headteacher at St Ninians Primary School in

Stirling; she has taught across Central Scotland, England and New Zealand.
She has responsibility for Early Years but has a particular interest in Pre-school.
She is currently developing a Documentation approach to learning within the
school nursery in conjunction with Stirling Council. She is actively involved in
promoting enterprise within the school and taking it into the community. Her
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Contributors ix
work in this area has recently been highlighted in a case study published by
Learning and Teaching Scotland.
Elspeth McCartney lectures in the Division of Speech and Language Therapy,

Educational and Professional Studies Department, University of Strathclyde,
on speech and language disorders in children. She holds qualifications as both
a teacher and a speech and language therapist, and has published extensively
on speech and language therapists and teachers working together. Her research
field is language therapy for children with language impairment in schools.
Jackie Marsh is Reader in Education at the University of Sheffield, where she

is involved in teaching on masters and doctoral programmes in literacy and
early childhood education. Her research is focused on young children’s use of
popular culture, media and digital literacy in homes, schools and early years
settings. She is currently President of the United Kingdom Literacy Association
(UKLA).
Margaret Perkins lectures in literacy education at the University of Reading,

where she is the course director for the Primary Graduate Teacher Programme.
She is co-author of Teaching Language and Literacy in the Early Years (Goodwin
and Perkins, 2002).
Michael Rosen is a well-known poet, writer and broadcaster. He published his

first children’s book in 1974 and continues to write best-selling books and
poetry for children. His wide-ranging interest in literature and literacy includes
presenting BBC radio’s Word of Mouth and hosting Reading Aloud on Teachers’
Television. He is a visiting lecturer on children’s literature at London Metropolitan
University.
Vivienne Smith lectures at Strathclyde University in the Department

of Childhood and Primary Studies. She is interested in the development of
children as readers, and especially in how they interpret text and make it
meaningful.
Jonathan Solity is a lecturer in Educational Psychology and Honorary Research

Fellow at University College London. He has led a number of research projects
into the most effective ways of teaching literacy and maths to raise attainment
and prevent learning difficulties. He has written six books and numerous articles
on the psychology of teaching and learning, psychological assessment and the
teaching of reading and maths.
Rhona Stainthorp is a Professor of Education in the School of Psychology at the

Institute of Education, University of London. She has been involved with
teacher education at all levels for the last 30 years. Her research interests are in
the psychology of reading and writing development including spelling and
handwriting. She believes passionately that knowledge of the research evidence
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x Phonics: practice, research and policy
from cognitive and developmental psychologists about the development of

reading should be part of the training of all primary teachers.
John Stannard has spent his professional life in primary education as a teacher,
teacher trainer, local authority adviser and inspector. He joined Her Majesty’s
Inspectorate in 1986 and later, as Ofsted’s specialist English adviser, set up the
National Literacy Project in 18 under-performing LEAs. Subsequently, he
designed and directed the National Literacy Strategy for five years, retiring in
2000. Since then he has worked as an international consultant for CfBT, an
independent company, advising and supporting governments on national
strategies for raising standards in the Caribbean, South-East Asia, the Middle
East and Canada. He is visiting Professor at the University of Southampton,
Department of Education and, in 2000, was awarded a CBE for services to
education.
Morag Stuart is Professor of the Psychology of Reading at the Institute of

Education in London. She spent some 16 years teaching children in Key Stage 1,
and therefore was delighted to discover, when she started a part-time evening
degree course in psychology at Birkbeck College in the mid-1970s, that there
were research psychologists who devoted their working lives to investigating
what is involved in reading the words on the page. Prior to this she had no idea
why some children learned to do this almost without teaching and others
struggled, however hard she tried to teach them. She began her own research
into the development of word reading skills in the early 1980s, and continues to
find this a fascinating topic.
David Wray taught in primary schools for 10 years and is currently Professor of
Literacy Education at the University of Warwick. He has published over 30
books on aspects of literacy teaching and is best known for his work on
developing teaching strategies to help pupils access the curriculum through
literacy.
Dominic Wyse is a lecturer in Early Years and Primary Education at the

University of Cambridge with a specialism in the teaching of English, language
and literacy. His work in the last few years has particularly focused on the
extent to which the pedagogy of the National Literacy Strategy is informed by
evidence. His most recent research article looked at the teaching of grammar
and pupils’ word choices, and was published in 2006 in the Cambridge Journal
of Education. His most recent book is The Good Writing Guide for Education
Students (2006).
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UKLA is a registered charity, which has as its sole object the advancement of
education in literacy. UKLA is concerned with literacy education in school and
out-of- school settings in all phases of education and members include
classroom teachers, teaching assistants, school literacy co-ordinators, LEA
literacy consultants, teacher educators, researchers, inspectors, advisors,
publishers and librarians.
The Association was founded in 1963 as the United Kingdom Reading

Association. In 2003 it changed its name to the United Kingdom Literacy
Association in order to reflect more accurately its wider range of concerns.
Through the work of its various committees and Special Interest Groups, the
Association is active in a wide variety of areas, both nationally and internationally.
UKLA works with a range of government and non-governmental agencies on
issues of national interest. The Association is also committed to the funding and
dissemination of high-quality national and international research projects that
include practitioner- researchers.
UKLA provides a forum for discussion and debate, together with information
and inspiration. We do this through our wide range of conferences-
international, national, regional and local – and our publications, which
include a professional magazine, ‘English 4-11’, and two journals, ‘Literacy’
and the ‘Journal of Research in Reading’. This series of co-published titles with
Sage Publications complements our range of in – house publications and
provides a further opportunity to disseminate the high quality and vibrant work
of the association. In order to find out more about UKLA, including details
about membership, see our website: http://www.ukla.org
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Lewis(phonics)-3436-Introduction.qxd 8/21/2006 6:25 PM Page 1
Introduction
Phonics: The Wider Picture
Learning to read is a vital foundation to becoming a literate, educated person.

Reading offers opportunities for enjoyment, for increasing our knowledge of
the world and for enhancing our imagination and creativity. It also gives people
access to improved life chances – success or failure in becoming a reader is a
strong indicator of future progress in school and beyond.
Throughout the developed world therefore governments are giving great priority
to literacy and are asking schools to ensure that children reach certain standards
of reading achievement. In England, for example, this is manifest in the ever-
increasing targets set for the number of children reaching the expected reading
level for their age group as measured by national tests. In America the No child left
behind legislation focuses on literacy teaching and pupil literacy achievement, again
measuring children’s performance with state-administered tests. In Australia the
government has recently concluded a National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy
(DEST, 2004) and has called for higher standards of literacy through a set of
‘National Goals’. In the developed world, ensuring high levels of literacy is a
priority and there are ambitious plans to support the developing world in achieving
the same goal. The United Nations has made the pledge that by 2015 all the world’s
children will complete primary schooling and UNESCO has nominated 2003–2012
as the United Nations’ Literacy Decade. Literacy is recognized not only as important
for the personal development and life chances of individuals but also as vital to the
spiritual, cultural and economic wellbeing of nations.
Given the central importance of literacy in our developed and developing world,
it is no surprise therefore that we want to know ‘How best can children be enabled
to learn to read and write?’ To try to answer this quesion there has been an
Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading ( DfES, 2006) – hereafter called
the Rose Review – in England. A similar review has been undertaken in Australia –
Teaching Reading: Report and Recommendations (DEST, 2005) – and in the United
States, the National Reading Panel was set up in 1997 to investigate the research
about the teaching of reading (NRP, 2000b). We will return to these reports later.
This perennial question – How best can children be enabled to learn to read
and write? – has been asked for many decades. It continues to be asked because
1
2 Phonics: practice, research and policy
there is no simple answer and because what we know about how children learn
to read and write changes over time. In the last decade or so there has been a
fairly widespread consensus on the elements of a successful reading programme.
This consensus view has recognized the importance of phonics as a reading
strategy, but has seen this as one strategy among several that a reader might use
within the context of a rich and broad literacy curriculum. The Australian
reading report, for example, concluded that:
The evidence is clear . . . that direct systematic instruction in phonics during

the early years of schooling is an essential foundation for teaching children
to read. Findings from the research evidence indicate that all students learn
best when teachers adopt an integrated approach to reading that explicitly
teaches phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge and
comprehension. This approach, coupled with effective support from the
child’s home, is critical to success. (DEST, 2005: 11)
It went on to recommend that:

. . . teachers provide systematic, direct and explicit phonics instruction so
that children master the essential alphabetic code-breaking skills required
for foundational reading proficiency. Equally, that teachers provide an
integrated approach to reading that supports the development of oral
language, vocabulary, grammar, reading fluency, comprehension and the
literacies of new technologies. (DEST, 2005: 14, Recommendation 2)
This ‘phonics as part of a wider approach’ is often expressed as ‘phonics is
necessary, but not sufficient’. In the first two chapters of this book, Kathy Hall
and Morag Stuart explore this view. Hall argues that learning to read is
influenced by many different factors, including such things as children’s
understanding of the pleasures and purposes of reading, the range of skills
children need to be taught and employ (including phonics), parental and
societal influences and teacher expertise. She goes on to argue that phonics is
important in learning to read but it is not the only important element. This
chapter reflects the views of the United Kingdom Literacy Association, which
held a series of members’ meetings during 2005 to discuss the role of phonics
in the teaching of reading. In the second chapter, Morag Stuart sharpens the
focus to look closely at why phonics is important in learning to read, and argues
that not only does it support the beginning of reading but that it offers readers
the opportunity to develop independent ‘self-teaching’ strategies.
That phonics is neccessary in learning to read is not therefore at the heart of
the current debate about the role of phonics. Rather, over the last few years the
debate has centred on:
whether children are being taught phonics/enough phonics;

what form of phonics (synthetic or analytic) should be used;
the systematic teaching of phonics;
when best to teach phonics; and
how fast to pace it.
Are children being taught phonics?
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s there was heated debate as to whether phonics
should be taught as part of the early reading curriculum. Such disputes about the
role of phonics have a long history. Moya Cove’s chapter, ‘Sounds Familiar’, traces
the development of phonics teaching and the arguments around this. Cove’s ‘long
view’ helps us to see these issues from a wider perspective. The introduction of the
National Literacy Strategy (NLS) in England in 1998 gave a strong impetus in that
country for the explicit teaching of phonics to children from the age of five. The
Framework for Teaching (DfEE, 1998a) contains ‘phonological awareness, phonics
and spelling’ objectives from reception year (5-year-olds) onwards. The NLS
suggests that about 15 minutes of the daily literacy hour is devoted to daily teaching
of this ‘word level’ strand. As part of the introduction of the NLS, all teachers
received training and the second (and largest) module of the National Literacy
Strategy’s Literacy Training Pack (DfEE, 1998b) focused on subject knowledge about
phonics. A related issue to the phonics training that practising teachers were
offered was debate about the knowledge of phonics that trainee teachers needed. In
Scotland and America, it is not specified. In England, the standards for initial
teacher training institutions contained an explicit section on the phonic knowledge
that trainee teachers had to demonstrate in order to complete their course
successfully. The Rose Review continues this approach by recommending a
strengthening of the phonics training teachers and trainees receive.
Following the introduction of the NLS, Progression in Phonics (DfEE, 1999a)
was published to give teachers a practical and systematic phonics teaching
programme. This was sent to all English primary schools. The thrust of
government policy was clear: phonics should be taught and teachers needed
specific subject knowledge to do this. As a measure of this policy, three years
later in Teaching of Phonics: A paper by HMI, Ofsted reported that:
Phonics teaching has increased significantly since the implementation of
the National Literacy Strategy. The debate is no longer about whether phonic
knowledge and skills should be taught, but how best to teach them. (Ofsted,
2001: 2)
By 2005, Ofsted were more detailed in their comments about ‘how best to teach
them’:
. . . inspection evidence continues to show significant variation in the
effectiveness with which pupils are taught the phonic knowledge they need to
decode text. In the schools with high standards phonics was taught early,
systematically and rapidly so that pupils quickly gained the ability to decode text
(and begin to write too), associating letters with sounds. Where standards were
lower, expectations as to the speed at which pupils could acquire phonic
knowledge were insufficient and the phonics teaching lacked systematic or full
coverage of sounds and their combinations. (Ofsted, 2005: para. 42, our italics)
This statement was part of a growing pressure to look more closely at exactly how
phonics was taught, and mirrored similar questions raised in Australia,
New Zealand and the United States. In Australia, for example, an open letter to
the government signed by 26 Australian psychologists and reading researchers
raised such issues (DEST, 2005: 2). Chapter 10, ‘Responses to Rose’, considers this
‘growing pressure’ in England and gives commentators with different stances on
the role of phonics in reading an opportunity to comment on the Rose Review.
Different approaches to phonics teaching –

synthetic and analytic phonics
In the debate on the role and teaching of phonics, advocates of a ‘synthetic phonics
only’ approach (see, for example, Chew, 1997; Miskin, 2003) argue that the results
obtained by such programmes are far in advance of those obtained by children using
a mixed phonics programme (synthetic and analytic) or a mixed strategy approach
(phonics as one of several reading ‘searchlights’). We will examine these claims, but
first we must define the differences between synthetic and analytic phonics.
In synthetic phonics programmes, children are systematically taught the
phonemes (sounds) associated with particular graphemes (letters). Children
begin from hearing the phonemes in a spoken word and blending phonemes
orally. In reading, individual phonemes are recognized from the grapheme,
pronounced and blended together (synthesized) to create the word. For
example, when encountering an unknown single-syllable word such as h/e/n the
child would sound out its three phonemes and then blend them together to
form hen. Blending is seen as a very important skill. The skill of segmenting
words into phonemes for spelling is also taught, and blending and segmenting
are introduced as reversible processes. The order in which new phonemes are
introduced and the speed at which this is undertaken are important (see
following section). Synthetic phonics programmes emphasize decodable words
and some proponents do not favour teaching other reading strategies or an initial
sight vocabulary of high-frequency, non-phonically regular words in the early
stages of beginning a synthetic phonics programme.
In analytic phonics, children identify phonemes in whole words and are
encouraged to segment the words into phonemes. They also analyse similar
characteristics in other words (for example, hen, house, hill all begin with the
same sound; tin, sin, win, pin all share the same medial and end phonemes or
the same rime ‘in’). Recognizing word families and patterns helps children
develop inferential self-teaching strategies. If they can read ‘cake’, they can
work out and read ‘lake’ without blending all the individual phonemes.
Most teachers use both synthetic and analytic phonics, but advocates of a
‘synthetics first and fast’ approach claim that it is more effective in teaching
children to read than mixed reading strategy approaches. They also claim that it
is more effective than other kinds of phonics programmes. A recent longitudinal
study in Scotland on the effectiveness of a synthetic phonics programme compared
with an analytical and an analytical plus phonemic awareness programme
(involving 300 children over seven years) concluded that ‘the synthetic phonics
approach, as part of the reading curriculum, is more effective than the analytic
phonics approach’ (Johnston and Watson, 2005: 9). However, a systematic review
of the research literature on the use of phonics in the teaching of reading and
spelling (Torgerson et al., 2006) found that the weight of evidence was weak on
whether synthetic approaches were more effective than analytical approaches.
They found only three randomized controlled trials on this matter (including an
earlier and much smaller Scottish study of just 30 children but not including the
large longitudinal Scottish study mentioned above – the experimental design used
for this study did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion). They concluded that in
these, no statistically significant difference in effectiveness was found between
synthetic phonics instruction and analytic phonics instruction. This review
confirmed the findings of Stahl et al. (1988), who also reviewed the research on
phonics instruction and concluded that there are several types of good phonics
instruction and that there is no research base to support the superiority of
one particular type. While the Torgerson review has itself come under attack
from supporters of a synthetic phonics approach (McGuinness, 2006), for the
disinterested observer it would seem that currently there is not enough evidence
to support the comparative claims made for synthetic versus analytic phonics.
Nevertheless, the Rose Review took a pragmatic view, deciding that:
schools and settings cannot always wait for the results of long term research
studies. They must take decisions based on as much firm evidence as is
available. (DfES, 2006: para. 31)
Policy decisions in England to promote synthetic phonics are not therefore

based on research evidence.
Phonics as part of a wider literacy programme
The Torgerson review did, however, confirm that ‘systematic phonics instruction
within a broad literacy curriculum was found to have a statistically significant
positive effect on reading accuracy’ (2006: 9, our italics). The Australian Reading
Review and the National Reading Panel in America came to the same
conclusion. These findings illuminate another area of debate – whether phonics
should be a ‘fast and first and only’ strategy or part of a broader programme.
Some advocates of synthetic phonics programmes believe that beginning
readers should only encounter phonemically decodable text in order to practise
their reading skills and that there should be no ‘guessing’ words from picture,
context or initial letter cues (see, for example, Reading Reform Foundation,
2006). They argue that using a range of cues has the potential to confuse children
and that encouraging children to use information from a picture may lead to
them not understanding that they must focus on the printed word (see the Rose
Review, DfES, 2006: para. 117). Such a view sees reading as being a stepped
process of acquiring separate reading skills. Hall (Chapter 1, this book) discusses
different views of the reading process and the impact this has on people’s views
on phonics teaching. John Stannard’s response to Rose piece in Chapter 10 looks
at the model of early reading suggested in the Appendix of the Rose Review, and
argues for the value of a multi-cueing system approach to reading with phonics
as one (important) cue among several. Advocates of a mixed strategy approach
argue that using pictures, context and syntax cues is not encouraging children to
‘guess’ but rather to use language knowledge, logical deduction and prior/world
knowledge to make sense of a word/sentence. They would also argue that a broad
literacy curriculum includes reading and being read to from a wide range of
books, not just decodable texts. The Rose Review, along with the Australia and
US reviews, emphasizes the importance of this.
Systematic phonics: structure and pace
Structure
Studies have been done comparing systematic phonics instruction with ‘hit or miss’
phonic instruction and these show that ‘any kind of well organized and efficient
phonics instruction is better than little or no phonic instruction that leaves phonics
to chance’ (Cunningham and Cunningham, 2002: 91). Systematic phonic
programmes introduce phonemes in a series of steps. These usually begin with
learning letter sounds, distinguishing between vowels and consonants, recognizing
initial and final phonemes in regular consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) words
and introducing medial vowels. From this, simple CVC and CCVC words can be
segmented and blended. Long vowels are then introduced. Different programmes
may introduce consonant and vowel phonemes in different ways, but the 40-plus
phonemes are introduced systematically. Farmer, Ellis and Smith’s chapter on
‘Teaching Phonics: The Basics’ discusses the knowledge and the practical issues
that need consideration when teaching a systematic phonics programme.
Although the heart of a phonics programme is the systematic introduction
of phonemes in a planned sequence, teachers also use the many planned (and
unplanned) opportunities to teach and apply phonic lessons that occur throughout
a broad literacy curriculum. In Chapter 4, ‘Inside the Classroom’, Prue Goodwin
and Margaret Perkins describe how, far from being ‘hit and miss’, a planned
approach based on play and reading ‘real books’ can offer the opportunity to build
complex phonic knowledge. We must also consider that, no matter how systematic
the programme, there are many words in the English language that are just not
decodable. Henrietta Dombey’s chapter on English orthography (Chapter 8) helps
us to see the strengths and limits of a systematic phonics programme.
Pace and when to start

If one accepts that systematic phonics teaching is necessary to beginning
reader, there are strong arguments for a quick-paced programme which
ensures that children have the knowledge they need to decode texts as rapidly
as possible (Stahl, 1992; Wyse, 2000). The caricature of the young child
plodding through an initial sound a week so that it takes almost a school year
to learn 26 letter sounds is now seen as unnecessarily slow, and it is
recognized that phonic programmes can be undertaken in weeks rather than
months by many children. Such slowly paced practices also make the
assumption that children enter school with little in the way of phonemic
awareness and letter knowledge. Children begin to learn about language from
the moment they are born, and both Jackie Marsh’s chapter on ‘Involving
Parents and Carers’ (Chapter 5) and Elspeth McCartney’s chapter on
‘Developmental Issues’ (Chapter 6) remind us of the wealth of knowledge
children acquire before they begin formal education. Skilled early years’
practioners build on and extend children’s pre-school language and speaking
and listening experiences. They do not confuse a systematic approach with a
formal approach. In the best early years setting, phonics is taught through
active, multi-sensory strategies (language games, music and so on) embedded
in a rich literacy curriculum (see, for example, Palmer and Bayley, 2004).
Such phonics teaching may often be in small group contexts to allow for
different developmental needs. In Chapter 4, ‘Inside the Classroom’, teachers
Lyndsay Macnair, who uses a synthetic phonics approach, and Sally Evans,
who uses a mixed synthetic and analytic approach, both show the importance
of active, multi-sensory approaches in their phonics teaching.
Phonics and spelling
One of the interesting aspects about the phonics debate is how dominated it
is by discussion of the relationship between phonics and reading and,
consequently, how little attention is paid to the relationship between
phonemic knowledge and writing. Elspeth McCartney addresses this issue
(Chapter 6) when she argues that spelling errors commonly assumed to be the
child making visual confusions may actually reflect errors of phonemic
perception. She urges teachers to consider this possibility when looking at
children’s work because, clearly, the two errors need different types of support.
In Chapter 7, Laura Huxford explores this further by describing the strong
relationship between young writers’ developmental spellings and the phonics
curriculum. Her examples show how phonics within a broad and coherent
literacy programme can empower children as writers. Henrietta Dombey, in
Chapter 8, strikes a cautionary note, however, pointing to evidence that
challenges the wisdom of total reliance on phonics. She reminds us that the
opaque orthography of English means that teachers must be able to explain
how the spelling of word families is deeply connected to their shared history;
understanding the basis of visual and morphological patterns may be more
powerful in the long term.
What next?
The ‘phonics debate’ has played differently in different educational systems. In

Scotland, where the literacy curriculum is less centrally controlled, phonics has
not become so politically charged as it has in England, Australia and the United
States. Phonics research has been publicized by the Scottish Office, but decisions
about how to respond to it have been left in the hands of local authorities, schools
and teachers. In England the response has been different. The House of Commons
Select Committee on Education set up the Rose Review to consider ‘What best
practice should be expected in the teaching of early reading and synthetic phonics’
(DfES, 2005a: 1) in part to inform the revision of the NLS framework as well as to
give clear advice on what schools should do about the teaching of phonics.
In its final report, the Review has concluded that ‘synthetic phonics offers the
vast majority of young children the best and most direct route to becoming skilled
readers and writers’ (DfES, 2006: 4) and has made a strong recommendation for
further phonic training for teachers, teaching assistants and student teachers. At
the same time, the NLS has been piloting an early reading programme, with
increased phonics teaching in the foundation stage, to be offered to all schools. In
England teachers are being given a very strong steer on how to teach phonics.
So where does this debate leave teachers who are wondering whether to alter their
approach to teaching phonics in the light of new ideas and new recommendations?
As a professional you will want to make a considered decision on this. Rather than
focus on the technical differences between competing programmes, you may find it
more helpful to consider the principles of good phonics teaching and how these
apply to your existing practice. You will weigh the evidence, look at existing practice
and its outcomes as well as new ideas and their possible outcomes; you will consider
your own knowledge and understanding and think of the context of your school and
the needs of your pupils. You will want to discuss phonics practice with colleagues
in your school and if possible from a wider network of schools. At the end of each
chapter in this book are suggestions to help you consider what you are already doing
and what else you might do. Chapter 11 suggests how you might use this book to
initiate and support professional dialogue about phonics. There is also a Glossary
which explains any technical vocabulary that might be unfamiliar to you.
There is an old story about a man who goes to his lawyer with a legal
problem. The lawyer agrees his fee with the client and then reaches for a book.
He opens it and reads out the answer to the man’s question. The man is furious.
‘It’s disgraceful: I’ve just paid you a fortune to read a paragraph from a book.
How can you possibly justify that?’ ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ said the lawyer.
‘I wasn’t paid to read the paragraph. What you paid for was my knowledge
about which paragraph, and which book. The reading was free.’
Like that lawyer, teachers are not paid just for ‘doing’ a set curriculum; they
are paid to make professional decisions about the needs of the children they
teach, and for the knowledge that underpins these decisions. We hope the
contributions in this book will add to that store of professional knowledge and
enable teachers to make wise decisions.
Lewis(phonics)-3436-Ch-01.qxd 8/21/2006 6:23 PM Page 9
Chapter 1
How Children Learn to Read

and How Phonics Helps
Kathy Hall
Underachievement in education is a perennial hot topic in the public view and

children’s reading achievement is at the centre of this conversation. This is despite
the fact that the most recent evidence would suggest that the teaching of reading is
successful for the vast majority of children in England with 87 per cent of girls and
82 per cent of boys achieving level 4 or above in the 2005 Key Stage 2 tests (DfES,
2005b). But a substantial minority of children do not achieve well, constituting the
so-called ‘long tail of underachievement’ that has become characteristic of
education in this country and that attests to many children not reaching their
potential. To improve reading achievement overall there is still plenty of work to be
done by educators, policymakers, researchers, media people and publishers.
My focus in this chapter is on the teacher and the school. I will begin by
considering key factors that influence how children learn to read and then I will
attend more specifically to word recognition and the role of phonics. A message
deriving from my argument is that it is unwise to advance an exclusive method
of teaching the alphabetic principle. I will argue that such a prescriptive stance
denies the complexity of teaching and learning and that the marginalization or
exclusion of other methods ignores the psychological and linguistic evidence
about phonological and phonemic sensitivity in beginning readers. The chapter
suggests a better way forward.
Learning, teaching and the whole of reading
A major reason why controversy exists about how best to develop reading (or
indeed any area of the curriculum) is that fundamental differences exist in our
9
views about knowledge and how we come to know. If one sees knowledge as fixed
and certain and ‘out there’, separate from the knower, literacy can be viewed as an
individual and linear accomplishment, made up of a discrete set of skills like
phonics, fluency and comprehension. If one takes this perspective one is more
likely to see teaching as a prescriptive business in which curriculum content is
presented, unmediated by context or the nature of learning relationships, in small
increments to the learner. In addition, one is more likely to accept the possibility
of there being just one best way to help all pupils learn to read.
If, on the other hand, one sees knowledge (including knowledge about the
alphabet) as something that is actively built up and appropriated by learners’
active participation in tasks, if one sees learners as intentional beings whose
wider knowledge, feelings, experiences and identities constantly filter their
understanding, if one considers that what learners see as significant in a task
or particular learning situation influences what they can take away from it in
terms of new learning, then one is more likely to see teaching as a process
which must engage with the learner’s take on the world, especially the
learner’s view of themselves and the learning context. Here teaching, learning
and knowledge are viewed as intimately related. In this perspective, literacy
involves more than merely an interest in whether children can read and write;
it involves questions about what learners do with their literacy, the literacy
practices that are meaningful to them and the literacy practices they engage
in in their day-to-day lives. If one goes along with this line of thinking, one is
less likely to accept directives about there being one best way of helping
pupils to read. These fundamental beliefs and assumptions are often ignored
in discussions about the best way to teach reading, and they very often
underlie controversies about teaching methods.
To teach children to read involves more than helping them know about letters
and sounds. Teaching children to understand the alphabetic principle is
important for successful reading, but it’s only one of the many factors which need
be considered. The elements of reading that teachers have to consider as they
plan curricula, programmes and teaching strategies are shown in Figure 1.1. To
concentrate in our teaching (or indeed in our policy making) on only one of those
aspects is to ignore the larger system, any element or combination of elements of
which can produce failure. Such a narrow view gives the false impression that the
way to enhance the teaching of reading is simple and straightforward – that all it
needs is one solution involving one method or one programme.
As the US researchers who produced this diagram point out, any single
aspect needs to be seen in the context of a literacy curriculum that considers all
aspects. This means that learning the alphabetic principle cannot be divorced
from the notion of ownership or engagement or motivation to read. Desire to
read is necessary for the sustained effort needed to become a proficient reader
and teachers cannot afford to ignore this, especially as recent evidence points to
the disparity between the incidence of children in this country and in other
European countries who read for pleasure and enjoyment (Mullis et al., 2003).
The development of the alphabetic principle cannot be separated from
comprehension or writing. After all, the purpose of teaching the alphabetic
How Children Learn to Read and How Phonics Helps 11
SOCIETY
LOCAL COMMUNITY
FAMILY
SCHOOL LITERACY
CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY
CLASSROOM LITERACY
CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY
LITERACY AND
LEARNER IDENTITIES
TEXT CRITIC TEXT USER
LITERACY DIMENSIONS
AND ROLES
TEXT TEXT
COMPREHENDER PRODUCERS
CONVENTIONS
AP
OF PRINT
Alphabetic Principle
Figure 1.1 Dimensions of literacy (adapted from Taylor et al., 2000: 18)
principle is to facilitate comprehension. Because reading involves different kinds

of literature, children need to learn to read different kinds of texts and a school
may promote or neglect this with consequences for reading achievement. We also
have to consider the fit between home and school literacies. As Taylor et al. (2000)
point out, children’s home languages may be built upon, marginalized or totally
ignored by the school. Children may have family literacy experiences that fit well
with the expectations of the school or those experiences may go unrecognized, all
with consequences for pupils’ opportunities to learn and for their life chances.
Similar arguments can be made for the importance of the other aspects in the
diagram because all of them influence reading achievement. The fact is that any
literacy curriculum exists within a broader social context that can enhance or
militate against ability to read and write.
Understanding the phonics debate
A major reading theme currently exercising educators, policymakers, researchers,

media people and publishers in the United Kingdom concerns the beginning
reader and the role of phonics. How best to develop the necessary phonic
knowledge in the classroom and whether current policy has got it right are
deeply controversial questions.
In essence this controversy centres on the relative effectiveness of two different
methods of teaching phonics, known as synthetic and analytic phonics. Crudely
put, synthetic phonics is about sounding out and blending, while analytic
phonics is about perceiving patterns and drawing inferences (definitions of these
and other terms are provided in the Glossary). In addition, synthetic phonics has
come to be associated with small phonological units (phonemes) linked to letters,
and analytic phonics has come to be associated with large phonological units
(onsets and rimes) also linked to letters and letter strings (for example, White,
2005). However, at least one significant researcher in the field (Goswami, 2002:
52) rejects this alignment, claiming that the onset–rime research has nothing to
do with analytic phonics. The alignment stems, in my view, from the claims in
some psychological research that knowledge of small phonological units, more
specifically phonemic knowledge, is a better predictor of success in reading than
knowledge of large phonological units (more specifically onsets and rimes). This
finding has led, unhelpfully, to a corresponding polarization of teaching methods.
Research at the University of York (Hulme et al., 2002; Muter et al., 2004)
shows that phonemic awareness is an excellent predictor of early reading skills,
and those researchers have argued that measures of onset–rime awareness are
weaker predictors. This work also claims that explicit phoneme-level training
is more effective than rhyme-level training in improving reading attainments in
children deemed to be at risk of reading difficulties. The Scottish research in
Clackmannanshire (Johnston and Watson, 2005), which was set up to assess the
relative merits of synthetic and analytic teaching approaches, highlights the
value of explicit phoneme-level training linked to letters. Other research too
makes similar claims about the relative effectiveness of synthetic phonics over
analytic phonics (e.g. Stuart, 1999; Macmillan, 2002; Chew, 1997). So it would
seem that an emphasis on small phonological units, specifically phonemes, is
important and this is in line with an emphasis on synthetic phonics.
Much of this research has been criticized on the grounds that it is asking the
wrong research question, since both large and small phonological units are
necessary for reading. The Scottish research, which has had considerable
exposure especially in the popular press, can be severely criticized on the basis
of a flawed design leading to claims about the effectiveness of synthetic phonics
that are unjustified by the evidence. I would suggest that analytic phonics was
set up for failure in the Scottish study, while synthetic phonics was set up for
success. This in no way disputes the need for phonemic knowledge, but it does
highlight the origin of the needless oppositional positioning that has developed
in the debate surrounding research, policy and practice.
In my view the evidence converges on the conclusion that attention to small
and large units in early reading instruction is helpful for all children. Insofar
as synthetic and analytic phonics are associated respectively with small and
large units, then both teaching approaches are likely to be useful and
complementary. The next sections develop this argument further.
Clues about a developmental sequence and

progression
It is likely that some children would fail to benefit from approaches designed
to teach phoneme sensitivity linked to letters (that is, synthetic phonics) if they
do not possess the necessary phonological knowledge. The latter could be devel-
oped through oral language, songs, rhymes, riddles, word play in stories, and
invented spelling. ‘I spy’, rhyming stories, nursery rhymes, tongue twisters and
poems all have an important part to play, as well as games, activities and
exercises. Exposure to intensive programmes aimed at teaching explicit
phoneme manipulation may only serve to discourage children who have not
grasped the phonological insight that spoken language can be broken up into
units like syllables and onsets and rime.
One researcher (Stahl, 1992) explains this well with reference to the case of a
girl, Heather, whose lack of progress and apparent incapacity to benefit from
phonics in class were of concern. He sought to gain a sense of her level of
phonological awareness by asking her questions like the following: Can you say
the word ‘meat’ without the /m/sound? (‘eat’), Can you say the word ‘coat’
without the /k/sound? (‘oat’). Heather’s answers to these two questions
respectively were ‘chicken’ and ‘jacket’. Puzzled about this, he pursued his line of
questioning to discover that she had not understood that spoken language can be
thought about without reference to its meaning. As far as Heather was concerned,
a little bit of ‘meat’ was ‘chicken’ and a little bit of ‘coat’ was ‘jacket’ – she was
responding to language at the level of meaning, not at the abstract level required
for the manipulation of sounds in one’s head. Until Heather grasped this insight,
a strong focus on phonemic awareness would probably be unhelpful to her. This
raises what is one of the hallmarks of good reading teaching – understanding your
learners, recognizing what is salient for them in the moment-by-moment
interaction in a lesson, as well as having a sense of how best to sequence the
curriculum to maximize their learning.
There is good evidence that the development of phonological skills
proceeds from early awareness of large units (syllables, onset–rimes) to later
awareness of small units (phonemes) (Bowey, 2002). But there is a subtle
distinction to be noted here which derives from the research of Usha Goswami
(2002). This shows that while onsets and rimes are the most accessible
phonological units, letters are the most salient orthographic units for the
beginning reader. Her work tells us that it is easier for children to learn the
phonemes which are onsets (initial phonemes) or rimes. This line of work
suggests an important message about progression: it may be helpful to teach
the phonemes that are onsets and rimes first, and then move on to other
phonemes.
However, having made the point about a possible developmental sequence, I
would suggest that teachers need not be entirely bound by this. The fact is that
learning is not only a cognitive process, it is also a social and cultural one as I
noted earlier in the chapter. Individual cognition is always embedded within a
particular social context (Razfar and Gutierrez, 2003). While the psychological
evidence offers clues about how we might teach the alphabetic principle, it
cannot determine it for us for the same reasons I have raised about the nature
of learning and knowledge. Children, like all people, learn concepts and
practices, including phonological and phonemic knowledge, not as simple
linear content; rather, learning occurs unevenly and flexibly and by having
many varied opportunities for interaction, for practice, for application and
reflection on its purposes and processes. We should not be dogmatic about the
fine details of curriculum content any more than we should be dogmatic about
the details of teaching methods.
The human brain and pattern recognition
The brain is an exquisitely designed pattern detector (Bussis et al., 1985), so it

makes sense to capitalize on this talent. As the reader sees patterns repeatedly
(such as ai in mail, paint and constrain), the graphic letter pattern is retained in
memory in association with sound. When a familiar pattern is detected in a
word, that pattern evokes those stored associations. This then enables the
reader to decode a new word like complaint (see Johnston, 2001 for a full
account; also Ehri, 2005). Word sorting activities, usually a key feature of
analytic phonics, encourage learners to notice patterns, to think flexibly about
letter–sound correspondences. Such activities support self-teaching, whereby
the learner develops a means of identifying the sound of unknown words
independently. Once this self-teaching mechanism is under way the reader can
begin to use larger visual sequences that map onto larger phonological units.
In this way reading becomes indistinguishable from whole-word reading.
The issue of generalizability and pattern detection begs an important
question: how much phonemic knowledge does the teacher need to teach? By
virtue of the human brain’s pattern detection abilities, a teacher may not need
to work through all of the 40-plus phonemes of English. Understanding that
the initial sounds of the written words ‘mat’ and ‘mop’ are the same (that is,
mastery of the singleton onset), coupled with relevant letter–sound
knowledge, may be sufficient for the alphabetic principle to be grasped by
some children (Bowey, 2002; Byrne, 2005). Some children helped to recognize
the identity of word beginnings are readily able to transfer their insight to
word endings; others cannot transfer automatically and quickly – they need
more help and practice.
All of this complicates the process for the teacher and certainly suggests that
it’s not sensible to prescribe one programme or method that all children should
experience. Even if one adopts a narrow cognitive perspective on learning, the
fact is that there cannot be any single theory of how children should be taught
to read as children have different capacities to generalize (Byrne, 2005).
Causes and consequences of phonemic sensitivity
Some interpretations of synthetic phonics emphasize that learners should be

taught the sound of letters and common letter blends before they move on to
reading books. But if one accepts, which inevitably one must, that phoneme
awareness is both a cause and a consequence of letter knowledge or learning to
recognize printed words, then this position is untenable. And if one accepts
that many children come to school already seeing themselves as readers (and
writers), it makes no sense to delay their reading of books, not to mention
the potential damage of communicating to them that they can’t read.
Notwithstanding the status attributed to synthetic phonics in their work, the
York researchers conclude that there is a reciprocal relationship between
phoneme sensitivity and reading achievement. For example, Hulme et al. say
that ‘a reasonable conclusion is that in the literate individual there is a
constant interaction between phonological and orthographic representations’
(2005: 97). They draw this conclusion from their finding that letter knowledge
at 4 years 9 months is a predictor of phoneme sensitivity one year later and,
conversely, phoneme sensitivity at 4 years 9 months is a predictor of letter
knowledge one year later (Muter et al., 2004). Other researchers, too, reported
a similar reciprocal pattern (Lupker, 2005). The point here is that as the child
reads more and generally appropriates more linguistic knowledge of reading,
vocabulary and spelling, phonemic knowledge also increases.
So phonological knowledge, phonemic knowledge and letter name
knowledge are interconnected. This is concretely described in The Learning
Brain by Blakemore and Frith as follows: ‘Think of two groups of children each
playing with a toy village. One group has ready-made wooden houses while the
other has houses constructed out of Lego bricks. Those who have the Lego brick
houses will consider the town as infinitely modifiable, whereas the children
with the wooden houses will think of their houses as fixed and whole. For them,
the concept of being able to remove pieces from each house and change the
shape of the houses makes no sense’ (2005: 73). The thing is that once learners
grasp the alphabetic principle, their whole view of speech changes, for they are
now aware that the sounds of words can be broken up and put back together
again. In addition, they now have a technique for making up words that do not
exist. Prior to acquiring this insight, made-up words are only thought of as
‘existing, but unknown, words’ (2005: 73).
In relation to phonological awareness, what appears to happen is that
knowledge which was, up until the acquisition of the alphabetic principle,
deeply embedded and implicit now becomes foregrounded and explicit. The
teacher’s job, then, is to help children make explicit the phonological
knowledge that they already possess about onsets and rimes. They need to be
helped to segment onsets and rimes even further when these units correspond
to groups of phonemes (Goswami, 2002).
The complex orthography of English
The alphabet is the visual code for representing oral language. Learning how to
crack this code would be much simpler if there was just one letter for every
sound (or phoneme). But there are almost twice as many phonemes as letters,
and each letter is used to represent several sounds in different contexts – note
for instance the ‘t’ in ‘nation’, ‘native’ and ‘nature’. English has a ‘deep’
orthography unlike say Finnish, German or Greek. (Henrietta Dombey
explores the impact of deep orthography on learning to read and spell in
Chapter 8.) The point is that the relative inconsistency in mappings of letters
and sounds makes learning to read English much harder than learning to read
many other languages (Goswami, 2005; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). Some
words in English, for example ‘people’, ‘yacht’ and ‘choir’, represent no pattern
in the language in that there are no other words with similar sound-letter
mappings or, put more technically, they have no ‘orthographic neighbours’
(Zeigler and Goswami, 2005: 19) and must be learned as distinct patterns. A
whole word approach therefore is relevant for such words. Once again this
highlights the inadequacy of using just one teaching method.
Spotlight on comprehension
Comprehension is of course the purpose of decoding, and word recognition is

merely the means to this. Successful comprehension depends on skills beyond the
phonological domain. The York research has shown that vocabulary knowledge
and grammar knowledge predict reading comprehension, even when the effects of
word recognition, phoneme sensitivity and letter knowledge are controlled (Muter
et al., 2004). That reading comprehension is heavily dependent on semantic and
syntactic language skills is obvious to anyone who has ever supported a child’s
understanding of printed text. However, the nature of vocabulary and
comprehension bears some comparative scrutiny with alphabetic knowledge.
Letter and phonic knowledge is finite. All of it (names of letters and the
correspondences between phonemes and graphemes) is usually learned quickly
and everyone learns the same knowledge. All readers go from non-existent
knowledge of the alphabetic principle through full acquisition to automatic
word recognition. This knowledge, though absolutely vital, also has a narrow
sphere of impact – it impacts on decoding only. On the other hand, vocabulary
and comprehension knowledge develop over the life span, are probably infinite
in range and vocabulary and comprehension competence can vary enormously
between individuals. In a seminal research paper published recently in the
United States, Scott Paris (2005) explains this idea and suggests a crucial
distinction between what he terms ‘constrained’ and ‘unconstrained’ reading
skills. Constrained skills have ‘a narrow scope, are learned quickly, the
trajectory of mastery is steep and the duration of acquisition is brief ’ (Paris,

2005: 188). Constrained skills are likely to have a limited range of influence
on reading achievement beyond the early stages. Unconstrained reading skills
like vocabulary and comprehension are a different matter, he suggests. These
develop over one’s entire life and show enduring differences across individuals.
And very importantly from the perspective of the current policy context, these
skills develop before, during and after constrained skills like word recognition.
This notion of constrained and unconstrained reading skills has enormous
implications for the theory of reading and the statistical methods used to predict
reading achievement. Space prevents a full account of Paris’ analysis here, but
suffice to say it casts serious doubt on some of the existing reading research that
claims privileged status for word recognition skill over comprehension and on
the research that claims privileged status for any one way of developing this
knowledge. While Paris notes how important it is that the beginning reader
masters constrained aspects, his analysis leads him to the conclusion that any
single pedagogical approach should not be privileged over any other. He expresses
this as follows: ‘What is unscientific, illogical, and unwarranted are the claims that
one kind of instruction is the best or only way to promote the acquisition of the
skills, that those methods are uniformly appropriate for all children, that the
constrained skills have greater priority over other skills, and that such
interventions prevent reading failure’ (Paris, 2005: 199).
So what is a teacher to do? The skill of word recognition is crucial for successful
reading and the first couple of years in school are especially significant for its
mastery. But since word recognition is probably not the only mediator of reading
comprehension (Paris, 2005) – and reading comprehension is the purpose of word
recognition – other, unconstrained, skills need to be developed in tandem.
To sum up so far, reading requires the integration of information from at least
six different areas of knowledge:
Cultural: learners bring with them knowledge and beliefs about the
reading activities they are engaged in; they have views about themselves as
particular people in relation with other people, for example, how they wish
to be recognized by their peer group; in sum they have identities and are
active agents in the learning enterprise.
Communicative: concepts about print, about genres, since different texts
have different intentions and purposes.
Verbal reasoning: literal and inferential reasoning ability and the ability to
understand, for example, metaphor.
Phonic knowledge: visual and aural perception of letters and phoneme–
grapheme relations.
Semantic: meaning of the words.
Syntactic: grammar of sentences and larger units.
Since these are interdependent and support each other it makes sense for the
teacher to be mindful of all of them. This of course need not preclude selecting
an element such as phonic knowledge for particular attention within lessons,

but the accomplished teacher considers all these processes, as the next section
explains.
What do we know about what accomplished

teachers do in reading lessons?
Classroom research generally shows that teachers make a larger difference in

learners’ growth as readers than do the methods those teachers are nominally
using (Taylor and Pearson, 2002). Research on effective literacy teaching shows
conclusively that a quality literacy programme is not merely about teaching
materials, the curriculum and set procedures. The most critical element in
building an effective reading programme is the teacher (Hall, 2003). Also,
accomplished teachers make more impact in schools located in high poverty
areas than they do in schools in economically advantaged areas. This is not
surprising when one considers how children who are poorer depend more on
their school and their teachers to socialize them into school literacy practices.
This suggests that providing teacher professional development would be the
most reliable way to improve reading attainment.
In addition, as well as strong teacher effects, there are strong school effects on
pupil success in reading. This suggests the importance of professional development
for all school staff members, including support staff and teaching assistants, and
not simply classroom teachers. A major US government-commissioned study of
effective reading teaching is especially revealing here. It took account also of
organizational factors at the school and district levels and concluded that ‘effective
instruction includes artful teaching that transcends – and often makes up for – the
constraints and limitations of specific instructional programs’ (Snow et al., 1998:
314). What all this tells us is that simply prescribing an evidence-based method to
teaching reading (that’s if we knew of such a single one) is far from enough – how
such an approach is implemented by teachers in the classroom is critical.
The pedagogic practices of the most accomplished teachers are noteworthy.
They are subtle, flexible, personalized, learner-focused and context-aware.
They include:
Integration and application: The notion of integration captures this idea and
is better than ‘balance’ in conveying what accomplished teachers do.
Integration is more sophisticated than mixing a little bit of this and a little
bit of that. It involves teaching word recognition or how to crack the code
alongside the development of comprehension. While they offer systematic
teaching in language conventions to foster letter–sound correspondences,
accomplished teachers understand that the application of this knowledge
to print is key: first, children need to see the rewards to be gained from the
effort expended, second, learners need extensive experience of applying

phonic knowledge to running text, and third, they need instruction and
support in making sense of text (UKLA, 2005).
Coaching: Accomplished teachers coach weak readers often in one-to-one
and small group settings. In a study of successful one-on-one tutoring of
struggling early readers, practitioners used a range of methods to make
children’s implicit knowledge explicit, including:
– reading texts that provided multiple repetitions of the same words and
word families;
– providing direct teaching about the letter–sound relations within words;
– helping children to spell words through numerous teacher-scaffolded
interactions; and
– hearing the teacher’s words as the teacher models how to identify or
spell unknown words.
All these activities are personalized, which means they are delivered at
the right moment and repeated as frequently as needed for an
individual child to understand, internalize and recall (Juel and Minden-
Cupp, 2001).
Instructional density: Accomplished teachers are adept at fostering several
aspects of learning in one short teaching episode; they are able to seize
teaching opportunities as they arise and link them with their planned
teaching.
Extensive experiences with an array of texts: Accomplished teachers draw on
a broad curriculum using meaningful and varied texts for purposes that
mirror reading and writing in the real world. Authenticity characterizes
their approach in that the reading activities they facilitate are closely
linked with reading in everyday life outside of school.
Formative assessment: Accomplished teachers have a style of teaching that is
more conversational than interrogational; they tune in to what their
learners say and do with a view to understanding their interpretations and
misconceptions so that they can intervene appropriately. They build on
their learners’ responses, seeing what their learners say as evidence of their
thinking and understanding. In this way they are seeking to understand
what is salient to the learner.
Grouping: Children are grouped and regrouped for teaching purposes
rather than fixed ability groups; small group teaching, one-to-one teaching
and whole class teaching are judiciously blended. Whole class phonics
teaching is not likely to be effective for the majority of children. The key
to reaching a child by providing verbal interactions, instruction and
written materials that are at the right level and at the right time is simply
not as easy in the whole class setting.
To summarize, the classroom practices of accomplished reading teachers make

it clear that they see their learners as intentional beings and that they see
learning itself as a volitional process. They also see themselves as powerful

enablers who are aware of the connection between what they do in the
classroom and their learners’ success as readers. They are adept at adapting
learning environments to suit their particular learners. Accomplished teachers
seem to have a strong sense of what is personally meaningful to their learners
and have the capacity to exploit and explore this in their interactions with
learners. Their practices are evidence-informed about learners as well as about
literacy learning.
Why won’t programmes work?
The idea of solving reading difficulties via the curriculum or via a teaching
method is seductive, but there are many reasons why schemes, programmes or
curricula are an inadequate basis for improving practice. How the schemes,
programmes or the curricula get translated into learning can’t be predetermined –
as already noted, teaching and learning have to be considered in tandem. The
problem with mandating schemes and programmes is that they cannot take into
account the contexts of their implementation and thus they cannot place the
learner at the centre of the learning enterprise.
Also, from the perspective of teachers and teaching, the more we dictate
teachers’ moves and script their lines, the more we’re likely to alienate good
teachers. In the United States, heavily scripted phonics lessons and
programmes are routinely marketed as compensation for poor teachers. What’s
not mentioned is that they also alienate and even drive out good teachers. It is
imperative that such a situation should not develop here.
Phonics is ‘big business’, with financial rewards awaiting anyone who invents
‘the best’ scheme or programme for teaching it. In the United States there are
various ‘lobbies’ whose existence and lobbying have the potential to distort the
‘normal research’ investigations and national and local policy processes. Such
lobbying can be counter-productive for pupils; it stimulates practice, policy and
research in artificially narrow domains without encouraging consideration of
the broader picture outlined in the early part of this chapter. In addition, lobbies
almost always distort policy and research by introducing a political and an
adversarial dimension where polarities and simplifications win out over the
realities and complexities. Six years ago Colin Harrison (1999) observed that
whenever you get a situation where there isn’t agreement among members of the
research community, as we currently have about the teaching of phonics,
rhetoric and lobbying often become the basis on which decisions about teaching
come to be made. While this lack of consensus remains, it is my view that the
theory of reading pedagogy has progressed, especially through the work of
significant researchers like Usha Goswami (see especially, for example, Zeigler
and Goswami, 2005), and this line of work has clearer implications for practice
than were available six years ago. On the basis of the review of evidence
conducted by the USA’s National Reading Panel (NRP) (2000b), we also know that
the teaching of phonics is essential for the beginning reader and that phonics is
best developed in a systematic way. The NRP review also showed how several
methods of teaching phonics in the classroom are successful, but found that the
methods themselves were significantly indistinguishable in their effects. This
was also the conclusion reached in a more recent systematic review of evidence
(Torgerson et al., 2006).
Conclusion
Phonics teaching is far from all that beginning readers need to became
successful readers. They need to have experience of a wide range of literature –
fiction and non-fiction – so that they learn about the pleasure and knowledge
that can come from being read to and from reading for oneself. Beginning
readers must be taught how to use all the cues and strategies that will help them
make sense of text and this will include strategies to decode words as well as
strategies for comprehending text. Phonics teaching is an important part of this
story, but it is not the whole story.
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
In what ways are teacher beliefs about teaching and learning

important?
How do your beliefs about phonics and the teaching of phonics
influence what you do in the classroom?
If you were trying to understand the teaching of phonics in your
school, how would this chapter help you to go about doing this?
SOMETHING TO READ
Goswami, U. (2005) ‘Synthetic phonics and learning to read: A cross

language perspective’, Educational Psychology in Practice, 21 (4):
273–82.
Cook, M. (ed.) (2002) Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of
Phonics. Royston: United Kingdom Literacy Association.
Hall, K. (2003b) Listening to Stephen Read: Multiple Perspectives on
Literacy. Buckingham: Open University Press. pp. 67–101.
SOMETHING TO DO
Talk with a colleague about why the phonics debate is so heated. You
might locate a suitable article in the popular press to focus your talk.
Examine one of the phonics schemes and consider the assumptions
it makes about how best to develop children’s acquisition of the
alphabetic principle. Is it in line with a) your views and b) the
evidence presented in this chapter?
Revisit Figure 1.1 and talk with a colleague about ‘the place of
phonics’ and ‘putting phonics in its place’.
Chapter 2
Learning to Read the Words on

the Page: The Crucial Role of
Early Phonics Teaching
Morag Stuart
Reading is one of the most miraculous of human achievements. Learning to read

is one of the most important acts of learning required of children. Small wonder,
then, that how children can best be taught to read has been fiercely debated down
through the ages. Reading is also complex, and the word itself is subject to many
different definitions and interpretations. We read in order to understand written
language – language we see – just as we listen in order to understand spoken
language – language we hear. For understanding to happen in reading, we need to
process visually presented information (written words). For understanding to
happen in listening, we need to process aurally presented information (spoken
words). One of the major differences between reading and listening is thus the nature
of the information to be processed: the written versus the spoken word. Human
beings are biologically endowed to process the spoken word; processing the written
word, however, is a culturally determined skill that has to be taught and learned.
This chapter is intended as an introduction to research into the ways in
which human beings learn to process the written word: research that seeks to
understand how children come to be able to look at any visually presented
word, whether it is presented in a context or by itself, and read it aloud and
understand what it means. Unless children do develop efficient processes for
recognizing written words, they will not be able to understand written texts; but
development of efficient word recognition and comprehension processes does
not guarantee understanding at the textual level. Reading the words is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for the understanding of written texts
to take place. This chapter, then, investigates only the necessary condition – the
ability to read the words on the page.
23
A child’s route to reading
Let’s take an imaginary child – always easier to deal with than a real one!
Chelsea is five, and she’s just starting school. We are going to follow Chelsea’s
journey from not being able to read the words on the page, to doing this with a
certain degree of ease: from pre-reader to word reader. Chelsea is going to be a
child who takes to reading as naturally as a duck takes to water, and we are
going to learn what it is that enables her to be so rapidly successful.
At five, Chelsea’s oral vocabulary is well within the average range for her age:
she is a typically developing 5-year-old in terms of her ability to understand and
produce spoken words. Her grammatical system is also well within the average
range for her age: she is also a typically developing 5-year-old in terms of her
ability to understand and produce a range of different sentence structures.
Chelsea is as well able to understand spoken messages and stories as any other
typically developing 5-year-old. In her short life, she has experienced the full
range of experiences that one might expect an inner-city 5-year-old like Chelsea
to have experienced. She has attended morning sessions at nursery since she was
three and a half. She goes to the shops with her mum, and spends time on the
swings in the local playground. She is invited to birthday parties. She travels on
buses and in cars, and sometimes on trains. She goes to the doctor. She also
frequently visits her nan who lives nearby, and sometimes her granny who now
lives by the sea. Her parents, grandparents and nursery teachers/carers have read
her lots of stories. We might therefore expect, given her age-appropriate language
system and her range of childhood experiences, that once Chelsea learns to
read the words on the page, she will be as well able as any typically developing
5-year-old to understand the stories she reads. What essential attributes does
Chelsea bring to the task of learning to read the words on the page?
Chelsea learned quite a lot about letters before she started school. She’d had an
alphabet frieze in her bedroom, and her nan had a favourite alphabet book that
they used to enjoy together. At nursery, she learned the alphabet song, and began
to write her name. There was an alphabet frieze at nursery too, and Chelsea and
her friends sometimes played at copying the letters from that. By the time she was
five, Chelsea could name many of the letters on the alphabet frieze. Knowledge of
letter names has frequently been identified in the research literature as a reliable
predictor of success in learning to read words: this might be one of the factors that
contributed to Chelsea’s capacity to take to reading like a duck to water.
Alphabet books and friezes tend to illustrate each letter with an object whose
name starts with the sound of that letter (a picture of a bear to go with ‘b’; a
picture of an egg to go with ‘e’ and so on). So, at five, Chelsea had also begun to
realize that letters had sounds as well as names, and she’d begun to associate
some of the letters with the sounds they represented. She knew that ‘m’ was /m/
for mummy, ‘d’ was /d/ for daddy, ‘n’ was /n/ for nan, ‘b’ was /b/ for bear.
From the nursery rhymes her nan taught her, and the rhyming songs and
games she played at nursery, Chelsea had got the idea of rhyme. If you asked
her what rhymed with ‘cat’, she could tell you that ‘bat’ did, and so did ‘lat’ and
Reading Words on the Page: Early Phonics Teaching 25
‘dat’. She was beginning to be able to categorize words by the sound patterns
they had in common – beginning to be ‘phonologically aware’. At its broadest,
phonological awareness involves being able to turn away from the meanings of
words and pay attention to their form. Chelsea, like many other young children,
became aware first of rhymes. But by the time she started school, Chelsea could
also tell you what sound a word started with: that ‘cat’ began with /k/ and ‘dog’
with /d/. She probably was helped towards this by her experience with the
alphabet books and friezes, where letters were illustrated by objects whose
names began with the sound of the letter, and by the day-to-day exchanges at
home where /m/ was for mummy and /d/ for daddy.
Understanding the alphabetic principle
And here we come to the most crucial influence on Chelsea’s flying start in
learning how to read words: by the time she started school, she had already begun
to understand the alphabetic principle. She knew that there were letters. She knew
that letters could be named and written. She knew that spoken words were
composed of sounds. She knew that those sounds could be represented by letters.
There is ample research evidence that children who understand these aspects of
the alphabetic principle are likely to learn to read words quickly and easily (see,
for example, Bus and van Ijzendoorn, 1999; Foorman et al., 2003; Mann and Foy,
2003; Treiman, 2000). Moreover, as Brian Byrne has shown in his important
longitudinal studies, providing children with teaching that enables them to
understand the alphabetic principle before they start school has long-lasting
beneficial effects on their ability to read the words on the page (1998: 75–106).
According to David Share (1995), these long-lasting beneficial effects occur
because young children who understand the alphabetic principle and who are
taught letter–sound rules (elementary phonics) as their first introduction to
reading have a powerful self-teaching device available. They can ‘sound out’
and hence pronounce unfamiliar words that they come across in their reading.
If the word is one that is already in their spoken vocabulary, sounding out and
pronouncing it will allow them to understand it. If it is a word that is not in
their spoken vocabulary, the context in which it appears will give them some
idea of what it might mean, thus contributing to oral vocabulary development.
Using phonic rules to sound out unfamiliar words thus has the power to
develop both written and spoken vocabulary. Furthermore, Share argues that
paying close attention to the letter-by-letter sequence of the unfamiliar word as
it is sounded out facilitates its storage in sight vocabulary (by sight vocabulary,
we mean a store of words that are instantly recognized on sight, and linked to
their meanings and pronunciations).
Chelsea was lucky, in that her first teacher understood the place and value of
early phonics teaching, and provided the children in her class with systematic
and structured teaching of letter–sound correspondences. This wise and
wonderful teacher also made sure that it was fun for the children, and that they
immediately had opportunities to practise their new knowledge in reading and

writing words using the letter–sound rules they’d learned, and the segmenting
and blending skills they’d been taught. Chelsea was soon well placed to start
trying to sound out unfamiliar words, as she had been taught letter sounds and
how to blend these to make words. She had a powerful toolkit to help her
decode transparent two-, three- and four-letter words like ‘up’, ‘hat’, ‘went’
and so on. Her self-teaching device was kicking in from the beginning. Her
phoneme segmentation skills and knowledge of letter sounds also enabled her
to start to write without needing continual adult input to this – her spelling was
not conventional, but she was able to represent the sound pattern of most words
she wanted to write (for example, ‘plez wil u cum to mi prte’).
Acquiring sight vocabulary
Chelsea also took part in shared reading sessions with big books. She often
looked at the big book herself once the session had ended, and played school
with her friend, when they took turns in being the teacher and reading the big
book. Because the same big books were shared frequently in reading sessions,
Chelsea very quickly learned several of the texts off by heart. Then, her ‘playing
school’ sessions with her friend became real learning sessions: Chelsea was
careful to follow each word in the text with her finger, as the teacher did, and
to recite the text she had learned by heart as she did so. Most often, the word
she recited was the word she was pointing to and looking at, although there
were occasional mismatches – 5-year-olds are not necessarily perfect at
identifying word boundaries in connected speech, so her recitation occasionally
ran ahead of her pointing. When the word attended to on the page matched the
word she was speaking, Chelsea had the opportunity to learn that that
particular arrangement of printed letters represented that particular spoken
word. She was able also to start storing some sight vocabulary.
Jackie Masterson, Maureen Dixon and I carried out a training experiment
(Stuart et al., 2000) to see how easy it is for 5-year-old beginning readers to store
new words in sight vocabulary from repeated shared reading of the same texts.
It turned out to be much harder than we expected! We tried to teach the children
16 new words, which were printed in red to make them identifiable as the words
to be learned. There was one of the red words on each page. After the children
had seen and read each red word 36 times, no child was able to read all 16 of
them, and the average number of words read correctly was five. We were quite
shocked by this, because we had made a database of all the words from all the
books the children were reading in school, and so we knew how many different
words each child had been exposed to in their first term reading at school. This
ranged from 39 to 277 different words, with a mean of 126. Hardly any of these
words occurred frequently in any individual child’s pool of vocabulary: on
average fewer than four words occurred more than 20 times – yet 36 repetitions
had not been enough to guarantee that children would remember a word. When
we tested children’s ability to read words they’d experienced more than 20 times
in their school reading, on average they could read only one word correctly.
The alphabetic principle and learning

sight vocabulary
Chelsea would have been one of the stars if she had taken part in our
experiment. We had actually split the children into two groups, based on their
knowledge of letters and their ability to give the first sound in a spoken word.
One group had, like Chelsea, good understanding of the alphabetic principle.
They were near perfect at telling us that ‘sandwich’ began with /s/, and at
choosing the written letter S as the one you’d need if you were going to start
writing ‘sandwich’. We’ll call this group the ‘graphophonic group’. The other
group had no idea what ‘sandwich’ or any other spoken word we presented
started with, and made random choices when asked which letter you’d need if
you were going to start writing ‘sandwich’ or any other word we’d presented.
We’ll call this group the ‘non-graphophonic group’. The graphophonic group
learned significantly more of the new words than the non-graphophonic group:
after 36 encounters with each word, the graphophonic group could on average
read seven words and the non-graphophonic group only three.
We suggested that two things – awareness of phonemes in spoken words, and
letter–sound knowledge – are crucial to this swifter acquisition of sight
vocabulary. Sight vocabulary involves forming links between the visual form of
the word and its meaning and pronunciation. The link from the visual form of a
word to its meaning is essentially arbitrary. If, like Chelsea, and like the children
in the graphophonic group, you can also make some logical links between some
of the letters in the visual form of the word and some of the sounds you can hear
in the spoken word, this should underpin and reinforce the arbitrary link from
visual form to meaning. This, we suggest, is why the graphophonic group who
could identify initial sounds in words and map from a sound to a letter learned
more words than the non-graphophonic group. Similar suggestions have been
made by Linnea Ehri (1995) and Usha Goswami (1993).
Interestingly, we had also measured the children’s visual memory abilities,
because making links between visual forms of words and their meanings could
be seen as involving visual memory – memory for things you have seen. Our two
groups of children were matched for visual memory ability. For children in the
graphophonic group, there was no correlation between visual memory scores
and number of words learned. But for children in the non-graphophonic group,
this correlation was highly significant: although children in this group learned
fewer words, the children with better visual memory scores were more likely to
learn some words. It seems that if a child has no understanding or knowledge
of the alphabetic principle, then they’d better have a good visual memory.
The fact that we’d found evidence not only of differential rates of learning
but also that the two groups were perhaps trying to set up representations of
words based on entirely different kinds of information led us to a further
question, namely, what aspects of printed words do children store in their
earliest representations of sight vocabulary? Some children seem to be able to
use logical links between print and sound to remember sight vocabulary, whilst
others seem to have to rely on the arbitrary links between print and meaning
that their visual memory allows. We (Dixon et al., 2002) set out to investigate
whether these different ways of remembering words led to the formation of
qualitatively different representations in sight vocabulary.
Phonemic identification and sight vocabulary
We worked again with 5-year-olds, and tested their ability to tell us what
sounds spoken words began and ended with. We also again tested their
knowledge of letter sounds. From these screening tests, we assigned the
children to three groups. Children who could identify both initial and final
phonemes and could select the letters to represent given phonemes at levels
significantly above chance were assigned to group 1; children who could
identify initial but not final phonemes, and could also select letters to
represent given phonemes at levels significantly above chance were assigned
to group 2; and children who could do neither phoneme identification task
and were at chance on the sound-letter matching task were assigned to group
3. Chelsea, who could identify initial phonemes but not final phonemes (that
is, could tell you that CAT begins with /k/, but not that CAT ends with /t/)
and who by now had been taught lots of letter sounds, would have been
assigned in this experiment to group 2.
We then set out again to teach some new words to all the children. But this
time, we didn’t just expect that group 1 would learn more quickly than group 2,
who in turn would learn more quickly than group 3. This time we also predicted
that children in the three different groups would store different representations
of the words they learned. As children in group 1 were aware of sounds at both
the beginning and end of words, we predicted that they would include the
beginning and end letters of the word in their representation. Children in
group 2 we thought would selectively store the beginning letter, and we didn’t
know what children in group 3, relying on visual memory rather than on
forming links between some letters and some sounds, would store.
We made the learning task fearsomely difficult by making all ten words the
same length, by printing them in capital letters so there were no overall
distinguishing patterns of ascenders and descenders, and by having five pairs of
words starting with the same letter. That is, we tried to teach SANDAL, SIGNAL,
RASCAL, ROCKET, TICKET, TURNIP, CARTON, COBWEB, PICNIC,
PENCIL. We showed the children the words on flashcards and we got them to
match the words to pictures and we planned to continue this training until each
child had read all ten words correctly in two consecutive sessions. But nine
children, mostly from group 3, never met this criterion, and for such children
training was stopped after 56 presentations of each word (14 training sessions).
Then we tested the children with the real words and a variety of misspelled
versions of each, to discover which aspects of each word were represented in the
child’s memory for that word. We laid out a word and its seven variants on the
table (for example, SANDAL PANDAL SANDAN SARDAL SANCAL NASDAL
SANLAD SADNAL) and asked the child ‘Which of these says “SANDAL”?’ We
noted which word the child chose and then asked, ‘Do any of the others say
“SANDAL”?’ And we kept on noting the child’s response and asking this
question until the child said, no, none of the others was ‘SANDAL’.
We expected children in group 1 to choose fewer variants of each word,
because we expected them to have stored the first and last letter in their sight
vocabulary representation. If this were so, then they would likely accept
SANDAL SARDAL SANCAL SADNAL, that is, the real word and the three
variants that retained the first and last letter. We were quite close here: on
average, children in this group accepted 3.4 items, and were more likely to be
misled by variants where the change was in the middle of the word.
We expected children in group 2 to choose more variants of each word than
children in group 1, because we expected them to have stored only the first
letter in their sight vocabulary representation. If this were so, then they would
likely accept SANDAL SANDAN SARDAL SANCAL SANLAD SADNAL,
that is, the real word and the five variants that retained the first letter. We were
quite close here too: on average children in this group accepted 5.9 items, and
only very seldom accepted variants where the first letter was wrong. And we
expected children in group 3 to choose at random and possibly accept the real
word and all its variants: they accepted on average 6.5 items, and were more
likely than children in group 2 to accept variants where the first letter was
wrong, although they were still less likely to accept variants where the first
letter was wrong than variants with changes in other positions within the word.
It clearly was a very hard task, and Chelsea might have commented, as did some
of the children in groups 2 and 3: ‘I know which ones say rocket, nearly all of
them!’ and ‘But all of them look like turnip to me!’
Let’s just pause here for a recap and think forward. Chelsea got off to a good
start in reading because she knew about letters, she knew that spoken words
were patterns of sounds, she could identify the initial sound in spoken words,
she knew that sounds in words could be written with letters, and she knew the
letters that stood for a few sounds. These attributes allowed her quickly to learn
remaining letter–sound rules, and to use these to work out the pronunciations
of some of the unfamiliar words she came across in reading texts. As we’ve seen,
according to David Share the ability to sound out unfamiliar words acts as a
self-teaching device: children who can use phonics to sound out unfamiliar
words can then store these words in sight vocabulary for subsequent rapid
recognition. Our experiments suggest that these attributes are what allowed
Chelsea also to use her experiences in shared reading and in playing at reading
to start to develop a sight vocabulary. Moreover, the representations she stored

in sight vocabulary were likely to contain the first letter of each word, because
as she could identify the first sound of the word, she could link the first letter
to that sound, reducing the arbitrariness of the relationship between written
word and meaning.
From initial and final phonemes to vowel digraphs:

inferential self-teaching
How much better would Chelsea have done if she had also been able to identify
the final sounds in spoken words? In that case, her sight vocabulary
representations of words would include the first and last letters. That is, the
word ‘BOAT’ would be represented as ‘b–t’, and the word ‘NIGHT’ as ‘n–t’.
From another of our experiments (Stuart et al., 1999), we argue that these
skeletal representations provide the child with a particularly powerful device for
learning.
So let’s assume that by the time she was six (the age of the children in Stuart
et al., 1999), Chelsea had got to grips with final sounds in words and was now
storing both beginning and end letters in her sight vocabulary representations.
If so, then as she reads and re-reads these words in the books she is now reading
every day, in guided as well as shared reading sessions and at home with her
parents, every repeat encounter with a word provides an opportunity to
complete its representation in sight vocabulary. As she reads ‘BOAT’, the ‘b’ is
already linked to /b/ and the ‘t’ to /t/: the ‘oa’ must therefore link to the
remaining portion of the sound pattern, to the /əυ/ in the middle of /bəυt/. As
she reads ‘NIGHT’, the ‘n’ is already linked to /n/ and the t to /t/: the ‘igh’ must
therefore link to the remaining portion of the sound pattern, to the /ai/ in the
middle of /nait/. Chelsea aged six is able to learn further phonic rules from her
experience of reading! Stuart et al. (1999) demonstrated this ability in 6- to
7-year-old readers who learned to read before the NLS was implemented. These
children were taught only the sounds of single letters at school: no vowel
digraphs were taught. We reasoned that if the children were nonetheless able to
read made-up ‘words’ containing vowel digraphs correctly, they must have
learned about the vowel digraphs from their reading experience, because
nobody was directly teaching them these.
We used our database of the children’s reading vocabulary to identify vowel
digraphs that the children had come across very frequently (ee, ea) or very
infrequently (oy, ei) in words they read in their school reading books. And as a
check on our hypothesis that correct reading of vowel digraphs indicated self-
teaching through reading, we further reasoned that children should in that
case be more likely to read correctly the vowel digraphs they’d experienced
frequently than those they’d not come across very often. So, in our experiment,
‘ee’ and ‘ea’ should be read correctly more often than ‘oy’ and ‘ei’. But vowel
digraphs differ in more than just frequency of occurrence: for example, they
also differ in the consistency of their pronunciation. So we manipulated this
too: ‘ee’ is always pronounced /i/ and ‘oy’ is always pronounced /ɔ¹/ in all the
English words in which they occur; ‘ea’ and ‘ei’ are pronounced in a variety of
ways in different words in English (bead, great, head; vein, heir, weird). So we
also reasoned that consistency should affect vowel digraph reading accuracy:
the consistent should be easier to learn than the inconsistent.
In this experiment, we split children into two groups, according to whether they
were reading above or below the level expected for their age on a standardized
word reading test. There was an effect of reader group: children reading at or
above the expected level for their age were better at reading the vowel digraphs
correctly. We also found the expected effect of vowel digraph frequency: ‘ee’ and
‘ea’ were read correctly much more often than ‘oy’ and ‘ei’. Our scoring system
militated against finding any effects of consistency, as we counted any of the
several alternative pronunciations of each inconsistent digraph as correct.
The explanation I’ve given of how some children – 6- to 7-year-old children
who are reading words well – might be able to learn further phonic rules from
their experience of reading depends crucially on the notion that sight vocabulary
representations which incorporate beginning and end letters of words provide
opportunities for the child to infer that the remaining letters must represent the
middle sound of the word. We found some support for this notion also, in that
children who could identify the middle sound in a spoken word (that is, who
could tell us that the middle sound in /bəυt / was /əυ/) were the best at reading
vowel digraphs. The children with all the necessary prerequisites in place for
such inferential learning to occur were indeed the best learners.
So, by the age of seven, Chelsea’s ability to teach herself phonic rules from
reading continues to increase the power of her phonic decoding abilities, so that
she can sound out more and more complex words, which she can then store in
sight vocabulary for future swift recognition. These two different kinds of word
recognition processes (sight vocabulary; phonics) work together to reinforce
and strengthen each other. Phonic knowledge allows rudimentary decoding of
unfamiliar words and underpins early sight vocabulary; early sight vocabulary
allows further phonic rules to be inferred; expansion of the phonic rule system
allows more complex unfamiliar words to be decoded and stored as sight
vocabulary; as sight vocabulary expands, so does the possibility for further
inferences to be made; this further expands the phonic rule system and so on.
This is why some children, like Chelsea, take to reading like ducks to water.
Systematic teaching of phonics
But what of the children who do not: how can they best be taught? First, we need
to be able to identify such children early on. When we start teaching children
to read, we need to know whether they are phonologically aware: whether they
can identify rhymes and initial and final phonemes in spoken words. We need
to know how many and which letter sounds they know. This information is
quick and easy to obtain. It is probably counter-productive to start teaching
children to read before they are capable of understanding and using the
alphabetic principle. As Stuart et al. (2000) showed, children who are required
to learn to read words before these capacities are developed rely on visual
memory and are unable to do more than learn to associate arbitrary features of
print with word meanings: this learning is unproductive and cannot generalize
to novel items. Therefore, the first priority with 5-year-olds who are not
phonologically aware and who do not know letter-sound correspondences is to
teach them these things.
The research evidence clearly indicates that teaching phoneme awareness
and phonics facilitates the development of word reading and spelling skills
(for a review of the effects of phoneme awareness training, see Ehri et al., 2001b;
for a review of the effects of phonics teaching, see Ehri et al., 2001a). In
intervention studies with inner-city children, most of whom were learning
English as an additional language (Stuart, 1999, 2004), children who were given
one term of systematic phonics and phoneme awareness teaching in their
second term in Reception were significantly better readers and spellers of words
at the end of Year 1 than children not taught in this way. They retained their
word reading and spelling advantage at the end of Year 2 over children in the
sample who were not given any systematic phonics teaching throughout KS1.
One class not taught systematic phonics in Reception had received one year of
systematic phonics teaching during Year 2. This class were equally as good word
readers as the Reception-taught group by the end of Year 2, although their
ability to read ‘made up’ words (an analogue for ‘unfamiliar words’) was still
less well developed than that of the children taught phonics for one term in
Reception.
We also know that early systematic phonics teaching does not abolish
individual differences: some children learn what is taught faster and with less
need for practice than others. But it is clear that systematic phonics teaching
which includes the two components of phoneme awareness and linking
phonemes with letters is beneficial to the progress of children who learn with
more difficulty and who need more practice (Hatcher et al., 2004).
If we adopt phoneme awareness and phonics teaching as the entry point for
teaching reading, then many of the children we teach will, like Chelsea, get off
to a flying start in reading and will progress, as Chelsea did, to develop a self-
teaching system for reading words. This will be true even of some of those who
enter school without the attributes that enabled Chelsea to get off to such a
flying start, but who are quick to pick up on these things when they are given
the opportunity to do so through structured, systematic and intensive teaching.
The children who are slow to pick up on these things need more time and
practice. For example, in the school where the Jolly Phonics programme was
developed, the whole Reception class would go through the 10-week
programme in the first term. Those who had not got it at the end of the first
term were given additional small group teaching in the second term. Those who
still had not got it then were given additional individual teaching in the third
term. By the start of Year 1, the alphabetic principle was understood and used
to some extent by all children. This, I suggest, is what we should be aiming to
achieve for all the children we teach.
How do the arguments and evidence presented in this chapter relate

to those in Chapter 6, ‘Developmental Issues’ and in Chapter 1, ‘How
Children Learn to Read’?
SOMETHING TO READ
The author of this chapter was a member of the Rose Committee,

which looked at the role of phonics in early reading. Read the Rose
Review’s report published in March 2006, available online at www.
standards.dfes.gov.uk/rosereview/
SOMETHING TO DO
Identify children in your class who bring some of the different kinds
of understanding about sounds in words that are described in this
chapter. Reflect on how well your current phonics curriculum is
meeting their needs.
Chapter 3
Teaching Phonics:
The Basics
Sandra Farmer, Sue Ellis

and Vivienne Smith
Unless you have phonemic awareness . . . it is impossible to gain much

from instruction in phonics. (Harrison, 2004: 41)
Research about phonics for reading – and for spelling – exists in abundance. This
chapter turns attention to the practical knowledge, skills and processes teachers,
classroom assistants and student teachers need to embrace to teach phonics
effectively. Interviews with practitioners and with tutors who provide continuing
professional development courses consistently highlight the need for practitioners
to have solid, practical understanding of the subject. Experienced phonics
teachers will recognize much of the information in this chapter, and could use it
when planning the content and activities for parents’ workshops and induction
sessions for new staff. The practicalities of how to teach a sequenced phonics
programme are well covered in many commercial programmes and governmental
resources, and such resources are easily accessible. This chapter therefore does not
focus on the minutia of the order in which to teach phonemes, segmenting and
blending, but rather on the fundamental understanding about these processes that
practitioners must consider.
Talking about letters
When people begin working on phonics it is easy to make small and basic mistakes
that create confusions for children. One basic mistake is confusing letter names
34
Teaching Phonics: The Basics 35
and letter sounds. Children need to be taught quite clearly that letters have a
name and make a sound. For some letters, the name and the sound are quite
similar (the letter ‘f ’, for example, makes the sound at the beginning of ‘fish’). For
others, the name and the sound are quite different (the letter ‘c’ makes the sound
at the start of ‘cat’).
The complex orthography of English means that letters do not consistently
make the same sounds (compare, for example, the ‘c’ in ‘cat’ and in ‘circle’ or
the ‘s’ in ‘sea’ and in ‘sugar’). This can be confusing for children and needs to
be acknowledged rather than ignored. It is particularly important to discuss it
when children are doing activities such as the ‘sound bag’ or collecting objects
beginning with a particular sound (perhaps to make a ‘sound table’). Chapters 6
and 8 provide more detailed explanation of the complex relationship between
sounds and letters in English.
Several phonics schemes begin by teaching children the sounds that letters
make, and teach the letter names slightly later. This is fine unless children have
already been taught the letter names at home or learned them from alphabet
songs or watching popular television programmes such as Sesame Street. It is a
good idea, when adults begin talking about letters, to ask the children what
they already know. If the children already know the letter name, it makes sense
to use this as an anchor for new knowledge about the sound. Otherwise, some
children become confused, knowing lots of ‘free-floating’ bits of information
about the letter but unsure of how it connects together and unable to use their
knowledge effectively or confidently. Being able to link letter names and sounds
is useful in other ways too. The important thing about letter names is that they
are constant; the letter ‘a’ is always called ‘a’ but the sounds the letter ‘a’ can
represent are numerous. Also, the letter names can help children to understand
long vowels. Don’t let children always associate letter names with upper-case
writing and sounds with lower-case writing.
Making sounds
When you say ‘sounds’, be careful not to distort the sound by enunciating in an
exaggerated way. It is especially important to avoid adding an extra ‘uh’
(technically called a ‘schwa’ sound) to the consonant; try to say ‘c’, ‘rrr’ and ‘t’
rather than ‘cuh’, ‘ruh’ and tuh’. Some sounds are running sounds like aaaa,
rrrrrrrrr, llllllllllll, mmmmmm, nnnnnnnn and sssssss and are fairly easy to
articulate without the intrusive ‘schwa’, but c, t, b, p, g are much harder and are
notoriously vulnerable to over-articulation or vocalizing a vowel at the end. The
sound that ‘c’ makes can, with care, run on. Other consonants, however, especially
those known as the plosives (e.g. b and p) are much trickier. Sometimes it helps
to separate a sound by rapidly repeating it in its briefest form – b b b b b b.
Over-enunciation of isolated sounds interferes with children’s understanding
of how to blend sounds, segment sounds and listen for sounds.
Don’t assume that children understand the

words you use
It seems obvious to check that the children know what you mean when you use
terminology such as ‘word’, ‘letter’ and ‘sound’. Young children may not have
had a lot of previous discussion about the mechanics of print and may not be
completely secure about what these terms mean. Even experienced teachers can
make assumptions about the vocabulary and experiences children bring.
Words such as ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘end’ can also cause confusion. Some
children may still be struggling to use ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘end’ easily
when talking about physical objects that they can see and touch. Spoken words
are far harder – they are transitory: they cannot be seen and they cannot be
touched. When children first learn to talk, they think of words solely in terms of
what they mean: for a young child ‘ice lolly’ is often one word (because it relates
to one thing) and it means, quite simply, an ice lolly. It must seem very strange
to children unused to thinking of words as a sequence of sounds or articulatory
movements, to suddenly hear their teacher talking about an ‘ice lolly’ as two
words, each with a ‘beginning’ and an ‘end’. Hatcher (2000) and Adams et al.
(1998) offer some practical advice for helping children to hear the sounds.
Don’t confuse phonemes with letters
Experience has shown that adults often discern small units better, not in sound
but in writing. There is an irony here, for teachers often bemoan the fact that
children do not listen very well. Classroom experience shows that children are
able to discern phonemes aurally once they have reached the phoneme-chunking
stage of phonological development (see Chapter 8). Adults, by contrast, are
often almost irretrievably immersed in visual, print-borne information and find
it difficult to focus on hearing the sounds rather than seeing the letters. One of
the most basic mistakes adults make in teaching phonics, therefore, is that their
knowledge of the letters used in the written word overrides their ability to hear
the number of actual sounds in it.
For example, take the word ‘cat’. Say the word slowly and smoothly, stretching
out the sounds to let them run easily into each other. Count how many different
sounds you say in the word. Adults generally have no trouble identifying three
sounds (or phonemes) – ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’. You will note that the number of phonemes
in the word ‘cat’ matches the number of letters. However, now do the same
exercise for ‘chat’. You should find that ‘chat’ has the same number of phonemes
as ‘cat’ but a different number of letters: the first phoneme in ‘chat’ is ‘ch’, a single
sound but represented by two letters – a digraph.
The following activity will help practitioners to find out for themselves the
extent to which they have a secure and explicit awareness of phoneme (sound)
Number of Number
phonemes of letters Digraphs (two Trigraphs (three Quadragraphs
(sounds) in in the letters that make letters that (four letters that
the word word one sound) make one sound) make one sound)
Cat 3 3 – – –
Chat 3 4 ch – –
Splat
Bridge
Catch
Clock
Caught
Table 3.1 Working out how phonemes relate to graphemes in words
and grapheme (letter(s) that represent the sound) boundaries. Consider in turn
each of the words in Table 3.1. Say each word slowly and smoothly. As you say
the words, listen very carefully for the different phonemes you hear and count
them. Beware! You may have a tendency to see the letters of the word rather
than hear the changes in sound as the word is said. Compare your answers with
those of a colleague before reading the next paragraph.
You should have found that ‘splat’ has five phonemes (and five letters);
‘bridge’ has four phonemes (‘b’ ‘r’ ‘i’ ‘j’) and six letters. ‘Catch’ has three
phonemes (‘c’ ‘a’ ‘ch’ – note that the final phoneme is exactly the same as the
first sound in ‘chat’) but it has five letters, whereas ‘clock’, also with five letters,
has four phonemes (‘c’ ‘l’ ‘o’ ‘c’).
An understanding of how sounds are articulated can help to stop adults being
blinded by the number of letters in a word (see Chapter 6). Various practical
approaches can support people in listening to the phonemes in a word, rather
than looking at the letters. Miskin (2005) recommends counting the phonemes
by stretching each sound along a separate finger whilst saying the word slowly
and smoothly. Marie Clay recommends using Elkonin boxes, where empty
squares represent the number of phonemes in the word. The word is
pronounced slowly and smoothly (stretched-out) and counters placed in the
appropriate square as each new phoneme is heard (Clay, 1993: 33). It is also
helpful if children are taught to write digraphs, trigraphs and quadragraphs in
flowing, joined script from the start to emphasize the link with the sound and
establish automatic spelling patterns.
It is critical that practitioners feel very secure in their concepts of
phonemes and graphemes and their boundaries. Why? Because this marks the
difference between phonics teaching of the past and what has been referred to
as ‘new phonics’. Old phonics teaching tended to assume blending as an
obvious and automatic process, and blended sounds were often taught as a
unit. (For example, children would be asked to look for ‘sp’ in the beginning
of words such as ‘spell’, the end of words such as ‘wasp’ and in the middle of
words such as ‘raspberry’). Thus, old phonics teaching approaches didn’t
consistently take sounds down to the basic unit of the phoneme. The ‘new
phonics’ approach argues that this is important; children must be taught to
hear and understand phonemes if they are to understand the alphabetic
principle (Bielby, 1994).
Be clear about whether you are teaching

onset–rime or CVC words
Many practitioners have ‘picked up’ terms such as ‘onset and rime’ and ‘CVC
words’ but haven’t necessarily thought about how the two relate to each other.
When practitioners are teaching using onset and rime, the teaching activity should
involve isolating all the consonants at the beginning of a syllable up to the first
vowel. This is the onset. The first vowel and any remaining vowels and consonants
are the rime. For example cl/ock are the onset and rime for clock, w/ig-w/am
are the onsets and rimes for the two-syllable word ‘wigwam’. Teaching activities
using onset and rime involve children in listening to these sounds. Having
identified these sounds, teachers then often ask children to analyse the visual
patterns of the letters and use this information to work out new words. For
example, the rime ‘ock’ helps children work out dock, lock, sock and so on.
Hearing onset and rime and seeing letter patterns are not inevitably bound
together, however (see Chapter 1 for a fuller discussion).
When practitioners teach CVC words, they are often teaching children to
hear and identify all the individual phonemes in the word, in sequence. The
tasks tend to involve activities such as blending individual phonemes to make
a whole word or separating a whole word into its constituent sounds.
It is not a bad idea to use the technical terms with children, as long as this
doesn’t confuse them. The important thing to remember is that the activities
associated with onset–rime and with CVC words require different kinds of
thinking about the sounds and the relationship between sounds and letters;
both are valid and important for different reasons. Chapter 2 explains the
importance of teaching CVC words and Chapter 8 explains the importance of
acknowledging letter strings that do not fit the principle of matching one
phoneme (sound) per letter.
Take a critical look at activities and worksheets
To use phonics effectively, children must be taught to hear the phonemes in

words, to hear the sequence of phonemes and to know and be able to write the
letters and letter combinations that commonly represent those phonemes in

written English.
We all know that teachers must actively teach and cannot expect activities and
worksheets to do the job for them. Some activities and worksheets may give
opportunities to clarify understandings and to practise and consolidate
knowledge. To be sure of this, however, practitioners need to look analytically at
the talking and the thinking that the worksheet or activity promotes in practice.
There are several drawbacks to using worksheets as the mainstay of a phonics
programme. One is that ‘doing’ the worksheet often involves spending less than
a minute thinking about the sounds and the letters; the bulk of the time is spent
colouring in the pictures. Another potential problem is that many phonics
worksheets can be completed purely on the basis of visual information; the child
can correctly match-up similar letters without ever thinking about how the word
sounds, how it is articulated or connecting the phonemes with the letters that
represent them. A third issue is that to illustrate sounds, worksheets sometimes
assume a vocabulary that is simply not within the modern child’s experience.
A recent example was children from an economically disadvantaged Glasgow
estate completing a worksheet about the phoneme ‘i’. Two of the four objects used
to illustrate this sound were ‘ink’ (the illustration was of a traditional ink bottle)
and ‘imp’ (the illustration showed a pixie-type figure). Imps and the ink required
for traditional fountain pens not being familiar objects, these children were
talking about a ‘bottle’ and a ‘wee man’. They saw no relationship between the
phoneme ‘i’ and the objects depicted on the worksheet. Although they enjoyed
colouring the pictures, one has to question what they learned about phonics.
They would have benefited more from the kinds of explicit, interactive teaching
described in Chapter 4, firmly embedded in illustrations of how and why this
knowledge is useful and encouragement to use it in reading and writing
activities across the curriculum.
Understand the technical terms and don’t be

afraid to use them
Crucial to any exploration of phonics for teachers, teaching assistants and other
practitioners is the need to clarify the core concepts and terminology used.
Spend a few moments thinking about how you would complete each of the
following sentence starters. Try to capture the essence of each term by jotting
down key words and phrases:
Phonics is . . .
Phonemic awareness is . . .
Phonological awareness is . . .
Phonetics is . . .
Invite other colleagues to engage in this task and share your comments. A useful
starting point is to consider which of the four terms felt least threatening – or
most familiar – to each of you, as well as what you have each written down.
Discuss how you felt when trying to differentiate these terms. Many teachers,
students and teaching assistants report an uncomfortable level of inadequacy,
even embarrassment. This often leads to consideration of the importance of
open discussion and direct training in both initial teacher education and
subsequent professional development courses.
A glance down the list shows that all the four terms share the same stem phon –
linking them all in some way to sound. A focus on the term ‘phonics’, however,
cannot solely encompass sound, but also the association between a sound and
the symbol(s) used to depict that sound in writing. Teachers may be familiar
with educational psychologists’ reports which sometimes refer to ‘sound to
symbol’ and ‘symbol to sound’ processing. This kind of language is more
accurate than ‘sound to letter’ and ‘letter to sound’ processing. The moment we
make reference to the symbolic information of writing we move into ‘graphic’
rather than ‘phonic’ information. Hence it seems that the term ‘phonics’ is
better understood as a shorthand term for either ‘grapho-phonics’ (if the
literacy process is reading) or ‘phono-graphics’ (if the literacy process is
spelling/writing). Now our original terms have multiplied. We have:
phonological awareness
phonics
graphological awareness
graphics
Let’s move now to ‘phonological awareness’ – usefully interpreted as a lifelong

development centred on the ability to ‘chunk’ for sound. For a detailed description
of how children develop phonological awareness and what this involves, see
Chapter 6. Suffice to say that phonological awareness is an umbrella term covering
a range of increasingly finely-tuned developments, underpinned by the ever-more
conscious awareness of, and ability to manipulate, the sounds of language. A high
level of phonological awareness is the ability to engage in spoonerisms: turning
‘car park’ into ‘par cark’ and ‘cat-nap’ into ‘nat-cap’, for example.
So what, then, is the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic
awareness? It is useful here to consider phonemic awareness as a vital stage in the
overall development of phonological awareness. Within the term ‘phonemic’ is the
notion of a phoneme. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in language that
changes meaning. Take the word ‘cat’ – change the initial sound from ‘c’ to ‘th’ or
‘f ’ and the meaning of the original word is changed; change the middle sound to
‘u’ or ‘o’ and ‘cat’ becomes ‘cut’ or ‘cot’; change the final sound to ‘p’ or ‘ch’ and
‘cat’ becomes ‘cap’ or ‘catch’. Phonemic awareness, therefore, is the conscious
understanding that words are made up of individual sounds (phonemes) and that
these sounds are represented through the alphabet. Activities that require
phonemic awareness include alliteration, ‘spot the odd one out’ tasks, phoneme
segmentation, phoneme blending and phoneme manipulation.
Phonetics concerns the articulation and acoustic features of speech sounds.

Articulatory phonetics explains the distinction between consonants and vowels
(see Chapter 6) and can help listeners identify the phonemic pattern of words.
Parallel distinctions exist for talking about knowledge of the written letters.
Thus, a grapheme is the smallest unit of written language that changes the
meaning of a word and graphemic awareness, the awareness, sensitivity to and
ability to manipulate graphemes to change the meaning of a word.
Make the purpose and applications of phonics

lessons explicit
Everyone learns more effectively when they understand how the learning will
be useful and can link the learning activity they have been set with wider, more
general experiences. This matters because children need to apply new knowledge
many times before it moves from working memory to long-term memory and
becomes effortless and automatic.
Sometimes links that seem obvious to practitioners are less obvious to children,
who often ‘ring-fence’ knowledge and see it as only applicable to particular
activities or situations (Guthrie, 2004). Thus, the links between phonics lessons,
reading and writing need to be demonstrated and followed through to make the
wider applications completely explicit. Children need to be shown how phonics
is useful, and this must be integral to the teaching session, rather than an
‘afterthought’ at the end of the lesson or a separate lesson. It also means that
children should be coached in using their knowledge during real-life writing and
reading tasks, not just on games, worksheets and activities.
It is always good practice to ask children to suggest when they will be able to
use and apply what they have learnt: it helps to make the links explicit,
encourages a disposition for seeing links and encourages children to take
responsibility for, and notice opportunities for, their own learning. Incidental
comments by adults are also a powerful influence on the learning ethos in class.
Teachers and classroom assistants who point out and encourage children to
apply their learning to new activities, and who notice and compliment children
when they spontaneously make such links, help create this ethos.
Don’t ‘over-teach’: keep lessons pacy, interactive

and personally relevant
Teaching that is too pedestrian and earnest lacks impact. Short, pacy and
frequent phonics inputs have more impact than longer, drawn-out sessions
(Ofsted, 2005d). It is important to link new sounds to those that children

already know, but if lessons lack variety and if whole class teaching means that
children have to re-visit and re-explain old ideas too often, they become bored
and switch off. Multisensory approaches that include visual, auditory and
kinaesthetic ways of learning are important. For example, letters can be said,
chanted and sung about, their shapes can be created through body and hand
movements and they can be seen in different fonts and sizes. Multisensory
teaching supports all learners, including dyslexic children. Such approaches
help secure learning in long-term memory and support learners in making that
learning ‘automatic’ (PNS, 2005; Augur and Briggs, 1992). Varied resources
such as wooden, plastic and magnetic letters in an alphabet arc promote
graphemic and phonemic awareness.
It is also important to consider the social and emotional dimension of learning.
For adults, a letter is simply a letter and a sound simply a sound, but young
children are different. Some letters, and some sounds, are far more important
and salient than others, and the most important of all are those in their own
names and in the names of those they love. Many phonics schemes advocate a
teaching sequence based on introducing the most useful, high-frequency
phonemes first and in fairly quick succession to allow children to combine and
use them in writing and reading. For younger children, however, it may be
effective to introduce the letters and sounds that make ‘emotional sense’ at this
early stage, when they can become a useful anchor for other learning.
Be a ‘noticing’ practitioner
There is much emphasis on and encouragement for schools to introduce whole

class phonics instruction as early as possible. For children who are able to hear
and manipulate phonemes this appears be a good thing. However, some groups
of children have particular problems with blending and segmenting sounds.
These include children who stammer, children with ‘glue-ear’ and other types of
hearing loss (temporary or permanent), as well as any children who lack the
requisite level of phonemic or phonological awareness. Younger children are
particularly vulnerable in this respect. They will often benefit more from
playful opportunities to share and enjoy the sounds and rhythms of language
than from a highly structured and inflexible phonics programme at this stage.
Practitioners need to ensure that the relentless pace of whole class teaching
does not put such children under undue pressure. It is important to quickly
notice and respond to difficulties, and to recognize that support for such a child
may involve less emphasis on a phonics programme and more emphasis on the
alternative ways into reading and writing which are part of a broad literacy
curriculum (see Chapter 4).
Make the phonics worthwhile
Decoding words is not an end in itself. In an analysis of lift-the-flap books, Vivienne

Smith (2003) shows how the books children read teach them not only about reading
but also about learning. When children read meaningful, engaging and playful
texts, and when they read widely and discuss what the texts mean for them and
their lives, children become adventurous, thoughtful and active readers. They also
learn, in Smith’s words, that ‘knowledge is open-ended and the omniscience of the
text is limited’ (2003: 121). Similarly, when children are encouraged to write about
matters that are important to them and can write freely, using their writing to reach
out to the reader and to invite the reader into their world and their thoughts, they
become articulate, reflective authors. Unless children are shown how to put their
phonic knowledge to powerful use, all will come to nought. As Mark Twain is
quoted as saying, ‘Those who don’t read have no advantage over those who can’t.’
How can teachers and teaching assistants encourage children to

apply newly learned phonic knowledge immediately and repeatedly
so that they develop automaticity in terms of transferring and
applying phonics across a range of tasks and subjects?
How is children’s progress monitored in your school? In particular, how
quickly are children who don’t seem to be making sense of phonics
instruction noticed, and what types of support are they offered?
SOMETHING TO READ
Kathy Hall (see Chapter 1) and Colin Harrison (2004) will help
practitioners locate phonics teaching within the wider domain of
reading. Harrison, C. (2004) Understanding Reading Development.
London: Sage.
Adams, M.J., Foorman, B., Lundberg, I. and Beeler, T. (1998)
Phonemic Awareness in Young Children. Baltimore MD. Paul,
H. Brookes. This book builds up children’s phonological develop-
ment through a series of carefully structured yet fun-packed
games.
SOMETHING TO DO
Listen carefully to two or more people talking together. Really listen

to the sounds they are saying – especially the way words merge (for
example, people actually say ‘dwa’ for ‘do our’ in the sentence ‘we’re
going to do our homework’).
Be more sensitive to the range of ways people in school speak –
especially dialect differences and variations in accent. Drawing
children’s attention to the different ways that a word is enunciated
can help to make the sound structures in words more conspicuous.
Encourage children to count phonemes and graphemes carefully and
consider teaching a joined script to write the letters of digraphs,
trigraphs or quadragraphs.
Chapter 4
Inside the Classroom: Three

Approaches to Phonics Teaching
Lyndsay Macnair, Sally Evans,

Margaret Perkins and Prue Goodwin
In all the debates about the role of phonics and the kind of phonics we should
use, it is important to consider what the different approaches to phonics means
in terms of classroom practice. What are the teaching and learning experiences,
and what are the outcomes for children who are taught by practitioners with
different beliefs about the teaching of phonics?
In the first part of this chapter a teacher who first used synthetic phonics
in Clackmannanshire describes how she now mixes the approach with more
writing and play-based activities in her current school in Stirling. In the second
part, a teacher describes how she uses both synthetic and analytic phonics in
her class. The final account describes a heavily integrated and contextualized
approach based on exploring language in many ways.
Synthetic Phonics – How I Teach It
Lyndsay Macnair
I have taught phonics to infants in Scotland and New Zealand but I first became
aware of a new approach to teaching phonics whilst I was teaching in England.
Former colleagues in Clackmannanshire were piloting a synthetic phonics
programme and were keen to share their success. I spoke at length with my former
colleagues and had opportunities to observe lessons. On my return to teaching in
45
Clackmannanshire I was formally introduced to the Council’s synthetic phonics

programme with in-service training sessions and lesson observations.
From these sessions my first impression was that of speed. The pace of the lesson
was very slick and well structured. Letters and sounds were introduced with up to
four new sounds a week, which was much quicker than any approach I had
previously experienced. The children were being exposed to vocabulary such as
‘vowel’ and ‘consonant’ right from the start, with the use of colour and flags to
differentiate between the two. They were encouraged to look for letters and state
their position in a word, be it beginning, middle or end. Children were active and
interacting in the lessons: finding letters, blending words and forming letters. The
children’s enthusiasm and sense of achievement was electric and impressed me
greatly.
My second observation was the variety of resources used. These included
flashcards, invaluable magnetic letters on individual boards as well as a magnetic
wedge with the alphabet along the top, all within one lesson. I cannot stress how
important the magnetic boards and letters were. The children were able to work in
pairs and individually to blend words. The letters were introduced onto the boards
as they were taught. This was a resource idea I took away, used and adapted.
Having observed lessons and read the teachers’ material I was keen to begin. I
started with a small class and developed a blueprint which I now use with most
classes I teach. The most important point to stress is that the children’s active
participation in the lesson is key to its success. They must be able to access the
whiteboard, chalkboard or wedge – whichever I am using – so I have the children
sitting in front of the chalkboard in rows or in a circle with the magnetic boards
within reach. I have placed a grid overlay on the magnetic boards, containing the
letters of the alphabet, with the vowels highlighted in red. The children are
responsible for adding new letters and putting the letters back on the grid when
they have finished. I have also invested in a wooden set of magnetic letters which
have the vowels highlighted in another colour. This avoids any mix-ups with
magnetic letters when the children use the large board.
A typical phonics session
A typical phonics lesson lasts approximately 30–40 minutes and is split into
roughly six parts:
• Warm-up begins with oral starter activities which include the alphabet song,
the name game, letters before and after, and ‘vowel owls’.
• Revision of previous teaching using letter flashcards and magnetic wedge.
The children identify and say the letters and do the actions as the flashcards
are shown. This is reinforced again by asking the children to find letter
sounds on the wedge. The children are then asked to read words from the
board that reinforce the previous letters taught. At this point I get the
children to rub the words off the board as they read them (which gives great
Classroom Teaching: Three Approaches 47
satisfaction). Included on the board are the tricky words, which the children
learn alongside the letter sounds. I also have a selection of words as
flashcards. These are stuck to the board and collected instead of being
rubbed off. The children are given an opportunity to spell words. At this
point I remind them that to read a word they need to sound and blend it.
The children help me write words on the board sounding out each letter in
turn reinforcing beginning, middle and end. The children then make words
using their magnetic letters.
• A new sound is then taken from the alphabet and shown to the children with the
explanation that the letter makes a particular sound. At this point an action
is introduced to help the children remember the sound for that letter. The
children are then shown the printed version of the letter on the flashcard as
well as the written version on the board and wedge. Words containing the new
sound are written on the board and a volunteer is asked to find the new sound,
circle it and say its position in the word either beginning, middle or end. I then
ask for examples of words containing the new sound and write them on the
board, or the child can write them on the board with the help of their peers.
The children are asked to put the word into the context of a sentence.
• Word making with the magnetic letters to reinforce the new sound is always
popular with the children. Words are given and the children have to locate
the letter for each sound and place them in the correct order at the bottom
of their boards starting at the left-hand side, which is marked with a star.
This is an opportunity for paired working, when the children can assist each
other.
• Letter formation is practised with magic finger pencil writing on the floor, a leg
or in the air. Volunteers are asked to come and write on the board. The children
are shown a cursive font from the start, as we encourage cursive handwriting
at my school. I use individual whiteboards for this, giving children the
opportunity to make errors without worrying about its finality. The children are
then asked to assess their work and circle the best example, and I do the same.
These boards can be photocopied for evidence when required.
• Consolidation is completed in the form of a game, a written activity, a
whiteboard activity or a reading activity. I try to have a blank sound board
on the go for that day, giving the children a chance to add words containing
the new sound throughout the day, circling the sound for the day. If the child
cannot spell the word, I help them to sound it out. I often challenge the
children to find more words than the day before. This is a fun way to learn
and the children especially enjoy playing the games. These include picture
cue cards, a game which the child takes and makes the word either with the
magnetic letters or the whiteboard. Pairs matching words to pictures also
helps to develop memory skills. The children really enjoy sitting in a circle
with a mountain of words in front of them. They are timed to collect as many
words as they can read. If they are stuck they can put the word back or seek
peer or teacher help. This can be differentiated by placing the harder words
in front of the more confident child, saving simpler words for the less
confident. It’s the sense of achievement that is important in this game.
The impact of the approach
Having taught phonics for a number of years, I was surprised at the speed
and eagerness with which the children approached reading. The rate at which the
children progressed through the reading scheme as well as their hunger for non-
fiction material was impressive. They were willing to try the strategies shown
during the phonics lessons on everything. They were displaying competent word
attack skills and as a result new words were not daunting but rather a challenge to
be overcome. This had a huge impact on the rest of my teaching. The children
were able to write independently very early on and were confident in their writing.
They were unfazed by new vocabulary. They sounded words out and wrote them
down; yes, phonetically spelled, but nonetheless the children were writing and
were not afraid to have a go. The spelling improved as their knowledge base grew.
The amount the children wrote also increased, as did the range of contexts they
wrote about. The children’s handwriting improved as the children were exposed to
the cursive formation of letters right from the beginning, and when digraphs were
taught the children wrote them with the joins in place, knowing no different.
Environmental topics were now more challenging; the children in Primary 1
(who entered the class aged four and a half to five and a half) were able to
complete simple research activities I had previously introduced in Primary 2,
such as finding key vocabulary and facts from non-fiction material. The
children were also able to transfer the knowledge gained from research when
compiling their Jungle Journals, writing at least three facts about a variety of
grassland and jungle animals. Citizenship also benefited as the children were
keen to write more in their class journals after visits home or to interesting
places. The children were also able to read the journal themselves.
An added bonus was that of peer support. The children were able to help one
another and to read what each other had written. We made time for sharing
writing with our friends and classmates. Teaching synthetic phonics had a huge
impact not only on the class but also on the rest of the school and the parents.
I was aware that this approach to phonics was new to many parents. Many felt
it alien to them and were concerned about ‘not teaching it right’. As a result
the parents were invited to attend workshops within the school and in the class,
where they were shown a typical phonics lesson to help them develop a clearer
understanding of the strategies and expressions used. It was also an opportunity for
the teacher to dispell any parental concerns or confusion in a friendly informal way.
The parents were shown a range of the activities and games that the children
completed on a weekly basis. Many were surprised by the capability and confidence
of their child.
Within the school there were implications for the management team as well as
fellow teachers. Provision of resources and training had to be sustained as the
approach was rolled out throughout the infant department and beyond. The
attainment of the children had to be recognized and developed. These children
needed to be challenged at every opportunity or they would become bored and lose
their enthusiasm. This had implications for teaching and resources. The children
had to be given activities that were stimulating as well as challenging. The

management had to monitor this and encourage staff to look beyond familiar ‘stage
appropriate’ resources and schemes and provide support to adapt resources and
make them appropriate to the needs of the child. This included providing wider
reading material to complement the existing reading ‘scheme’ material.
Benchmarks in writing were constantly evaluated, looking to develop and improve
upon the year before.
Phonics, like most lessons, has to be fun and interactive to be remembered.
Within my career I have witnessed a number of approaches to teaching phonics
become popular only to be overtaken by the next latest and greatest. I have been
fortunate to participate in this Synthetic Phonics approach which I have tried,
tested, refined and believe will stand the test of time. In my opinion the
measure of its success is the joyful expressions of a class of children reading a
new book for the first time or a piece of writing to a friend.
A Commentary on Practices in the Synthetic

Phonics Classroom, by the Editors
Some of the practices mentioned in this account will be familiar in many

classrooms, whatever form of phonics teaching is adopted: an emphasis on active
teaching and learning; an expectation that all children will engage; the use of
familiar games and routines; the employment of visual, aural and kinaesthetic
ways of learning; the linking of reading and writing and the eagerness of the young
learners to participate. There are also familiar games and practices, such as the
parallel learning of phonemes and their graphemes and the use of letters to aid
word building. The correct naming of vowels and consonants and encouraging
children to pay explicit attention to letter position is also common practice in
many classrooms.
Readers will, however, be struck by the heightened pace of the introduction of
new sounds (up to four a week) and the amount of time given to phonic teaching
(30–40 minutes per day). This is in line with an approach that sees synthetic
phonics as a ‘fast and first approach’. At this rate all the phonemes can be
introduced within a term. The literacy session concentrates on teaching and
practising the phonemes and blending them to make words. Little time in this
session appears to be given to reading sentences or extended prose. The use of
decodable books is not specifically mentioned in this account but is often
promoted as part of more radical synthetic phonics programmes. Proponents of
synthetic phonics advocate giving children books they can read, which involves
restricting the vocabulary to the phonemes taught. There is also no use of
segmenting words to help children see letter patterns and draw analogies to help
with spelling and reading other words.
The phonic sessions are structured into a familiar routine – just as the literacy
hour in England follows a fairly fixed structure. Such a regular routine can be
supportive of learners as they know what to expect; routines help to establish a
community of learners and so the social practices adopted in this classroom are
taken as the norm by the children. The teacher’s commitment to the programme
comes through clearly. Such commitment is likely to impact on outcomes. The
teacher’s commitment was strengthened by professional development support.
A Mixed Approach: Synthetic and Analytic

Phonics Within a Broad Literacy Curriculum
Sally Evans
My phonics teaching is based around Playing with Sounds: A Supplement to

Progression in Phonics (DfES, 2003a). This programme is produced by the
Primary National Strategy/National Literacy Strategy. My phonics teaching is
only part of my wider approach to the teaching of literacy, but I understand that
teaching phonics is an important element in learning to read and I give it
regular time in the literacy hour.
My phonics teaching is planned, regular and structured. It is also fun and
active. It includes opportunities for children to use their phonic knowledge,
such as noticing sounds, words and patterns as we read books together for
pleasure and meaning. These shared reading books may be beyond those the
children could read unaided. In guided reading the books will be at an
instructional level of difficulty. An excited voice calling ‘Miss, Miss. Look it’s a
“ch”,’ or ‘There are three “ing” words on that page’ as we enjoy a class Big Book
or a guided reading session is a regular occurrence.
I see phonics as important but I do not see it as the only strategy my pupils need.
At the same time as we are learning and using phonics I introduce children to
other strategies they can use to help them read and understand a book, such as
learning high-frequency words as sight vocabulary, using picture cues, reading on
and using the context and syntax to work out what is a likely or unlikely word.
My pupils come from a range of different cultural communities and have
different experiences of exposure to books and awareness of environmental
print. They have a variety of knowledge about language patterns, letter
sounds and the alphabet letter names through the things they have done at
home and during their time in a variety of pre-school education settings and
reception class. Some of my children speak English as an additional language.
By the time they start in Year 1 there are noticeable differences in all
childrens’ attitudes towards learning to read and the early reading skills they
have already acquired. This means that I need to differentiate for various
groups and individuals. Although I plan for the Playing with Sounds (DfES,
2003a) programme as a class, there are some groups and individuals who may
need to spend more time within literacy sessions, practising and applying new
phonic knowledge, and others who are capable of moving on quickly. I have
an experienced classroom assistant who has developed her own knowledge of

phonics through working closely with me and through running National
Literacy Strategy intervention programmes such as Early Literacy Support
(DfEE, 1999b), and so one of us will take a group that needs additional
coaching. For the ‘average’ child I expect them to leave Year 1 as well
established beginning readers with a knowledge of the high-frequency words
listed in the framework, a sound understanding of the alphabetic code and
able to decode phonemically regular words. I expect them to segment words
and recognize patterns in words and use this to help with reading and
spelling. I also aim to ensure that they see the pleasures and purposes of
reading and writing, see themselves as readers and writers, and have a range
of strategies as well as phonics that they can use to help them as they read.
The literacy environment
My literacy teaching starts with the classroom environment. There are plenty of
attractive books (fiction and non-fiction) and a comfortable carpeted area where
we gather to read, as a class, a group or individually. There are posters, alphabet
friezes, labelled displays, word walls and labelled resources, all of which create a
print-rich environment. I have lots of language resources, including phonic
resources such as games, magnetic, felt and wooden letters and individual
whiteboards for children to ‘have a go’. The role-play area is set up to provide a
context in which they can see and use reading and writing (and mathematics).
This half-term we have a hospital, last term we had our Fairy Tale Cottage where
a notice on the door saying Just gone for a walk turned it into the Three Bears’
cottage, one saying Lift up the latch and walk in turned it into Grandma’s cottage, a
royal invitation in the letter box turned it into Cinderella’s kitchen and so on.
There are always writing materials in this area and the children use their phonic
knowledge as they write out a shopping list for mummy bear or a ‘do not disturb’
notice for Grandma’s door. We have a puppet theatre with a range of puppets
including a ‘Word Wizard’. Word Wizard’s cloak was made by one of our parents
and has letters scattered over it. Word Wizard takes part in many of our phonic
games and attempts at blending and segmenting. He’s very good at these and can
help, prompt and demonstrate. We also have ‘Baby Word Wizard’ (who has a
different coloured cloak and an L-plate) who often gets things wrong or gets stuck.
The children love helping him out.
I use ICT constantly to support and encourage reading. This includes things
such as phonic games on the computer, electronic Big Books, writing our own
books based on digital photographs that children add captions to and so on. I have
many everyday uses of ICT that support literacy. For example, when the children
enter the classroom in the morning and sit on the carpet, the computer is running
a programme that runs the words ‘Hello Isha, Hello James . . .’ (through all the
names of the class) along the bottom of the interactive whiteboard. As they settle
down they look out for their name and their friends’ names. As the year progresses
the message becomes longer – ‘Good morning’ or ‘How are you today?’ The children
are thrilled when a new message appears and read it with great excitement.
Typical phonic sessions
So what does a typical week of phonics teaching look like in my classroom? Most
days start with some songs, nursery rhymes or a language game as we gather on the
carpet. For some children these reinforce their phonemic awareness, for others
they are essential in continuing to give them vital early language experiences they
still need. Each day we have a literacy session of about an hour. We spend about
15 minutes on word level work, and three or four times a week this will be
dedicated wholly to phonic work. It will often begin with a song such as ‘Vowel
Rap’ or the ‘OO Song’ and then I will introduce a new sound or sounds that we will
draw on our neighbour’s back and on our whiteboards as we say it aloud. I will
write a word containing the phoneme and we will segment it into all its phonemes.
We will put it with other phonemes we know (using magnetic letters or the
interactive whiteboard) to blend into a word. We write the word and we will
generate other words with the same pattern. Children will try writing these on
their whiteboards. I introduce phonemes in an ordered way – initial, final and
medial – and we differentiate between consonants and vowels. We will play a game
using the sound(s), perhaps with our letter fans or on the interactive whiteboard.
We often create a sentence or two, which I scribe and which the children read back
to me. As the year progresses they write their own sentences.
I often start the literacy session with this word level work before moving on to
some shared reading or writing where children have further opportunities
to apply their phonic knowledge. During the independent group work some
groups will do further phonic practice through more games or through intensive
work with an adult. As well as the word level time within the literacy session,
playing around with sounds is threaded through short activities throughout the
day. For example, I may ask the children to line up in a certain order depending
on phonemes – all those whose name begins with ‘m’, with ‘b’; in PE we make the
shapes of letters as a warm-up activity, running round the hall and then making a
Y or a T or whatever.
Another word level session in the week will have a quick recap and revisit of
what we have done in phonics up to that point, but will then focus on sight
vocabulary and vocabulary extension. Handwriting is integrated into all the
word level sessions as we create letter shapes, but further handwriting activities
are undertaken at other times during the week too.
My long-term phonics planning is based on the medium-term plans provided
on the Playing with Sounds CD-ROM. This takes most children through all the
seven steps of Progression in Phonics by the end of term 1. The steps have also
been modified to introduce some vowels earlier so that the children can blend
words at an early stage. This is faster than the original pace suggested by
Progression in Phonics in 1999, but the introduction to Playing with Sounds

explains that this is because research shows that most children can progress
at this faster rate. The day-to-day phonic activities are taken from the many
suggestions on the laminated cards of the programme. These cards (22 in all)
progress systematically from such things as enjoying rhyming and rhythmic
activity to vowel digraphs and reading long words by identifying the phonemes
in syllables. The first 15 or so cards are aimed at foundation stage but are
very useful for tracking back for those children who need further experiences
in these early steps. There are screening materials for early identification of
children who may need additional support in phoneme-grapheme correspondences,
blending, segmenting and decoding.
The cards also offer me professional development support as each step has an
introductory card that gives advice on:
early learning goals/learning objectives;

what children need to have experienced;
explanation of any terminology;
what I need to know about this step (the professional content knowledge
the teacher needs to understand); and
assessing children’s development.
In the three years since I began teaching I have learnt a huge amount about the
role of phonics. Every day I see how it helps my children to read and to write,
but I do not think it works in isolation; it is part of a broader package.
A Commentary on the Mixed Approach Classroom,

by the Editors
Many of the activities described above are similar to those described in the
‘synthetic phonics classroom’, but simultaneously with the phonic teaching there
is work on sight vocabulary, other reading cues and supported reading and
enjoyment of books beyond the child’s reading ability. In guided reading sessions
children would be encouraged to use phonics to read unknown words, but
they would also be reminded of other strategies that can help them. There is a
different pace of phonics teaching in this class – although still fast – and a
different amount of time given to it. Emphasis is also given to using letter patterns.
This teacher integrates phonics with the wider literacy curriculum and sees
phonics as one skill to be developed and used among others, not as a completely
distinct skill to be taught separately and first. Like the synthetic phonics teacher,
this teacher plays short games to reinforce phonic knowledge, offering children
lots of kinaesthetic and interactive opportunities to learn. Also like the synthetic
phonics teacher, she actively encourages children to use their phonic knowledge
across the literacy curriculum – to recognize their names on the computer, to

write and to help her compose writing on the interactive whiteboard. She too has
had professional development support and has this confirmed by the information
on the introduction to the cards and by supporting videos.
Play and Planning: A Sound Pathway to Pleasurable

and Purposeful Reading
Margaret Perkins and Prue Goodwin
There are decades of research into how we read, how children learn to read and
how best to teach it. Anyone training to be a teacher can find shelves of books
in university libraries about the complex combination of skills and experiences
involved in being a reader. Each book may offer slightly different advice; some
authors may make bold statements about the efficacy of one teaching method
or another, but all the authors will have set out with the genuine intention of
enhancing learning experiences for children and improving general ‘standards’
of reading in society. Other sources of guidance available to teachers include
government generated documents (for example, The National Curriculum,
DfES/QCA, 2000; NLS Framework for Teaching, DfEE, 1998a), advice published
by interested parties, such as librarians (The Reading Agency, 2004 Enjoying
Reading) and many strongly worded articles and reports in journals and
newspapers. Once qualified, however, it doesn’t take long for most primary
teachers to realize that, though very helpful, all the advice on offer cannot take
into account the diverse range of needs within a class of up to 30 young
children. For example, just one aspect of reading – learning to interpret the
alphabetic code into meaning – has generated many different approaches from
which to choose. As no one teaching method will be successful for every child,
the rational teacher will look for and use whatever is helpful.
There is no doubt that for beginner readers a main element of learning to
read is the process of making sense of written language as a symbol. If children
are to become independent readers, they need to know how the symbolic system
works and they need to be able to use and manipulate the ‘code’. This is the
aspect of reading referred to as ‘phonics’, and it involves learning the
relationship between the speech sounds (phonemes) and their symbolic
representation in the form of one or more letters of the alphabet (graphemes).
It sounds surprisingly simple, yet it causes more debate among teachers,
academics and politicians than any other aspect of the reading curriculum. It is
essential that teachers understand how to navigate the debates, acquire a
confident knowledge of literacy learning and provide pupils with positive
learning experiences.
Typical classroom experiences
So what can we expect to see happening in a classroom run by a knowledgeable,

confident and thoughtful teacher? There will be several different elements:
an emphasis on hearing and distinguishing sounds;

learning the relationship between the written symbol and sound;
identifying common representations of sound and less usual ones;
looking for patterns; and
playing about with patterns.
All these activities will happen in different ways: they may be planned lessons
with the whole class or a group; they may be incidental conversations about
print during shared or guided reading or writing; they may be independent
activities when children analyse and make words from letters by manipulating
letters and letter combinations; they may be casual conversations about how
print works or they may be opportunities to highlight print features in display
and resources available to the children. All these different types of activities
will be part of the teacher’s planning so that lots of ways of using and talking
about print are part of the children’s classroom experience.
The first thing that children need to be able to do when tackling phonics is
to hear and discriminate between the sounds. It is important that this is done
before any explicit reference to how they are represented in print. The starting
point is work on phonological awareness, that is, the ability to hear differences
in speech sounds. Classroom activity related to phonological awareness will
involve a lot of drama, movement, singing, clapping, listening and music:
Singing songs and nursery rhymes that accentuate sound patterns (for
example, Hickory, Dickory Dock and Humpty Dumpty), which help children
‘tune’ in to speech sounds.
Sharing books with lots of opportunities to join in, especially with exciting
noises such as those made by the dogs in Yip Yap Snap! (Fuge, 2001) or the
traffic in Noisy Noises On the Road (Wells, 1988).
Playing skipping and clapping games, which encourage rhythmic
movement accompanied by words.
Talking about the sounds we hear around us every day. Asking questions
such as ‘What sound does the cow make?’, ‘Can you hear the bell ring?’ and
‘Are you listening to the music?’, all of which introduce very young
children to the vocabulary of sound and encourage them to talk about the
quality of sounds. ‘That is a high sound.’ ‘That bell is ringing quickly.’
‘That music makes me feel happy.’
Listening to sounds and identifying and differentiating between those
they hear. As they become more experienced, children will become more
adept at hearing subtle differences between sounds.
All these activities become reading lessons as the children learn to hear, identify
and discriminate between different sounds. In a classroom there would be lots
of opportunities for children to play with sounds – a tape recorder, a sound area
with materials to make sounds, displays of words to do with sounds. There
would also be a specific focus on listening to sounds – group activities where
sound lotto is played, making sound accompaniments to well-known stories,
matching sounds with the objects or people who make them, trying to make
different qualities of sound with voices and instruments.
Phonological awareness needs to be firmly established before moving to the
next stage when children start to explore how sounds are represented in print.
The purpose of our teaching is to enable children to become independent and
effective readers, in control of written language. Although all the different
sounds and their symbols must be learned, the whole experience should be
firmly embedded in the complete meaning-making process. We may choose to
make use of a published scheme (there is no point in reinventing the wheel)
but, as schemes tend to adhere to one approach, we must avoid allowing it to
dictate exclusively what happens in the class. Matching phoneme to grapheme
is only one way that children will acquire the decoding skill. It is helpful to
consider onset and rime, letter clusters and syllables. It is also important to look
at words in their meaningful context, whether thinking about writing your own
name or seeing a well-known story in print. Again there will be lots of activity
in the room as letters and sounds are painted, sung, drawn in the sand, made by
stretching arms and legs, spotted in displays around the school and even grown
with cress seeds on bits of felt.
Of course, all the time that this focused work is going on, there will be plenty
of other literacy experiences taking place. Everything related to literacy should
be perceived by the children as interrelated. They need to be aware that
working hard to remember a piece of grapho-phonic information holds the key
to being able to read the super story book they shared yesterday.
Language and literacy-rich classrooms
A language-and literacy-rich classroom can be deceptive. It may look disorganized

and unsystematic but the bedrock which underpins the excitement and activity is
well-planned, systematic teaching. Every encounter with print will be planned to
allow children to learn about both the nature and the function of written language.
The purpose of phonic teaching is to enable independent access to the meaning of
the text, and that must remain at the forefront of our thinking and planning.
Sound understanding is the aim, so we must take care how we talk about
phonics. Sounds are represented by the symbols; the letters do not ‘say’
anything themselves. Children can become very confused by our careless use of
language and we must be careful that we do not try to over-simplify and so be
less accurate. We must remember that:
There are no absolute rules in phonics. There are more common ways of
representing sounds, but often well-known words do not conform to usual
patterns. Think of the phoneme /ie/. It can be represented in many
different ways: light, tie, eye, kite, I, climb, height, fly. Which is the most
common? Which is the most unusual? Collecting words and sorting them
is a powerful way of helping children to understand how the English
language uses symbols to represent sound.
Children need to understand that there are some differences which matter
and some which don’t. In their previous experience a chair has always been
a chair, whichever way it is facing and whichever way up it is. Letters do
not work like that. Playing with letters is a way of becoming familiar with
their forms – magnetic letters, letters made from sandpaper, fur fabric,
satin, wood, letters written on a partner’s back, letter shapes I can make
with my body, letters drawn in wet sand, in rice, in sawdust, letters painted
in water on the playground, grown in cress on blotting paper, made out
of play-dough. It is important to give children every possible opportunity
of becoming familiar with the shapes of letters. Classrooms will be full of
examples of written language which draw attention to letters representing
sound. Alphabet charts can be made about almost every subject, letters can
be highlighted in any print, words sharing a common rime can be listed,
words with similar letter strings can be linked. Children’s names can be
used to explore the sound–symbol relationship.
Listening to sounds and playing with them does not stop when we move to
more focused phonic teaching. This too should be text based, and there are
many wonderful books which play with language. Phonics is great fun
when we find the rhymes in books like The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss, a
Preston Pig story by Colin MacNaughton or the brilliant Tanka Tanka Skunk
by Steve Webb.
There are also some stories for young children beautifully written in lyric
prose. The work of Martin Waddell, in particular, uses alliteration, assonance
and rhyme as a natural part of his style. When children listen to Farmer
Duck or Can’t you Sleep, Little Bear? they are hearing and seeing literary
language at its best.
There are many packages that offer good ideas for games that we can use with
children or adapt for the special circumstances of the class. For example, the
Primary National Strategy publication Playing with Sounds (DfES, 2003a) is an
excellent resource, full of good ideas for exploring language in an enjoyable
way. It contains examples of both child-initiated learning and play and planned
teacher-directed activities.
Shared writing will be another way in which children will be taught explicitly
how sounds are represented in print. Here it is the language of the teacher
which will make that clear: ‘How do I write down that word? It sounds like that
other word we already know.’ It is in situations like this that children come to
realize that the same phoneme is not always represented in the same way; by
exploring patterns they will come to appreciate both the conventions and the
vagaries of English spelling, determined by morphemic structure (meaning, for
example, ‘sign’ and ‘signature’) as well as phonological structure (sound).
The key characteristic of all these activities is that the alphabetic nature of
written language is explored and taught within the context of texts which are
meaningful and relevant to the children. Decoding is a means to an end and not
an end in itself; once we know what a word ‘says’, we need to talk about what it
means to us – how the story relates to our own feelings and experiences or how
the text entertains, instructs, persuades or informs us. Readers and writers need
phonic knowledge in order to engage with texts. It becomes one of the tools they
use; struggling readers are often those who become stuck in the skill of using
the tool rather than allowing the purpose of the literacy activity to dominate.
Although teaching should be logically organized, we must remember that
learning is recursive – it spirals forwards in an irregular fashion rather than
taking uniform steps along a straight line. It is not possible to say how or when
every child will make a leap of understanding or which of the phonics-focused
sessions prompted it. Synthetic phonics, analytic phonics, whole-to-part, onset
and rime, analogy – all are available to teachers and all have their part to play
in the early years classroom. In acknowledging different learning styles within
the classroom, we can take every opportunity available to us. It will be when a
young reader becomes lost in a book that everything falls into place. Above all,
children need to enjoy reading and to share their personal responses to the
variety of texts they encounter both in and out of the classroom. Acquiring
phonic knowledge is just one of the essential steps to achieving that end.
A Commentary on this Classroom, by the Editors
Again you will have recognized similarities between some of the approaches
mentioned in this account and in the two previous accounts in terms of the
kinds of activities undertaken. This account, however, embeds the teaching of
phonics within what is broadly called a ‘whole language’ approach. Emphasis
is placed on understanding the purpose of reading and in reading enjoyable
‘real books’ – although the authors acknowledge the usefulness of reading
schemes too. Knowledge about language is discussed and language is seen as a
flexible and intriguing tool rather than a set of unbreakable rules. Phonic rules
are given attention but are not an end in themselves. The personal and social
aspects of language learning are invoked and a literacy-rich physical and social
environment central to the quality of learning. The role of the teacher is
characterized as that of a skilled practitioner orchestrating many aspects of
language learning, not merely as a deliverer of programmes. Pace and content
are more personalized to the needs of the learner.
In Chapter 1, Kathy Hall argues that different views about the role of
phonics reflect deeper differences about how we view knowledge.
What different views of knowledge do you think are represented in
these three classrooms?
SOMETHING TO READ
The nine papers from the government’s phonics seminar held in

2003 include submissions from those who advocate a purely
synthetic approach, an NLS approach and an approach that places
greater emphasis on meaning. You can select from these papers if you
wish to explore any of these approaches in greater detail, available
online at www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/
686807/
SOMETHING TO DO
With colleagues, read through each of the teachers’ accounts and

compile a list of all the classroom practices that seem important.
Discuss which practices are absolutely central to your own practice,
which are present but not particularly high-profile, and which are
not part of your current classroom practice. Are there any aspects
that you think might be worth further investigation?
What do you think each of these teachers would say about how you
teach phonics to your own class? If they had to suggest one thing that
you should change, what do you think it would be, and why? Discuss
these suggestions with colleagues and consider which might be worth
trying.
Chapter 5
Involving Parents
and Carers
Jackie Marsh
The importance of teaching children to hear, identify and manipulate language,

that is developing their phonological and phonemic awareness, has been well
established by research (Byrant and Bradley, 1985; Maclean et al., 1987; NRP,
2000a). There is also widespread evidence that children’s early reading
development can be fostered by parents* and carers (Hannon, 2003; Nutbrown
et al., 2005) and, in this chapter, approaches to involving parents in this work
will be reviewed.
The chapter focuses on the development of phonological and phonemic
awareness, but that does not mean that work with parents should concentrate on
this area to the exclusion of others. Indeed, it is important that parents develop a
balanced approach to fostering their children’s reading progress, as an over-
emphasis on aspects such as the ability to recognize and manipulate phonemes
can be counter-productive. However, given that the emphasis of this book is on
the teaching and learning of phonics, this chapter offers guidance to teachers on
possible approaches that could be made. In addition, focusing on the role of
parents should not exclude schools from considering the involvement of wider
family members in literacy programmes and workshops, given that research has
indicated that grandparents, aunts, uncles and siblings, for example, can all play
important roles in children’s reading development (Gregory et al., 2004).
Before strategies that can be used to involve parents are considered, it is
important to remember that both phonological awareness and phonemic
awareness in spoken language are key precursors to attainment in phonics.
Therefore, in the early stages of reading, children need plenty of opportunities
*Throughout the chapter, the word ‘parents’ is used to refer to both biological and non-biological
parents and carers.
60
Involving Parents and Carers 61
to hear and play with sounds aurally. Teachers need to stress this to parents as,
often, parents move straight to work on phoneme-grapheme correspondence
when this is developmentally inappropriate for their children.
There are a number of approaches to involving parents in children’s early
reading. At the simplest level, teachers can engage parents in one-to-one
conversations about how they can support reading, and perhaps use parent-
friendly literature that can be taken home and used when parents need
additional guidance. An alternative is to offer specially designed one-off
workshops that introduce parents to key strategies. Holding regular drop-in
sessions for parents is also helpful and allows them to return to issues if they
find they need extra support. Finally, a series of workshops can be organized as
part of a structured family literacy programme. Whatever approach is used, it
is important for schools to be clear about how they will involve parents in early
reading and to communicate this to families. Simply sending books home for
parents to share with children will not always lead to best practice. When
considering setting up a programme (however informal) for parents, a number
of principles should be considered.
Key principles that should underpin work

with parents
The following section offers a set of guiding principles that could inform work
with parents, but is not an exhaustive list; schools will want to add principles
arising from a consideration of their own specific contexts.
Respecting and building on home practices

Many of the approaches taken to developing parental engagement in literacy in
the past have been predicated on schooled notions of what it means to be an
engaged parent, notions which are often conflated with the socio-cultural
practices of white, middle-class families (Carrington and Luke, 2003). In some
family literacy programmes, ideas, concepts and best practice have been
introduced in ways which have masked the already rich range of practices that
parents and carers are engaged in at home. Rather than imposing a given set of
practices upon parent groups, the approaches in this chapter are based on the
principle that a starting point for any work with parents should be a recognition
of the ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll et al., 1992) that they bring with them to the
task of helping their children to learn to read. If possible, it is always useful to
begin family literacy work with a survey of what is already happening in the
home so that future work can acknowledge and build upon this. It is also
helpful to let parents have a voice in the content and structure of programmes
in order that they meet the needs of families.
The primacy of oracy

In any work with parents to support early reading development, there should be
a key emphasis on parents fostering children’s oral language. Nutbrown et al.
point out that ‘Three aspects of oral language appear to be key to children’s
literacy learning and development: storytelling, phonological awareness and talk
about literacy’ (1995: 47). This chapter focuses on the second of these, but parents
and teachers should also be aware of the other important elements of oracy.
The importance of pleasure

Parents need to recognize that any activities they undertake with their children
should be occasions that are pleasurable and fun for all concerned. Placing
pressure on children to achieve specific skills could lead to children becoming
stressed and adopting a negative attitude to reading. Many of the approaches to
developing phonemic awareness that are mentioned in this chapter are
inherently pleasurable and can be embedded in a range of everyday activities,
such as having fun with word strings and rhymes on bus and car journeys,
signing along with jingles when watching adverts and favourite videos and
playing with alliteration and assonance linked to family names (‘Eddie eats
every egg’, ‘Herat sat in a flat’).
The balanced approach

As suggested in the opening to this chapter, parents need to understand that
beginning reading requires the child to orchestrate a number of different cues
and any input to promote reading development needs to maintain a balance
between work on whole texts, words and individual phonemes. The emphasis
needs to be placed on meaningful engagement with print. In particular,
storybook reading has been identified as a key element of early literacy
experiences in the home. Storybook reading enhances children’s attitudes to
reading (Baker et al., 1997; Baker et al., 2001) as well as their concepts of print,
receptive language development, vocabulary and comprehension skills
(Sénéchal and Lefevre, 2002). Storybook reading in itself is not the main factor
in success; it is the quality of the interaction between the adult and the child
during storybook reading that is important (Sénéchal and Lefevre, 2002). More
effective parental practice includes drawing children’s attention to letters and
words, asking them to predict events and prompting children to reflect beyond
a literal interpretation of the text (Sénéchal and Lefevre, 2002; Whitehurst
et al., 1998). It is important that the reading experience is enjoyable for the
child. Baker et al. (1997) found that increased enjoyment of reading was related
to discussions about the stories with parents and that this impacted positively
on motivation for reading in school.
In addition to storybook reading, other aspects of parental involvement in early

literacy are important for reading development. Parental attitudes towards
literacy, number of books owned, wider provision of literacy resources in the home,
library membership and educational aspirations for the child all predict levels of
emergent literacy skills (Purcell-Gates, 1996; Raz and Bryant, 1990; Share et al.,
1984; White, 1982). A range of activities is most beneficial and preferable to any
single interaction between parents and children (Sénéchal and Lefevre, 2002).
These issues could be discussed with parents in order to raise their awareness of
the need for a broad and balanced approach to the development of reading.
Active engagement
Workshops for parents should provide plenty of opportunities for parents to try
out activities and to rehearse the strategies that are introduced to them. This
can develop parents’ confidence and enhance their self-esteem.
Once fundamental approaches to working with parents have been established
by schools, teachers can set about designing workshops and programmes that
will provide parents with guidance on supporting children’s early reading
development. If it is not possible to hold such sessions, then teachers should at
least attempt to engage parents in regular conversations about supporting
children’s reading, providing them with strategies and guidance where necessary
through handouts and lists of websites. However, research shows that family
literacy programmes are effective (Hannon, 2003; Nutbrown et al., 2005) and,
where possible, schools should strive to engage parents in structured sessions
that offer opportunities to build confidence and skills.
The following section considers ways that parents can be encouraged to
support children’s reading.
How to promote engagement
There are numerous books with ideas for games and activities with children
that parents can use to promote children’s engagement in early reading. Such
activities need an underpinning framework to help parents gain a broader
picture of where the activities fit in children’s overall reading experiences. The
ORIM Framework is a model that has worked for a number of schools and
Local Authorities and is used by the Raising Early Achievement in Literacy
(REAL) Project (Nutbrown et al., 2005). The framework identifies four strands
of early literacy development: environmental print, books, early writing and
key aspects of oral language. It also outlines four key roles for parents in which
they can provide: Opportunities, Recognition, Interaction and a Model of
literacy in each of the four early literacy strands. Table 5.1 provides further
details of these key roles and what each of them entails.
Opportunities • Materials for promoting oracy, reading and writing.

• Encouraging play.
• Providing opportunities for interactions with print,
e.g. noticing environmental print on shopping trips.
Recognition • Identifying early milestones in children’s development.
• Displaying children’s drawings and writing.
• Providing praise and feedback to children on
achievements.
Interaction • Making the most of opportunities to interact with
children in oracy, reading and writing activities, e.g. when
writing to family members, reading the television guide.
• Showing children how to undertake certain tasks.
• Playing with children.
Model • Acting as role models for children by drawing attention to
the way in which parents use literacy in everyday life, e.g.
reading newspapers, completing forms.
Table 5.1 Four key roles for parents (Nutbrown et al., 2005)
This model offers a useful structure for promoting parents’ involvement in

children’s early reading development. As this chapter is focused on the
development of phonological and phonemic awareness, Table 5.2 provides an
example of how the ORIM Framework might be used to outline possible
approaches that can be made by parents in fostering this area of reading
development.
This framework can then be applied to other strands of early literacy
development to support work with parents (see Nutbrown et al., 2005 for
numerous examples of such work). As suggested previously, there are many
more ways in which parents can promote phonological, phonemic awareness
and phonics than the approaches outlined in Table 5.2, but the key emphasis
should be on activities which are fun, easy for parents to grasp and related to
everyday practices. To read further suggestions for such activities, see Bayley
and Broadbent (2005), who offer a wealth of ideas.
There are also now many websites for parents that offer guidance and resources
for supporting children’s early reading development. However, some of these sites
do promote an overuse of worksheets that can be printed off for children to
complete. Teachers should emphasize that parents need to be careful when
accessing websites and should choose sites that offer fun, interactive games and
activities that embed positive feedback within them. Often, newly-released
popular films have related websites that include good-quality games and these
can be highly motivating for children. Using children’s popular culture in early
literacy work can orientate children to tasks and enhance engagement (Marsh, in
Activities to promote phonological Activities to promote phonemic

awareness awareness/phonics
Opportunities • Borrow nursery rhyme books • Raise parents’ awareness of

from the local library. the opportunities for
• Make a tape of favourite engagement with print in the
nursery rhymes (or a podcast home environment, e.g. junk
if parents are up-to-date with mail.
technology!). • Borrow alphabet books from
• Raise parents’ awareness of the local library.
opportunities to identify rhymes • Buy a set of magnetic letters
in the environment, for the fridge.
e.g. adverts, jingles. • Talk about opportunities for
promoting engagement with
print on visits and walks.
Recognition • Parents should be informed • Parents should be informed

about the ways in which they about the ways in which they
can recognize children’s can recognize children’s
developing phonological developing phonemic
awareness, e.g. being able to awareness, e.g. being able to
clap syllables in names; identify individual phonemes
awareness of onset–rime. in words. Stress that this
needs to be done orally
before children match
phonemes to graphemes.
Interaction • Clap out the syllables in names • When encountering street

and other familiar words. signs, say the words out loud
• Re-tell nursery rhymes, and encourage children to
omitting the final rhyming identify beginning, middle
word for the child to supply, and end phonemes, e.g.
e.g. ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a shop – sh/o/p.
wall, Humpty Dumpty had a • Ask children to provide the
great —’. last phoneme in a word after
• Make a scrapbook of favourite offering them a clue to the
nursery rhymes, using word, e.g. ‘It is something
pictures from magazines and you read, it’s a boo_’.
catalogues to portray the • Collect together items which
characters/events. begin with the same sound and
place them in a bag. Emphasize
the initial sound as you say the
word when the child takes the
item out of the bag.

Table 5.2 Using the ORIM Framework for work on phonological and phonemic
awareness and phonics (Nutbrown et al., 2005)
Activities to promote phonological Activities to promote phonemic

awareness awareness/phonics
Interaction • Make up rhyming sentences • Make a popular cultural

(continued) that relate to children’s favourite alphabet book. Using a
television and film characters, scrapbook or file of
e.g. ‘Postman Pat has a dark individual blank sheets, cut
blue hat’. out pictures of favourite
• Place rhyming objects in a bag television characters or
and repeat the rhyming words use photographs from
with children as you take them catalogues, sweet wrappers
out, e.g. clock, sock, lock, rock. and so on. Stick these on the
• Ask child to think of as many relevant pages, e.g. the ‘M’
words as he/she can that end page might contain a picture
with the same rime, e.g. can, of Milo from the Tweenies
pan, man, fan. and a wrapper from a Mars
Bar.
Model • Draw children’s attention to • Parents can talk about

occasions when parents sing individual sounds in words
rhymes and jingles, e.g. ‘You as they write lists, complete
can do it when you B&Q it!’ crosswords.
Table 5.2 (Continued)
press). Parents also need guidance on the very wide range of materials that are
now on offer in supermarkets and bookshops to support early learning. Again,
some of these contain developmentally and pedagogically inappropriate material.
Developing a set of criteria for choosing such material could usefully be an
activity included in a family literacy workshop.
Working with bilingual families
For schools that serve multilingual communities, working with parents provides
a range of opportunities, but also additional challenges. Not all parents may be
able to speak English and some may not be literate in either English or their first
language. However, much can be done in work with families on early reading
development, as the following case study of Springfield School, Sheffield,
indicates. Here, the Deputy Headteacher, Val Johnson, outlines some approaches
the school has taken to work with parents on reading:
CASE STUDY
Springfield Primary School, Sheffield
Most of our parents are bilingual and many do not read or write English
and so we can’t just send home reading books with children and expect
parents to share them with their children. Nor are the reading record books
that many schools send home with children for parents to write in
appropriate for our families. So we have done a number of things to
develop parents’ engagement with their children’s learning. We have held
workshops with translators in which we have had a few parents at a time
attend, as that allows intensive work. We emphasize that it is important
for parents to talk to children at home using their first language. We spend
a lot of time talking about how they can support their child through
sharing stories, talking about books using the pictures and taking an
interest in what they do. We have also had a storysacks project in which
parents made bilingual storysacks. This gives parents the message that we
value their home languages and also increases confidence in re-telling
stories that they are familiar with. We also use photographs of trips that
parents have been on with children to make books – these shared events
can provide a good opportunity for talk around texts.
Other strategies that can be used to involve bilingual parents in early reading
development include:
Making a video for parents in their first language which explains how
children develop reading skills and how they can help them, even if
parents are not able to read English, for example, by talking about the
pictures, re-telling the story through the pictures.
Helping parents to make tapes of rhymes and stories in the children’s first
language.
Giving parents digital or disposable cameras and asking them to take
photographs of everyday objects at home. These can then be used to make
dual-language alphabet books to share with their children. Collective
approaches to some of the more challenging letters (for example, x and z)
can be taken!
Another group of parents that can often be difficult to reach is fathers. It is

primarily mothers who attend family literacy programmes, even in schools in
which a significant proportion of parents who bring children to school are men.
This may reflect the gendered patterns with regard to literacy, in that research
has indicated that many women read more often at home than men and are
more involved in literacy activities with their children (Millard, 1996). But
there are strategies that can be used to encourage men to take part in activities
that promote early reading and these are outlined in the next section.
Working with fathers
In the following case study, Gary Roberts and the Aberdeen Family Learning
Team outline how men were targeted for involvement in family learning
programmes. The projects were funded by Learning Connections, the Adult
Literacy section of Community Scotland.
CASE STUDY
Challenge Dad Pathfinder Project, Aberdeen
We have done a lot of work to involve fathers in children’s early literacy

development. In conversations with fathers, we found that many of them
wanted to be involved with children’s literacy development but didn’t know
what to do, they felt excluded. Many of the fathers we worked with were
football fans and felt comfortable around football grounds. So we organized
trips in which fathers and sons visited the grounds together and noted down
the environmental print as they went around, talking about the beginning
letters of words and playing games like ‘I spy’. The fathers and their children
also made books about the visit. We used disposable cameras and the dads
and sons and daughters took photographs. They chose the pictures that they
wanted to go in the books and discussed the literacy practices in them. It’s
amazing how much print they found, on football scarves and T-shirts and
things like that. It was a great success in that the fathers felt much more
confident about supporting children’s reading development and the children
loved the involvement of their dads.
Other strategies to involve fathers in early reading development include:
Creating a home–school comic-lending library: previous projects have

shown that fathers have enjoyed sharing comics with children (Millard
and Marsh, 2003).
Asking dads to make books about their interests and hobbies for their
children: for example, a dad in one school made a book about fishing for
his son using photographs and pictures from fishing magazines. The
school staff helped him to use language appropriate for beginning readers,
and his son loved reading a book that his own dad had made.
Dads’ favourite books: one school used a wall in a corridor to document the
favourite books of children’s fathers, displaying copies of book covers
where possible, along with speech bubbles containing the fathers’ thoughts
on the books they had named as favourites.
Setting up a Curiosity Kits scheme: non-fiction book bags with related
artefacts that have been shown to encourage book sharing between
children and males in the family (Lewis and Fisher, 2003).
There are a number of potentially sensitive areas in this work. Some children may
live in single-parent families and not be in regular contact with their fathers.
Focusing on fathers’ involvement may cause distress to some children in these
cases. It is also important that any attempts to involve fathers do not draw
energies away from developing family learning more generally. Both mothers and
fathers need to feel welcomed in school and able to become involved in family
learning projects. Balancing all of these elements in any work with families is
never easy, but is important in order to ensure widespread involvement.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored a number of approaches to involving parents in

children’s early reading development. The key emphasis has been on fostering
parents’ awareness of how they can develop children’s phonological and
phonemic awareness in fun and exciting ways. It is important that parents
realize that work on phonemic awareness does not have to be planned for as a
discrete activity, but can be woven into the fabric of everyday life.
Whatever approaches you take to working with parents in your school, it
will be important to monitor and review them. There will, inevitably, be
some approaches that are more effective than others, for a variety of reasons.
Documenting responses can enable you to evaluate the various strategies and to
develop further the most successful ones. In addition, engaging in such work year
after year will enable you to build up a strong stock of resources and approaches,
which can include the parents themselves. For example, you could involve some
of the parents who have undertaken workshops in guiding and mentoring new
parents, who may feel unsure about how to help their children. These ‘parent
buddies’ can be invaluable in supporting the work that you do. Above all, it is
important to remember that teachers cannot and should not undertake the task
of educating children alone. Partnerships with parents are key to children’s
educational achievement (Desforges and Abouchaar, 2003), and some of the early
work teachers and parents do to support children’s early literacy development is
crucial to the fostering of strong partnerships that will last. This chapter can only
offer a few glimpses into this significant area of work and so is followed by some
suggestions for further activities and reading.
What could you do to promote parents’ engagement in their children’s

early reading development that you are not currently doing? For
example, could you recruit ‘parent buddies’ to support new parents?
What extra resources do you need in order to develop these new
activities? Are you making the most of the parents themselves? Parents
of older children in school might be only too willing to donate to
parents of younger children reading games and resources that their
children have grown out of.
How can you include those hard-to-reach families and fathers in this
work?
SOMETHING TO READ
Bayley, R. and Broadbent, L. (2005) Flying Start with Literacy:

Activities for parents and children. Stafford: Network Educational
Press. This book offers a wide range of suggestions for activities that
parents can undertake with children, with an emphasis on fun and
active engagement.
Gregory, E., Long, S. and Volk, D. (2004) Many Pathways to Literacy.
London: RoutledgeFalmer. This book provides a number of rich case
studies which outline how bilingual families support children’s literacy
development. The emphasis is on the engagement of wider family
members, such as siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, not just
parents.
Nutbrown, C., Hannon, P. and Morgan, A. (2005) Early Literacy Work
with Families: Policy, practice and research. London: Sage. This book
outlines the REAL Project and provides detailed guidance on using the
ORIM Framework with families.
SOMETHING TO DO
Conduct a survey of current reading practice in the homes of the children

you teach in order to inform parental development work in your school.
Refer parents to the helpful CBeebies website which contains articles
on how children learn, including a section on language and literacy:
www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/
Visit the National Literacy Trust’s website in order to find out about
other parental programmes in the United Kingdom: www.literacy
trust.org.uk
Chapter 6
Developmental Issues: Speaking

and Phonological Awareness
Elspeth McCartney
By the time that normally developing children begin to learn to read and write they
have already learned to talk. This means that they have succeeded in segmenting the
stream of sound they hear into meaningful words, and learned how to pronounce
most of the words of English. Learning to relate written forms such as words and
letters to their auditory counterpart continues a process that started in infancy.
Learning to talk involves recognizing, representing and storing the phonemes
(speech sounds) of the languages heard by a child. Each word in a language has
its own phonological form, stored alongside the word’s meanings in the lexicon
(mental word store). Identifying a word spoken by another or saying it aloud
requires that the correct phonological form is identified or used. Long before they
learn to read or write, children analyse the phonemes of the language(s) to which
they are exposed, but do this on a largely unconscious level. By the time they learn
to decode written text they have created an internal template of the language’s
phonemes and word forms and can match written words against this, as a step in
accessing meaning. This chapter traces children’s development of phonological
representations and their growing ability to reflect upon them consciously, and
considers some of the implications of this process for learning to read. It begins
with a brief overview of the phonology of English to clarify the information that
children bring to the process of reading.
The phonology of English
The English language uses about 40 distinct elements to form all the words
of the language (and English may have about half a million words). These
71
elements are called ‘phonemes’. Phonemes are divided into vowels and
consonants and contrast the words of a language so that changing a phoneme can
change the meaning. Think of words like ‘cat’, ‘bat’, ‘fat’, ‘rat’, ‘sat’, ‘pat’, ‘tat’, ‘vat’,
‘chat’, ‘that’, ‘hat’, which differ only in their initial phoneme. Understanding how
phonemes are formed can help to explain why young children confuse
phonemes that adults may feel are ‘obviously’ different. Often the confused
phonemes are quite close in articulatory terms.
Vowels
Vowels and consonants are most easily defined by considering how a speaker’s
breath is shaped in the mouth as it passes from the lungs whilst talking. For
vowel sounds the breath is not stopped or occluded on the way, although every
vowel has a ‘buzz’ of voicing added from the vocal cords vibrating together in
the larynx (also called the voice box or Adam’s apple). The air passes out fairly
freely, shaped only a little by the tongue and lips.
To make different vowels, we need to think about the physical positions adopted
by the tongue and lips and how close the tongue is held to the roof of the mouth.
The back or front of the tongue can be bunched up more or less closely to the roof
of the mouth, or the tongue can be held fairly flat; the lips can be rounded or spread.
To understand the very tiny differences that children must notice, try this sequence:
round your lips, and hold the tip of your tongue down behind your lower teeth. This
leaves the tongue bunched up high at the back and lets you make ‘back’ vowels.
Make a ‘high’ to ‘low’ vowel sequence (start with the back of the tongue close to the
roof of your mouth) whilst letting some air out and sounding at the larynx. You
should first get an ‘oo’ vowel, as in ‘oodles’. Lower the back of the tongue to make
‘oh’, as in ‘over’; then lower it further to ‘o’ as in ‘orange’ then ‘ah’ as in ‘bath’. Now
make ‘front’ vowels, with the front of your tongue bunched up near the roof of your
mouth with lips spread, giving ‘ee’ as in ‘eerie’, then lower your tongue a little for
‘eh’ as in ‘empty’ and lower it further for ‘a’ as in ‘apple’. There are also vowels made
with the centre of the tongue (‘central’ vowels) like the ‘u’ in ‘utter’, the ‘i’ in ‘insect’
and the ‘e’ in ‘the’. Many unstressed syllables in English words use this last vowel
sound, although spelled in all sorts of ways. To make things even more complicated
for children, vowels can follow each other very rapidly in a word, forming
‘diphthongs’. Say ‘a’ with ‘ee’ to make the vowel sound in ‘my’; ‘a’ with ‘oo’ to make
the vowel sound in ‘now’, and ‘o’ with ‘i’ to make the vowel sound ‘boy’. There are
great differences among the accents of English in the exact sound of vowels heard,
and considerable variation within and across speakers.
Consonants
The consonants of English (see Table 6.1) are also classified by the
mouth movements used to realize them. Consonants can be either voiced or
Developmental Issues: Speaking and Phonological Awareness 73
voiceless – compare these by putting a finger and thumb tip on either side of
your larynx, and saying ‘f ’ followed by ‘v’, or ‘s’ followed by ‘z’. You should feel
the voicing ‘buzz’ on the ‘v’ and ‘z’ sounds, which are ‘voiced’ consonants, but
not on the ‘f ’ or ‘s’, where the air passes through the larynx without the vocal
cords vibrating, making ‘voiceless’ sounds.
Consonants are also defined by whether the air-stream coming through the
lungs is completely stopped for a short time in the mouth then released with a
small explosive noise (called ‘stop’ or ‘plosive’ consonants); squeezed between
two parts of the mouth moving close together (making ‘fricative’ and ‘glide’
consonants); or released through the nose rather than the mouth. These
features are called the ‘manner’ of release. In voiced and voiceless pairs the
‘stop’ or ‘plosive’ consonants (both terms are used) are ‘p’, ‘b’; ‘t’, ‘d’; and ‘k’, ‘g’.
When children confuse ‘p’ and ‘b’ or ‘t’ and ‘d’, we need to remember that it is
a tiny difference (approximately 40 milliseconds of vocal cord vibration) that
distinguishes them. The ‘fricatives’ are ‘f ’, ‘v’; ‘s’, ‘z’; ‘sh’, ‘zh’; ‘th’ both voiced
and voiceless and ‘h’, where two parts of the mouth come so close together that
we hear the turbulence as the sound is squeezed through.
The ‘affricates’ have air stopped as for a ‘t’ or ‘d’ but released as for a fricative
‘sh’ or ‘zh’, giving the voiced and voiceless affricates ‘ch’ as in ‘church’ (from ‘t
+ sh’) and ‘j’ as in ‘jury’ (from ‘d + zh’). The last group of consonants released
through the mouth are the glides ‘l’ as in ‘look’; ‘r’ as in ‘red’; ‘w’ as in ‘wet’; and
‘y’ as in ‘yellow’. The air passes through the mouth more freely than for stops,
fricatives or affricates, but less freely than for vowels.
There are also three voiced consonants, ‘m’, ‘n’ and ‘ng’ as in ‘ring’ where the
air-stream is released through the nose, and is blocked off from the mouth for
their short duration by the soft palate (back of the roof of the mouth) rising up.
Say these three sounds with a thumb and finger either side of your nose, and
feel the sound resonating there. Then hold a small mirror just under your nose
as you say them – you will see it mist up, as the air comes through. The nasal
sounds ‘m’ and ‘n’ are heard early in children’s speech.
The last way in which consonants are classified is by the place they are made
in the mouth. The two parts of the mouth that meet together or come close
together in English can be the two lips; the top teeth and lower lip; the tongue
tip and back of the top teeth, the tongue tip and hard palate (roof of the mouth),
or the tongue back and the soft palate (velum). The larynx itself can shape the
air just enough so that ‘h’ is heard. The figure below gives the consonant sounds
of English classified as above, including the bilabial and velar fricatives heard
in Scottish English in ‘white’ and ‘loch’.
Some of these consonants may look unfamiliar as they do not have parti-
cular letters attached to them. English uses the grapheme ‘th’ for both the
tongue–teeth fricatives (the voiceless ‘th’ as in ‘thought’ and voiced ‘th’ as in
‘though’). The voiced version is heard at the start of closed-class words like
‘the’, ‘then’, ‘thou’ and ‘that’ whereas the voiceless consonant can start content
words like nouns (‘thumb’, ‘thatcher’, ‘thimble’), verbs (‘think’, ‘thump’) and
adjectives (‘thorough’, ‘thin’). Adults may not notice that there are two
Manner of release
(Voiced consonants are in bold)
Place in mouth Stops Nasals Fricatives Affricates Glides
Two lips p, b m wh w
Lip and teeth f, v
Tongue and teeth th, th
Tongue tip and gum ridge t, d n s, z l, r
Body of tongue and hard palate sh, zh ch, j y
Back of tongue and soft palate k, g ng loch
Larynx h
Table 6.1 The consonants of English (adapted from McCartney, 1984: 18)
phonemes because both are written as ‘th’, but the existence of two phonemes
and one spelling can confuse children. Similarly the ‘zh’ phoneme that is only
heard in the middle of words such as ‘measure’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘treasure’ and in
‘borrowed’ words like ‘beige’ and ‘rouge’, Gigi and Zhazha may not be noticed
by adults.
As adults, we also unconsciously accept the rules governing how many
consonants can appear in sequence at the start and end of English words: one,
two or three at the start before a vowel is needed (so that ‘string’ would be
among the longest sequences permitted) and up to four at the end (as in
‘sculpts’, where the grammar marker ‘s’ gives four phonemes). We also know
that only some consonants can follow others in clusters; try saying both the ‘k’
and ‘n’ at the start of ‘knife’, for an example of a cluster of consonants that has
dropped out of English, or reversing the ‘l’ and ‘s’ in ‘slip’ for a pattern that does
not occur. Some consonants occur only in particular syllable positions, for
example ‘ng’ appears at the end of syllables as in ‘ringing’ but not at the start.
There is variation in consonant use among speakers and among English
accents: ‘r’ is not heard after a vowel in some accents, and voiceless ‘th’ is
becoming ‘f ’ in others, but less variation in consonants than among vowels.
For young children, the picture gets even more complicated when we think
about connected speech rather than individual sounds. Speech is the most rapid
motor sequence that humans undertake, and when we talk, the consonants
are not realized in their full forms as classified above. The rapid
movements required for speech mean that phonemes accommodate to the
sounds around them. For example, consider the word ‘have’ in the sentence ‘I
must have been wrong’, said at normal conversational rate (which is fast!). The
word is unstressed in this sentence and its vowel sound will become rather
central. The unvoiced consonant ‘h’ at the start follows two unvoiced
consonants, the ‘s’ and ‘t’ cluster in ‘must’, and will tend not to be heard since
voicing coming in for the vowel will mask it. A child writing ‘I must have . . .’
as ‘I must of . . .’ may be responding to such factors, playing the sentence
through their internal phonological representations, and coming up with the
very similar sounding word ‘of ’ (which has a central vowel followed by
phoneme ‘v’, although this is written ‘f ’). There is a tiny difference in sound,
but resulting in a big mistake in writing.
Assimilation can also occur within words, for example across syllable
boundaries. The rapid nature of speech means that speakers tend to collapse
phonemes, moving mouth parts together for one but opening them for the next.
An example is the word ‘handbag’, which is usually pronounced ‘hambag’.
Here the nasality from the phoneme ‘n’ is reflected in the nasal ‘m’, which has
moved forward to the lip position required to open for ‘b’. (Such features can
occasionally become fixed in spelling: the county of Dunbartonshire in
Scotland, from Dun Briton, fort of the Britons, contains the town Dumbarton,
where the spelling has changed to reflect the pronunciation.) Such assimilation
is not due to ‘lazy’ or ‘slovenly’ speech, nor to particular accents, but is a
universal accommodation to the limits of rapid muscle movement in humans.
However, it can pose problems for children who arrive at literacy with an
auditory-based system, and then meet the complexities of English spelling.
English phonology and spelling
The phonemes of English are represented highly inconsistently in written

words, even common words – much more so than in languages such as Italian.
This is partly because pronunciation has changed during the history of the
language, and the written form preserves an earlier pronunciation. For
example, certain words spelled with ‘gh’ reflect pronunciations still retained in
some Scottish dialects, such as ‘daughter’ said with a velar fricative (as in
Scottish ‘loch’) in the middle. Similarly, ‘two’ said as ‘twa’ is closer to the older
pronunciations and the spelling than the standard English pronunciation ‘too’.
Other words have been imported directly from different languages with their
spellings intact, such as ‘role’ as in ‘role-play’ from the French ‘rôle’. Retaining
spelling patterns close to the original helps readers distinguish among the
many words in English with different meanings that sound exactly the same
(here ‘roll’ which exists as a noun and a verb) and can help a reader to access
the right meaning quickly. But spelling variations can cause difficulties for
early readers and writers trying to map written forms to their internalized
sound-based template of English phonology.
One of the most awkward features of English writing is in the spelling of
vowels. For example, the vowel ‘oh’ as in ‘over’, which most people would agree
was one vowel, can be represented as in ‘bow’, ‘dough’, ‘toe’, ‘go’, ‘sew’, ‘boat’,
‘four’, ‘bone’, ‘course’ and ‘floor’, where the letters underlined represent no
phoneme except the vowel. Consonants also have variations: consonant ‘s’, for
example, can be written at the start of a syllable as in ‘see’, ‘science’,
‘psychology’ or ‘cycle’ and at the end as in ‘gas’ or ‘mess’. Its voiced twin ‘z’ can
be as in ‘zip’, ‘pizza’ or ‘scissors’ at the start of a syllable, and as in ‘maze’, ‘jazz’
or ‘has’ at the end. Consonant ‘sh’ can be as in ‘ship’ or ‘sugar’; ‘f ’ as in ‘fire’ or
‘photo’; ‘ch’ as in ‘church’ or ‘watch’, and ‘j’ has two different spellings in the
same word ‘judge’. The letter ‘x’ often represents two phonemes, ‘k’ plus ‘s’ or
‘g’ plus ‘z’ said as a cluster – for example! Much of this has to be learned as
word-specific spelling, and teachers spend time teaching rules, word ‘families’,
analogies and sometimes the reasons for odd spellings to help children cope
with the variations encountered. Chapter 8 gives further examples.
The development of phonology
Perception and categorization

Children learn to perceive and pronounce the speech sounds of their
language(s) very early, utilizing biological and social constraints on
communicative learning. Kuhl (2004) reviews the development of speech
perception, and notes that infants from birth are highly sensitive to acoustic
changes that distinguish phonemic boundaries important in many languages.
They very rapidly learn categories specific to their own language(s), so that
by about 12 months of age English-learning babies have difficulty in
distinguishing phonemes that are not heard in English, and even at six months
old can group vowels from their native language together in contrast to those of
another language. Infants learn to detect common stress patterns of words, and
‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ phoneme combinations, based on their preference by nine
months for phonetic patterns that occur frequently.
Speech
Learning the spoken forms of phonemes is affected by the development of
motor skills. Whether because human children develop oral motor abilities in
similar ways and at similar rates, or for some other reason, there is a predictable
pattern in which phonemes are acquired across languages by little children.
Vowel sounds appear early, and are often remarkably accurate. Broadly
speaking, consonants made at the front of the mouth are heard early, then those
made in the middle, then those at the back. In English this gives rise to the
sequence ‘p’, ‘b’; then ‘t’, ‘d’; with ‘k’, ‘g’ later. Fricatives are often realized by a
stop sound made at a similar place in the mouth to the fricative, and glides are
9 months – 18 months: Plosives and nasals. Within this group front

consonants may replace back consonants; consonants
at the start of words may be repeated in the middle
of words; final consonants may be deleted;
plosives replace fricatives and affricates.
18 months – 30 months: Fricatives are added. They may not be
used correctly until over five years.
36 months plus: Affricates are added. They may not
be used correctly until over five years.
Until five years: ‘w’ heard instead of ‘l’ and ‘r’.
30 months – five years plus: Consonant clusters, with ‘s’ and ‘r’ clusters last.
The consonant system is usually complete by seven years.
Table 6.2 The age at which consonants are usually heard (adapted from McCartney, 1984: 18)
often assimilated to ‘w’. Single consonants are heard before clusters, so that
‘spoon’ becomes ‘poon’, and unstressed syllables and final consonants are
omitted – ‘banana’ becomes ‘nana’ and ‘book’ becomes ‘boo’. A combination
of these processes produces typical ‘baby talk’. Processes also disappear at
predictable times in child development, making it possible to determine if a
child is progressing normally or showing delay in speech development. Dodd
et al. (2005) give an overview of phonological acquisition. The ages at which
consonants are typically used is outlined in Table 6.2.
As Table 6.2 shows, many children begin learning to read before they show
complete mastery of the consonant system of English. They can, however, gain
from phonological approaches to reading; indeed, many speech and language
therapists also use activities that develop phonological awareness to help
children with speech delay to develop their speech. In general, children with
early speech problems have normal internal representations of the phonology
of English and learn to read and spell successfully (Snowling et al., 2000),
although children with persisting impairments in other aspects of language
such as grammar and word-learning often show significant literacy difficulties
(Stothard et al., 1998).
Whilst not being able to pronounce a speech sound is not usually a reason for
being unable to perceive it or to learn its varied spellings, there are a small
number of children who use speech patterns that are uncommon in ‘typically
developing’ children, such as ‘backing’ sounds to the velar position or omitting
word initial consonants. Such children are often quite unintelligible. They are
thought to have difficulty in building up internal phonological representations,
and can as a group show long-term evidence of reading comprehension difficulties
(Leitão and Fletcher, 2004). These children may need help from speech and
language therapists and learning support teachers. Any child using such unusual
speech patterns should certainly set alarm bells ringing.
Children learn to perceive and use the phonology of English without being able
to reflect consciously on the internal phonological representations they are
developing. Our understanding of their abilities is gained through experimental
tasks and analysing their speech output: they cannot tell us the rules they are
developing, nor manipulate the phonology of words. As children approach the age
of school entry, however, they become more consciously aware of phonology, and
can be encouraged to think about speech sounds as identifiable elements. This
conscious awareness and ability to manipulate phonology has been described as
phonological awareness, and may be an important factor in predicting the ease
with which children will map their (accurate) internal representations of the
phonology of English on to its (imperfect) alphabetical system. See Chapter 8 for
a detailed discussion of the orthography of English.
Phonological awareness
Phonological awareness is defined by Torgesen et al. as a ‘sensitivity to, or

explicit awareness of, the phonological structure of the words’ in language
(1994: 276). In a large-scale longitudinal study of 5-year-old children moving
from kindergarten through the first two years of school, they identified three
discrete aspects of skill in phonological processing, with two aspects having
sub-groups. The first was phonological awareness, comprising two distinct but
correlated areas: phonological analysis and phonological synthesis.
Phonological analysis describes the ability to identify or isolate phonemes from
words presented as wholes. It can be measured in young children by tasks such as
identifying rhymes or identifying by listening, words that start or end with the
same phoneme. It can be measured in older children by harder tasks which
involve them saying the first phoneme of a word when given a picture; or saying
which new word is made when one sound is omitted, for example, if the ‘l’ is
removed from the word ‘slit’; or via ‘spoonerisms’, where the first phonemes of
two words are transposed (for example, ‘riding boot’ becomes ‘biding root’). The
younger children’s tasks involve providing them with examples to think about,
whereas older children are asked to process words ‘in their heads’.
Phonological synthesis is the ability to blend phonemes presented separately
back into whole words. It can be measured by tasks that say words as individual
phonemes and ask children to re-synthesize them into words, for example ‘d’ ‘o’
‘g’ into ‘dog’.
Torgesen et al. (1994) also identified two other aspects of phonological skill:
phonological memory and phonological access, with access divided into two
sub-groups. Phonological memory involves the brief retention in working
memory of non-meaningful auditory sequences, such as letters, digits or spoken
non-words. It is assumed that memory for such items is primarily phonologically

based, as phonemes have to be decoded quickly to remember the items with
no support from meaning. It can be measured by asking children to remember
digits or letters, or to repeat non-words.
Phonological access measures how rapidly phonological information stored in
the lexicon (word bank) can be retrieved, and is measured by rapid naming tasks.
Phonological access was sub-divided into two discrete sets of skills. Serial naming
is the ability to name common items rapidly, measured by presenting children
with simple and well-known pictures, letters or numbers to name as fast as they
could. Torgesen used letters and digits, but well-known nouns can be used
instead, such as ‘key’, ‘comb’, ‘pen’, ‘ring’, ‘book’, ‘cup’, ‘cat’ and ‘spoon’. These
are pictured on a chequer-board in random order, and children asked to name
them rapidly one after the other, so that phonological forms must be accessed
very quickly. Isolated naming involves a similar task, but with items presented
one at a time on a computer screen.
Torgesen et al. (1994) discuss the three main phonological skills – awareness,
memory and access – as together comprising ‘phonological processing’.
Phonological processing abilities and difficulties seemed to be fairly stable
child characteristics, with phonological awareness in particular strongly related
to subsequent reading skills.
The development of phonological awareness

and its relationship to reading
Phonological awareness develops during childhood, with a move towards

breaking words up into smaller and smaller segments (reviewed by Stone et al.,
1998). Children first identify whole words; then they can break some compound
words like ‘cowboy’, ‘greenhouse’ or ‘toothbrush’ into their separate component
words; then they can break some words into syllables; then into ‘onset’ and
‘rime’. ‘Onset’ is the consonants (if any) at the beginning of the syllable before
the first vowel, and ‘rime’ is the rest, comprising the vowel and any consonants
after it to the end of the syllable. Examples are:
Syllable Onset Rime
all (none) all

tall t all
crawl cr awl
split spl it
paw p aw
Breaking words up in this way may be one of the ways in which children learn
to perceive ‘rhymes’, words where the onset differs but the rime does not. The
third stage in phonological awareness involves breaking a word into phonemes,

so that the child can tell which phoneme starts a word, and later which ends it,
and can split up clusters into their component consonants. This demonstrates
conscious awareness of a word’s phonological form.
The interest in phonological awareness among teachers of literacy is due to the
strong relationship that exists between success on phonological awareness tasks and
success with reading, both when measured concurrently or when phonological
awareness is measured first, when it predicts later reading skill. Children who do
badly on phonological awareness tasks often have trouble with literacy attainments.
Castles and Coltheart (2004) review the research literature, and comment upon the
strength of this relationship. They caution, however, that correlation does not imply
a causal relationship. Some other factor could be causing both phonological
awareness and literacy to be relatively advanced or delayed. Furthermore,
phonological awareness may not be a pre-existing, ‘non-reading precursor to
reading’, but develop as children are introduced to letter–sound correspondences as
part of their early reading experiences. Phonemic awareness skills ‘are rarely in
evidence in the absence of alphabetic skills’ (Castles and Coltheart, 2004),
suggesting a reciprocal rather than a causal relationship. This idea is compatible
with the work of Morais et al. (1979), who found that adults from a non-literate
culture who had never been introduced to reading were not very good at the
phonological awareness task of adding or deleting a phoneme at the start of a non-
word, whilst adults from the same culture who had learned to read as a child or
adult had little difficulty. The ability to consciously manipulate phonology may be
less causally connected to reading than is sometimes assumed, and both
phonological awareness and literacy activities need to be fostered, but a lack of skill
in phonological awareness is not a good sign for learning to read and spell.
Assessing phonological processing skills
Since phonological processing skills may give clues as to the facility with which
children will develop reading, teachers are often interested in investigating this
area. There are two main approaches: assessing a child’s phonological
processing skills separately from literacy skills, and analysing their reading and
written work for evidence of phonologically-based confusions.
Assessing phonological processing skills directly

Some assessments are informal, such as the pack developed in the READ Project
in Dundee (Kemp and Peters, 2003), which provides informal information on how
a child copes with tasks such as rhyme detection. Teachers can ask children to say
whether two words rhyme; or to spot the ‘odd one out’ from two words that rhyme
and one that does not; or to say which is the first and/or last consonant in a word,
to get an idea of how aware a child is of the phonological structure of words.
However, phonological skills develop as children become older, and assessment

tasks need to measure how a child is coping in comparison with children of
their own age. For these purposes a standardized assessment is best: ‘home-
made’ tasks might present activities that are too hard or too easy and so draw
inappropriate conclusions. If a teacher thinks, on the basis of informal
assessments, that a child might have a problem they can use a standardized
measure. There are standardized assessments available for teachers’ use
covering all aspects of phonological skill development between the ages of three
years and 24 years (including Dodd et al., 2000; Frederickson et al., 1997; Muter
et al., 1997; Torgesen and Bryant 2004; Wagner et al., 1999). Using such measures
allows real problems to be spotted, and a child’s progress to be tracked over time.
Analysing reading and writing
Children who get stuck at the alphabetic stage of literacy are calling upon their
internalized, auditory-based phonological representations, and over-regularizing
the orthographic system of English to try to make a fit. Stone et al. (1998) suggest
looking at the errors children make when reading and writing, to see if they could
have a phonological basis. A child writing ‘has’ as ‘haz’ is reflecting the accurate
phonological form of the word, and a child writing ‘fote’ for ‘vote’ is only reflecting
a slight error in the timing of voicing between voiced-voiceless twin phonemes.
Errors that are often put down to visual confusions could be due to phonological
slips – such as ‘p/b’, ‘m/n’, ‘b/d’ – and vowels will often be written using a letter
that does represent the vowel sound, but not in the word being tackled. Listening
to a child attempting to read a word aloud will also give clues as to how a child is
processing text. ‘Closed class’ grammar words and markers deserve particularly
close attention. A child who spells words as they are ‘in their head’ does not have
a phonological problem, but may need to be taught a lot of spelling rules.
Focused teaching
A large number of studies have combined training in phonological awareness

with teaching of reading-related skills such as letter–sound correspondence,
and shown increases in reading attainment (see Castles and Coltheart, 2004).
The fact that phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge have a
reciprocal relationship argues against teaching either aspect on its own, or even
preceding letter teaching with phonological awareness training. Teaching both
together appears to be most profitable.
There is similarly no reason to assume that a child with demonstrably poor
phonological awareness cannot learn to read, although they may need extra
support to do so. Many teaching packs exist. Teachers use phonological
awareness activities to capitalize on the existing phonological representations a
child brings to the reading process to anchor the complicated orthographic
information needed to become competent readers and writers. Analysing errors

and confusions provides teaching ideas as well as assessing difficulties, and can
be used as teaching points to explain irregularities and variations.
Ensuring that new words encountered in the curriculum are discussed in relation
to their phonological form as well as their meaning is also important (McCartney
et al., 2005). Discussing how many syllables are in a word; what it rhymes with; what
sounds (not just letters) are at the beginning and end; and if there are any ‘little words’
within it can help to ‘fix’ the word in the child’s lexicon. When discussing word
meanings, linking a word to its root can sometimes explain spelling peculiarities.
Most children do not need to change their internal phonological representations but
can be helped to apply their tacit knowledge to acquiring literacy skills. Teachers have
opportunity to capitalize on this knowledge to support children in the sustained effort
required to master the maddening variations in the English orthographic system.
Read a piece of writing by a child carefully. If they are making

consistent errors (between, for example, ‘p’ and ‘b’ or ‘s’ and ‘z’),
consider the possibility that these may be based on the phonemes
rather than a visual confusion between letter shapes.
Think about the children in your class. Are there any that seem to
struggle with phonics? Could any of these have phonological problems?
SOMETHING TO READ
Castles, A. and Coltheart, M. (2004) ‘Is there a causal link from

phonological awareness to success in learning to read?’, Cognition,
9(1): 77–111, gives a detailed account of the relationship between
phonological processing and reading.
Martin, D. (2000) Teaching Children with Speech and Language
Difficulties. London: David Fulton, gives introductory information on
speech development and difficulties for teachers.
SOMETHING TO DO
Think about the movements you are making with each part of your
mouth as you say the words ‘standby’, ‘surfboarding’ and
‘thermometer’ aloud a number of times, very slowly. Now say them
again, but quickly this time. What differences do you notice?
Listen carefully to your children to see if they use voiceless ‘th’ or ‘f ’ in
words like ‘thumb’, ‘Catherine’, ‘teeth’, ‘nothing’. You might even hear ‘h’
in some.
Chapter 7
Phonics in Context:
Spelling Links
Laura Huxford
The relationship of phonics to spelling has been as contentious as that of

phonics to reading. There are those who vehemently eschew any association of
phonics and spelling on the basis that encouraging children to ‘write words as
they sound’ invariably results in incorrect spelling. There are, on the other
hand, strong advocates of phonically-based spelling programmes. However, in
almost all research commentary on reading development and teaching literacy
in the last 20 years, the phrase ‘phonics is necessary but not sufficient’
continues to be reiterated (see, for example, Stanovich, 1980; Tunmer, 1991;
National Reading Panel, 2000a; DfES, 2005a). As John Stannard says, phonics
is a heuristic device to enable children to grasp the fundamentals of the
alphabetic system (Stannard and Huxford, forthcoming).
Just as the teaching of writing is less prominent in research and media
coverage than the teaching of reading, so phonics for spelling has taken second
place to phonics for reading. However, there is considerable research going
back to Isabelle Liberman and colleagues in the 1970s to show that the skill of
phonemic segmentation, which is the skill required for ‘phonic spelling’, is also
critical to the development of phonemic blending, a skill required for reading.
Further research suggests that it may well be a precursor to it (Frith, 1985;
Cataldo and Ellis, 1988; Huxford et al., 1991). For this and other reasons, the
guidance on teaching phonics in the National Literacy Strategy proposed that
phonemic segmentation be introduced before phonemic blending.
In this chapter I will argue that in learning to be literate in English, early
spelling is largely phonics and that, conversely, early phonics is spelling. I will
briefly sketch out the place of phonics in the process and acquisition of spelling
and explain why it is appropriate to introduce phonics through spelling. I will
give examples of how an understanding of children’s spelling development and
83
the various ‘logics’ behind the spellings of words can help teachers to analyse
and understand pupils’ misspellings and suggest an approach to teaching spelling
which builds on phonics.
The place of phonics in the process and acquisition

of spelling
The term ‘phonics’ is shorthand for an element of the curriculum which covers
teaching and learning the alphabetic system or code – the correspondences
between phonemes and graphemes – and the skills of segmentation and blending.
It is also used to denote the use of phonemic processes to read and spell.
Various psychological models have been suggested to account for how we read
and write, but in essence we probably draw upon some sort of visual store of words
which we have accumulated over time as we have repeatedly encountered and used
them. The accuracy with which we retrieve words from this personal store is more
crucial for spelling than reading. Most of us would agree that there are words that
we can read with no difficulty but that when required to write them we cannot
recall every letter with total accuracy. Common examples include ‘gauge’,
‘separate’ and ‘accommodate’. Most people try out a number of versions of the
word to be spelled and select the one that ‘looks right’. However, we also have
words in our spoken vocabulary that we have not encountered in texts very often
and therefore have not created secure mental images of them. When writing such
a word we tend to spell it by analogy on the basis of the syllabic structure of
another similar sounding word and then represent remaining phonemes with the
most likely graphemes. The spelling options are further reduced by considering
other words that are related in meaning. For example, on the basis of the
phonemic structure, the ‘y’ in the spoken word ‘pyroclastic’ could reasonably be
spelled with an ‘i’ and the unstressed ‘o’ with any vowel, for example ‘piraclastic’
or ‘pirerclastic’. But the meaning of the word suggests that the first four letters
relate to other words such as ‘pyrotechnic’ and ‘pyromaniac’, which would lead the
writer to spell the word correctly with ‘y’ and ‘o’. Similarly, plant enthusiasts,
familiar with the form of Latin plant names, would be likely to write correctly the
name of any plant that they had heard about but never encountered in print. Thus,
even experienced spellers use a phonemic approach to spelling, usually overlaid
with another strategy, when writing unfamiliar words.
For young children very few words are familiar. But in the English language,
which is an alphabetic system, they do have the rudimentary building blocks
for spelling words. Young children who are taught or who deduce elements of
the alphabetic code make very good use of it to spell. Read (1986), Bissex (1980)
and Gentry (1982) catalogued examples of children’s propensity to break
(segment) words into phonemes and find appropriate letters to represent the
sounds they identified. Most teachers of young children can furnish the visitor
with examples (such as those shown in Figure 7.1 on p. 89).
Phonics in Context: Spelling Links 85
Young children’s efforts at spelling are based on a keen analysis of the sounds
they hear within words so, for instance, the word ‘new’ may be spelled ‘niyoo’.
Their efforts are also based on an emerging and usually idiosyncratic knowledge
of sound–symbol correspondences. Letters are pressed into service in
unconventional ways, so upper-case N might be used as its name which is
pronounced ‘en’ after ‘h’ to spell ‘hen’ (hN) (Ferreiro and Teberovsky, 1982).
However, they do not confine themselves to representations based on sounds in
words. As Gunther Kress illustrates in his book Early Spelling (2000), very young
children also employ pictures and other symbols to convey their message. (This
approach to writing – linking the written form directly to the meaning of words –
will be partially regained when the writer understands more fully the
complexities of English orthography.) Nevertheless, the use of phonics to spell
has three advantages for the developing writer: words can be spelled without
recourse to anyone else; the system is flexible as the same letters are used over
again to make any word; and each word does not have to be memorized. Although
the spelling may not be correct, it is usually decodable by a persistent reader,
particularly when the writer has attained the stage of representing vowel sounds.
These were the arguments used in the early 1980s by researchers and teacher
practitioners in the United States and also in England during the National Writing
Project to support ‘developmental writing’ or ‘invented spelling’ – although the
recognition that this was phonic spelling was not widely acknowledged. Running
concurrently across the United Kingdom, and stemming originally from the
research of Margaret Peters that spelling should be ‘taught not caught’ (Peters,
1985), was the message that spelling was primarily a visuo-kinaesthetic skill (Cripps,
1991) with the dictum ‘Look, cover, write, check’. There was legitimate concern in
the profession that children who are allowed to only ‘spell as they hear’ will practise
bad habits and internalize incorrect spellings. This is an example of the age-old
conflict between allowing children to pursue their learning in step with what is
perceived as their ‘natural’ development and trammelling their learning to avoid
potential confusion. The issue here, as I have already indicated, is that even
experienced writers need a phonemic spelling strategy to spell unfamiliar words.
So, not allowing children to explore phonics in relation to spelling would reduce
their strategies for spelling these words. But in encouraging phonics in the early
stage, children must be helped to realize that other factors override the simple ortho-
graphy generated from phonological correspondences. In England, the National
Literacy Strategy made an explicit attempt to resolve this conflict by recognizing
the value of phonics to spelling, but also stressing the significance of morphology
and etymology (DfEE, 1998a; DfES, in press).
The place of spelling in the acquisition of phonics
In the relationship between phonics and spelling, the National Literacy

Strategy (NLS) actually went further. Not only did it recognize the importance
of phonics to spelling, it also saw spelling as pivotal to phonics. At the time,
phonics was associated more with the special educational needs curriculum
than mainstream. Generally, phonics was taught to enable children to blend
for reading. However, the research consistently showed a strong correlation
between success in segmentation and successful reading (Liberman, 1971;
Liberman et al., 1974; Lundberg et al., 1980). Reading Recovery was one of the
earliest programmes to include segmentation, and more recent phonics
programmes such as THRASS™ and Phonographix© place segmentation at the
fore.
In mainstream early years education, developmental writing, also known as
‘invented spelling’, was highly regarded. It was viewed as a more motivating
approach for children than dictating what they wanted to say and then copying
the teacher’s writing. But on the whole, teachers did not make a connection
between the processes in developmental writing and phonics. The NLS
professional development materials brought the two together. In the teacher
training material (DfEE, 1998b), in Progression in Phonics (DfEE, 1999a) and in
Playing with Sounds (DfEE, 2003a) there was early emphasis on segmentation
and letter knowledge, followed by blending for reading.
There was a growing body of research and pedagogic argument to support
this position. Building on the research showing the importance of segmentation
cited above, were developmental studies indicating that children acquire the
skill of segmentation slightly in advance of the skill of blending. Anecdotal
evidence for this can be found as long ago as the writing of Montessori (1912,
1964), and Chomsky (1979) proposed that children should learn to spell before
learning to read to capitalize on their early propensity to hear sounds in words.
Empirical evidence that children could spell phonemically-regular words that
they could not read was contained in a study by Bryant and Bradley in 1980.
Frith (1985) proposed a model of learning (Table 7.1) to read and spell in which
she proposed that spelling was the pacemaker for reading. Subsequently,
longitudinal studies by Cataldo and Ellis (1988) and Huxford et al. (1991)
showed a developmental progression in which children’s ability to spell
phonemically-regular words preceded their being able to read them.
Based on much of the literature of the period, for example Ehri (1984),
Frith’s model traces developmental progressions for reading and writing:
children’s earliest writing consisting of pictures as symbols for words, events or
messages; a logographic stage where children read and write words they have
memorized as shapes, such as their names and signs; an alphabetic (phonic)
stage; and finally an orthographic stage when knowledge of morphology
facilitates reading and writing. Many teachers and parents recognize these
stages in children.
The fascinating element of this model is that the stages do not occur in
parallel for reading and writing. The logographic stage in writing appears short-
lived; children abandon it in favour of using a phonic approach. The phonic
stage in reading starts after the phonic stage in writing. In practice this means
that children latch onto the alphabetic principle and begin to write words as
they sound. In phonemically-regular short-vowelled words such as ‘bat’, ‘hot’
Step Writing Reading
1a symbolic logographic
1b logographic logographic
2a alphabetic logographic
2b alphabetic alphabetic
3a alphabetic orthographic
3b orthographic orthographic
Table 7.1 The six-step model of skills in reading and writing

acquisition (Frith, 1985)
and ‘fig’, this strategy will produce correct spellings so long as the children’s
knowledge of letters is adequate. However, if the words are not in their visual
lexicons, they probably will not be able to read them as their blending ability
may not be sufficiently developed. The National Literacy Strategy capitalized
on the need for letters in developmental writing and used the purpose for
writing as the vehicle for learning phonics.
Understanding children’s spelling
There is evidence to suggest that, given favourable circumstances, young

children are motivated to write – to imitate those around them by making
squiggles on paper or to attempt to convey a message (Temple et al., 1988;
Ferreiro and Teberovsky, 1982; Kress, 2000). In addition to wavy lines that are
akin to adult joined handwriting, they will use pictures and symbols that they
encounter in their lives, most notably approximations of numbers and letters.
They ascribe meaning to the marks they make and may use a consistent group
of symbols to represent a meaning more than once in their writing. The child’s
concept of a word – the awareness of a discrete entity known as ‘a word’ – is still
in its early development. However, the concept of breaking the stream of speech
into discrete words is probably enhanced by seeing names and labels written
down. Furthermore, there is no relationship between the marks they make and
the sound or phonemic properties of the spoken form of the message. In fact, the
concept of a word and the realization of a connection between spoken language
and its written form seem to be closely allied (Morris, 1993). The recognition
that words share common sounds and that these are represented by the same
symbol in writing is pivotal and is essentially the first step in ‘spelling’.
At first children will use letters to represent some sounds as well as other marks
or random letters. When they start to use letters exclusively to represent the
phonemic properties of the message, they are likely to write a string of letters
representing the prominent phonemes at the beginning of some words and
syllables. For example, a child might write ‘Iwtsmgm’ (‘I went to see my granma’).
Consonant phonemes are easier to hear than vowels, and so for a short period
young children may fill out their words but only with consonants. For example,
‘Sm cm hm wv m ysd’ (‘Sam came home with me yesterday’). The addition of
vowels and the incorporation of words they know well from their reading make
the writing much easier to read and lift children’s perceptions of themselves as
independent writers: ‘I wet to the pub wiv mi dad and mi mum and I had sum
cris’ (‘I went to the pub with my dad and my mum and I had some crisps’). The
consonants ‘n’ and ‘m’ are quite difficult to hear next to another consonant, so
these often appear later.
Of course, the children’s aural perception of the phonemes in a spoken word
dictates which phonemes they represent. This can work in both directions:
over-representing, such as ‘nyoo’ for ‘new’, and under-representing, such as
‘sepret’ for ‘separate’. The examples in Figure 7.1 are from personal narratives
by 4- and 5-year-old children.
In example (a), ros dinr (roast dinner), the child has not heard the letter ‘t’
in roast as the two words elide. Children make letters work hard. In example
(b), Choclt (chocolate), the letter ‘l’ represents the /l/ phoneme and the
following unaccented vowel – perfectly logical when the child calls this letter
sound ‘lu’. Similarly in example (c), ‘I went to the prk. I went wiv mi mum and
mi dad’ (‘I went to the park. I went with my mum and my dad’), the child spells
the ‘ar’ phoneme in ‘park’ with the letter ‘r’, using the name rather than the
sound of the letter.
Some confusions are quite common, according to the research literature.
For instance, children regularly spell words beginning with ‘tr’ such as ‘train’
with ‘chr’, thus writing ‘chrain’, or ‘chrip’. In examples (d) – (f) children’s
pronunciation shows clearly through their writing.
In example (d), ‘At the weekend I went to Cheltenham wiv miy Dad and miy
mum and miy siststu and miy buvu’ (‘At the weekend I went to Cheltenham
with my Dad and my mum and my sister and my brother’), the child shows his
pronunciation of ‘th’ as ‘v’ in ‘with’ and ‘brother’ and exaggerates the /ie/ in
‘my’ so hearing a /y/ sound at the end. But he is consistent in his spelling (or
misspelling) of the word.
In example (e), ‘I went to the park and I fell off the mugky bars and bumt my
herd and I had a big bump on my herd’ (‘I went to the park and I fell off the
monkey bars and bumped my head and I had a big bump on my head’), for the
word ‘monkey’ the child has used the letter ‘g’ to capture the illusive ‘ng’ phoneme,
which is a correct representation of how the word is usually pronounced.We do not
tend to say ‘munky’; we actually pronounce it mungky. Similarly she has not
represented the ‘p’ in bumped because she does not pronounce or hear it with a ‘p’.
But when she comes to ‘bump’ she can hear the ‘p’.
Figure 7.1 Examples of children’s spellings

In example (f), ‘I had a juncoo booc pusoo’ (‘I had a jungle book puzzle’), you
can hear the child losing the ‘le’ at the end of the words ‘jungle’ and ‘puzzle’,
and he is consistent in spelling the ‘le’ with ‘oo’ in both words.
The final example (g), ‘At the weekend I had visites hu wur the next door
nebus’ (‘At the weekend I had visitors who were the next door neighbours’), is
from a girl rising six years old who has taken to joined writing with ease and
seems totally comfortable in writing any word she wishes by inventing
phonemically plausible spellings.
These examples are from children in a school in the south-west of England.
Examples from children in the north of England look different in certain
respects. For instance, some people pronounce the middle vowel of the words
‘wool’, ‘book’, ‘hood’, ‘mug’, ‘love’, ‘come’ with the same phoneme, and young
children’s spelling reflects this. They may spell all these words with ‘oo’ or all
with ‘u’, so the word ‘come’ could be spelt ‘cum’ or ‘coom’. The interesting
effects of regional pronunciation on spelling is explored in some detail in Wells
(2001).
Teachers need to be aware of how children’s pronunciation affects their
early spelling. In the examples given in Figure 7.1 and detailed above,
in almost all the words there is a phonemically plausible reason for the
spelling. The children try really hard to write intelligibly and should be
congratulated. However, as they get older there is a need for them to
accommodate to English orthography – a fundamentally morphemic
orthography in which there are strong phonemic overlaps or correspondences.
Words are composed of morphemes but the conventions that govern how the
morphemes join often coincide with phonemic regularities. For example,
short-vowelled verbs such as ‘pin’, ‘rub’ and ‘beg’ double the final consonant
when ‘ing’ and ‘ed’ are added, making ‘pinning’, ‘rubbing’ and ‘begging’,
‘pinned’, ‘rubbed’ and ‘begged’. This rule or convention holds good for a large
number of words and explains why ‘beginning’, a word which often catches
children out, has a double ‘n’.
However, this phonemic convention has to sit alongside morphemic
knowledge of past-tense verbs. In ‘begged’, ‘pinned’ and ‘rubbed’ the /d/
phoneme is sounded immediately after the preceding consonant. The child
must be aware that the word requires the morpheme ‘ed’, not just ‘d’, to
describe a state or action in the past. But, in verbs ending in ‘t’ and ‘d’ (‘rented’,
‘shouted’, landed, ‘needed’) the ‘ed’ sounds like ‘id’, and unless children
recognize the need to mark the past tense with ‘ed’, they tend to write ‘rentid’
and so on. In verbs ending in ‘p’, ‘k’, ‘f ’ (‘jumped’, ‘picked’, ‘stuffed’), the ‘ed’
sounds like ‘t’; ‘jumpt’ is a very common error in children’s writing. To
confound children further, there is a group of irregular past tense verbs that do
end in ‘t’ and virtually all are phonemically regular, for example, ‘kept’, ‘felt’,
‘sent’, ‘lost’, ‘left’. When past tense is insecure, children have been known to
apply this convention to non-verbs and spell words such as ‘soft’ as ‘soffed’.
Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes have accumulated a significant corpus of
research on the effects of grammar and morphology on children’s spelling and
teachers’ knowledge of morphology (Bryant et al., 1997; Bryant et al., 2000;

Bryant, 2002; Nunes et al., 2003; Hurry et al., 2005).
Applying the research: teaching and learning

spelling
The relationship between research on children as spellers and the policy

and practice for teaching spelling is complex and often poorly articulated. A
study of the National Literacy Strategy in England indicates that this is not
inevitable, however. The first stage in learning to spell is learning phonics and, as
explained earlier, the first step in learning phonics is to use it to spell. That
phonics has a purpose in enabling children to be independent writers was the key
approach taken by the first professional development materials in the National
Literacy Strategy in 1998. Progression in Phonics (DfEE, 1999a) then aimed at
speeding up children’s acquisition of letter knowledge and the ability to segment
for spelling as well as blending for reading. It parcelled learning phonics into
seven steps. The first three were steps in segmentation, letter knowledge came in
at step 2 and from step 4 onwards blending was included. Step 1 covers general
phonological development including playing with rhyme and alliteration
(recognition that the phrase ‘Suzy slices saucy sausages’ contains an abundance
of the ‘sss’ sound). Step 2 uses segmenting the initial consonant in words to learn
a handful of letters. Step 3 moves on to segmenting the final sound in a
consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) word through which more letters are learned.
At Step 4 children learn the vowel letters in the process of learning how to
segment the medial vowel in CVC words. Through segmenting and spelling CVC
words, children learn how to blend the sounds of letters into words for reading.
Step 5 introduces consecutive consonants at the beginning and end of words,
again the blending of consonants being learned through prior experience of their
segmentation. Long vowels are introduced in Step 6, with one representation for
each vowel so that children could use long vowels to spell, the major work on
vowel choices being left to Step 7. A professional development CD-ROM was
produced for teachers in 2000 (DfEE, 2000).
This guidance was supplemented five years later by Playing with Sounds
(DfES, 2003a), a set of teaching cards and a CD-ROM. In the intervening period,
the inspectorate reported that the quality of phonics teaching in England had
improved. Teachers were finding that most children were able to segment the
medial vowel much more readily than children in previous years, and were
concerned that blending was left too late. In the light of this feedback steps 2,
3 and 4 were condensed, but the process for learning letters was still through
spelling, followed immediately by blending for reading.
The essence of all the NLS materials is that phonics should be systematically
taught in a playful manner. Games were developed for the materials in which
children manipulate concrete objects, not simply pictures, where they move
around the room and interact with each other as well as adults. Playing with
Sounds also includes a large number of examples where adults have taken the
opportunity to extend the children’s learning within activities that the children
have initiated.
Although the use of phonics empowers children when writing
independently, some children find the effort of forming letters deters them
from writing. These children need support in developing their fine motor
skills so that they can take part in an activity which they would be more likely
to relish if the physical side was not such an obstacle. Developing Early Writing
(DfES, 2001) suggests ways of offering this support as well as providing ideas
for helping children to internalize the letter movements through gross motor
activities. While these (and other) children are improving their handwriting
skills, they can be purposefully writing using small keyboards, magnetic
letters or, better still, an interactive whiteboard where they can select letters
and move them around on the screen. Unlike magnetic letters, letters on an
electronic whiteboard cannot run out!
Phonics, however, is only part of the story in learning to spell. Recognizing
how words are structured is arguably the first step in securing a personal
vocabulary of words. The NLS five-session spelling programme for 7- and 8-
year-old children (DfES, 2001) assumes that realistically, teachers will devote
five teaching sessions over a fortnight to teaching spelling and that at least two
of these will be extended to include independent work by the children and be
the subject of a follow-up whole class plenary session.
The five sessions allow for teaching the structure of words, attention to
spelling age-appropriate vocabulary by analysing the structure and identifying
the ‘tricky’ parts of words that are likely to be difficult to remember. An equally
important part of the programme is practice and application, so that as well as
understanding how words are constructed, children retain them in memory for
use in writing when they need to pay as much attention as possible to
composition, not transcription.
The programme uses investigation and problem solving as the basis for
learning how words are constructed. These investigations take the form of
games such as ‘Word sort’, ‘Guess my word’, ‘Add race’ and ‘Find your team’.
The approach taken to learning how to commit words to memory is to ask
the question ‘Why is this word spelled like this?’ The work on word structure
helps children to answer this question. But sometimes children need to spell
words that have an irregular feature. Children are encouraged to find parts
of the word that fit a convention and then to decide upon some way to
remember the ‘tricky’ part. For instance, the notorious word ‘yacht’ has three
phonemes, two of which are spelled perfectly regularly. The /o/ phoneme is
represented by three very unusual letters. People invent different ways to
recall this group of letters. Some prefer to visualize the shape, others to say
the letter names, others to create a mnemonic. The process of analysing it
into three phonemes with an ‘odd middle’ goes a long way to helping children
remember it.
Phonemic analysis helps towards understanding the structure of words.
Morphemic analysis, as described earlier, is also essential. The reason the word
‘accommodate’ has two sets of double letters is because it is a series of
morphemes, each of which needs to be written in full – ‘ac-com-mod-ate’. The
origins of words (etymology) provide reasons for their spelling. Another well-
used example is the relationship between the words ‘sign’ and ‘signal’; the
pronounced ‘g’ in ‘signal’ is an etymological mnemonic for the unpronounced
‘g’ in ‘sign’. Like all problem-solving activities, children are fascinated by word
study of this sort.
Conclusion
Writing, spelling or ‘making words’ has an important role to play in learning

phonics because it provides the motivation as well as the analytic component
that drives phonics for reading. Conversely, phonics plays an important role in
spelling. At first it is the liberating element to young children’s writing and as
they develop, children need to realize that there is more to spelling than
phonics. However, as one of the features of a word’s structure, phonics remains
an important component in spelling.
Look at Frith’s model of the development of spelling and reading

(Table 7.1). Does this relate to your experiences of working with
young children?
SOMETHING TO READ
DfES (2003b) Year 2 and 3 Planning Exemplification and Spelling
Programme, Reference no. 0493-2003. London: DfES. Available online
at http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/
849451/
Chapter 8 in this book, ‘Phonics and English Orthography’ by
Henrietta Dombey.
Chapter 6 in this book, ‘Developmental Issues: Speaking and
Phonological Awareness’ by Elspeth McCartney.
SOMETHING TO DO
Try spelling some words that you have heard but are not sure how to
spell. What strategies do you use? Check the spellings in a dictionary.
If there are places where you have gone wrong, try to work out why
this is.
Identify a child in your class who is a poor speller. Use the key ideas
in this chapter to list what this child does know and understand
about spelling and identify some of the things that the child has yet
to learn. Pick the single thing that you think will give the biggest
overall learning pay-off for this child and make this a teaching
priority.
Chapter 8
Phonics and English

Orthography
Henrietta Dombey
The teaching and learning of phonics have to be set in context. Before we can
make a decision about the suitability of a synthetic phonic approach to the
teaching of reading, we need to consider what it is that children have to learn.
Others have discussed what is involved in learning to read in terms of
comprehension and putting reading to use (see Chapters 1 and 4). These
considerations are vitally important for all children learning to read, all over
the world. However, in this chapter I am looking at what is involved in learning
to read English: at the difficulties encountered and the support given, the
challenges and the opportunities offered by the peculiarities of English spelling –
the orthography of written English.
Does the orthography of a language make

a difference?
Is it harder to learn to read English than other languages? The brief answer is
‘probably yes’, if we’re talking about other languages with an alphabetic script.
The idea of an alphabet is, of course, that it is phonographic, that is the written
signs represent speech sounds, rather than logographic, where the written signs
stand for the meanings of the words represented. In a ‘pure’ alphabetic system,
each letter represents a phoneme, the smallest unit of speech sound that makes
a difference to meaning. The word ‘cat’ is an example of a purely phonographic
English word: the spoken word has three phonemes, each of which serves to
95
distinguish it from other words such as ‘mat’, ‘cot’ and ‘can’, and each of which
is represented in the written word by a single letter of the alphabet. If all
English words were spelled like this, we could say we had a ‘pure’ alphabetic
system of writing. But as we all know, this is not typical of English spelling.
Many of the languages of continental Europe have a fairly reliable match
between letters and phonemes. In Italian, for example, the 25 phonemes of
spoken Italian are represented by 24 single letters (no ‘k’ or ‘y’) and 8 letter
combinations, such as ‘ch’, where English might use ‘k’. Italian and other
languages with a similarly straightforward relationship between phonemes and
letters are said to have a transparent or shallow orthography. In contrast, English
has an opaque or deep orthography. In the English writing system some 461
graphemes – letters or letter combinations – represent some 40 to 45 phonemes
(the number varies according to your accent and your procedure of
classification). Because of interference from other factors, such as the age of
starting schooling, the teaching approach adopted and the part played by the
written word in different societies, it’s very difficult to isolate the contribution
played by orthography to the speed and ease with which young children learn
to read. Researchers have found that children do seem slower to learn to read
in languages with deep orthographies. In line with children in many countries
of continental Europe, most Italian children master the basics of word
recognition in only six months of schooling (Cossu et al., 1995). But it has been
estimated that the deep orthography of English adds two to three years to the
process for children learning to read in English (Seymour et al., 2003). It also
takes longer for individuals to process deep orthographies and appears to
involve different parts of the brain (Paulesu et al., 2000). We need to look at the
orthography of English to know how this deep orthography is constructed –
what the complexities are that children have to learn.
Attempts to bring order to chaos
The ‘common-sense’ view is that the English spelling system is chaotic, and that
the deviation of many spellings from the phonographic principle is largely the
result of significant changes to pronunciation, coupled with marked conservatism
in the written language. But how true is this? How chaotic is English spelling? Is
it the result of a combination of oral flexibility and written rigidity?
Certainly a number of attempts have been made to rationalize English
spelling, to make it more phonographic. In the last century the most notable
have been the Shavian extended alphabet devised by Kingsley Read in 1959
(MacCarthy, 1969) and the Initial Teaching Alphabet (Downing, 1965). The
Shavian extended alphabet was the result of a large bequest left by George
Bernard Shaw for this purpose. It consists of 48 invented letters, each one
consistently representing a phoneme of received pronunciation (the high-status
Phonics and English Orthography 97
accent sometimes known as ‘BBC English’), but none resembling any letters of
the Roman alphabet. It would seem that this totally transparent orthography was
nevertheless too strange to those already familiar with conventional English
spelling in Roman letters, so made little impact. Working on a different principle,
the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), invented by Sir James Pitman, took the
letters of the Roman alphabet as its base, supplementing these with further
invented letters so that every phoneme could be represented unambiguously.
ITA flourished in the 1960s, but gradually withered, perhaps as a result of the
dissatisfaction experienced by parents, children and some teachers at the lack
of continuity between children’s experience of print at home and at school.
Extending the alphabet and regularizing English spelling appear to be
non-trivial matters, not easily accomplished.
Certainly, the orthography of English is essentially alphabetic. At base the
English writing system works by representing phonemes with graphemes. This is the
first key feature of English orthography, and, at its most straightforward, it
gives us words such as ‘cat’ and ‘chip’. But many English words don’t quite work
in this way.
Some historical influences
History has, of course, shaped our spelling. The spelling of words such as
‘knight’ and ‘lamb’ reflect the rather different pronunciation of their Anglo-
Saxon ancestry. Over the centuries the pronunciation of words has shifted, but
their spelling has remained relatively constant. But it’s not just the history of
changing pronunciation growing away from stable spelling that has shaped the
orthography of English. A stronger influence seems to be the many words
imported from other languages that have brought with them rather different
spelling patterns (Sampson, 1985).
Complexity has marked English spelling for nearly a thousand years. Before
the Norman invasion, the language of what is now England was Old English,
with a number of regional variants. But there was a standard written system,
based on the language of Wessex (Sampson, 1985). This was the language of
official documents, and thus very unusual in Europe, as elsewhere Latin
continued to serve the purpose of official transactions. This written English
operated to a set of rules that made it largely phonographic, in other words, it
operated with a nearly transparent orthography.
But with the large-scale imports of Norman French from the 11th century
onwards, came a different set of patterns. The two contrasting spelling patterns
can be seen very clearly in pairs of homophones such as ‘shoot’ and ‘chute’, ‘ark’
and ‘arc’, ‘root’ and ‘route’, ‘mussel’ and ‘muscle’ (Carney, 1994). As Carney
observes, the two sets of spellings represent not only their origins in different
orthographies, governed by different sets of spelling rules, but also ‘different
semantic fields and different ranges of experience’ (Carney, 1994: 96). As he

points out, if you want to make a colloquial form of the word ‘lunatic’, you spell
it ‘loony’ or ‘looney’, not ‘luny’. In the unregulated plethora of spellings for
English that followed 1066, many writers used the new French patterns on
words from Old English. Some of these ‘Frenchified’ spellings endured, such as
the spelling of the English words ‘ice’ and ‘queen’ (previously ‘is’ and ‘cwen’)
(Sampson, 1985).
Latin also had an important influence on English spelling. Latin spelling,
which, pre-conquest, had been quite distinct from English spelling and had
even been written in a different script, was now drawn on by the Normans,
particularly in the spelling of French words that were relatively close to their
Latin origins. For example, words with an initial ‘h’ in Latin, but no such sound
in French, had the ‘h’ re-introduced in their spelling. This is how we get words
such as ‘honour’ and ‘hour’. So by the end of the 11th century, English spelling
had become an amalgam of two major sets of rules, and a third one relating to
pronunciation of another language. It is not surprising, then, that in medieval
England a number of different spellings were considered acceptable for a given
word. With the introduction of printing in the 15th century, this diversity
became an advantage as compositors could choose the spellings that best fitted
the spaces available.
But of course English spelling did not reach its present complexity until
well after the Norman Conquest. Printing made another contribution. The first
compositors, who came from Holland with Caxton, brought with them the
spelling conventions of the Low Countries, giving us words such as ‘ghost’. In
the early 16th century, the French fashion for etymological spellings swept
England, giving us spellings such as ‘debt’, ‘salmon’, ‘corpse’ and ‘sceptre’ for
‘dette’, ‘samon’ and ‘cors’ and ‘septre’. In some cases (such as ‘corpse’, for example),
changes to pronunciation appear to have followed the spelling changes. Some
standardized spellings, such as ‘foreign’, were founded on error – in this case
the mistaken idea that the word relates to ‘reign’, when it actually derives from
the Old French ‘forain’, or the Latin ‘foranum’.
This departure from the phonographic principle, this move away from
transparency, came at a particularly significant time, for in the late 16th
century, printers began to move to a fixed spelling for each word, a process that
was completed by about 1650, since when there have been few changes.
However, many words have since been imported from other languages, often
with the spelling conventions of their country of origin. Words such as ‘blitz’
and ‘chauffeur’ bring with them rather different spelling patterns.
Meanwhile, the pronunciation of polysyllabic words, such as ‘woman’,
‘station’, ‘develop’, ‘arrange’ and ‘composition’, involves stress on alternate
syllables, with the unstressed vowels (for example, the ‘a’ in ‘woman’)
transforming into the sound known to linguists by the German name ‘schwa’.
However, the original vowel letter is retained in the spelling. In a similar way,
the spelling of the past-tense suffix on the end of verbs such as ‘marked’,
‘jumped and ‘landed’ remains constant, while the pronunciations of it differ.
We are so used to thinking of these ‘-ed’s as telling us the same information,

that we may not be aware that they actually represent three distinct syllables
in these three words. Try saying them out loud. This is true also of the plural
‘s’ in ‘frogs’ and ‘ships’.
All these examples show a drift away from the phonographic principle towards
a representation that is more morphological – more based on the meaning of
root words and key suffixes, rather than a strict representation of their
pronunciation on a phoneme-by-phoneme basis. This has its advantages: in their
written form we can clearly see the link between ‘compose’ and ‘composition’ that
is masked in pronunciation.
This brief canter through the history of English orthography might seem a
distraction from the spelling patterns young children have to learn, but it is
important to recognize that English spelling is neither straightforwardly
transparent, nor chaotically opaque. There are patterns and regularities, even if
these are more complex than for most other alphabetic languages.
The patterns of English orthography
This potted history of English spelling has shown many different systems at
work. We don’t need to teach young children the history (although parts of it
may well interest them). But we do need to help them become aware of the
systems at work in the words they encounter when learning to read and to spell.
Children need to have control of these systems, in recognizing their key
features, if they are to become ‘self-teaching’, learning new words for
themselves.
The first key feature is as stated earlier. At base the English writing system
works by representing phonemes with graphemes. But to make them independent
decoders, it is never going to be enough to teach children the phoneme–
grapheme correspondences of words such as ‘dog’ and ‘cat’, whose spellings
remain relatively close to their Old English origins. We need to help them
become aware of other patterns. Rhyme is particularly useful here: in groups
such as ‘dance’ and ‘glance’, ‘ball’ and ‘call’ the words both rhyme and have
the same end spellings: in each set, the rime – the part from the vowel to the
end of the word – is identical. The rime is a stable spelling that represents a
stable pronunciation, and so provides a better clue to word identification than
does a grapheme-by-grapheme analysis. So we’ve come to the second key
feature of English orthography: rime patterns. The rime is often a more reliable
guide to pronunciation than are the individual letters that go to make it up.
One important reason for this is often overlooked. In contrast with Spanish,
Italian and Finnish, all of which, as we have seen, have a more phonographic
orthography, English is vowel rich. Leaving aside those gliding vowels, the
diphthongs, Spanish has only five simple vowels, each of which is represented
-ack -ain -ake -ale -all -ame -an -ank
-ap -ash -at -ate -aw -ay -eat -ell
-est -ice -ick -ide -ite -ill -in -ine
-ing -ink -ip -ir -ock -oke -op -or
-ore -uck -ug -ump -unk
Table 8.1 Thirty-seven rimes that yield nearly 500 words in English (Wylie
and Durell, 1970: 787–91)
by a separate letter, whereas English has 12 vowel phonemes. But of course we

don’t have 12 vowel letters. Graphemes made up of two vowel letters extend the
range somewhat, giving us words such as ‘team’, ‘street’ and ‘goat’. But it’s
frequently the consonant (or consonant combination) following the vowel letter
that determines its pronunciation. It’s the ‘st’ in ‘most’ that shows how the ‘o’
is pronounced. Similarly, the letter ‘a’ represents three different phonemes in
the words ‘cat’, ‘call’, and ‘cast’. The pattern holds for ‘fat’, ‘fall’ and ‘fast’. The
reasons for this are explained in more detail in Chapter 6.
Attention to the onset and the rime are much more likely to yield something
approaching an acceptable pronunciation for a word such as ‘stall’ or ‘stake’
than sounding it out grapheme by grapheme. Table 8.1 shows how productive
this is in English.
There are similar patterns in two-syllable words, and even patterns that
operate between the rime patterns. We don’t need an etymological dictionary to
see all of these patterns: words such as ‘little’, ‘nettle’, ‘battle’ and ‘bottle’ clearly
go together, with connections to others such as ‘puddle’ and ‘apple’. Having
learned to recognize or spell one group, children are well placed to learn the
others by analogy. In this way, armed with the alphabetic principle and an
awareness of such spelling patterns, children can ‘bootstrap’ their way
identifying new words for themselves.
There is one final set of patterns that can help children gain control over
English orthography and see it as something other than chaotically arbitrary.
These are the patterns based on the morphemic principle, where the spelling of
a word indicates its meaning more clearly than its pronunciation, as in words
such as ‘southern’. This then, can be said to be the third key feature of English
orthography. The spelling of a word may tell us as much or more about its meaning as
it does about its pronunciation.
And finally, we have to admit that the complex history of English
orthography has resulted in a number of quite idiosyncratic spellings. There are
indeed many English spellings (‘two’, ‘many’, ‘friends’) that can’t be easily
marshalled into recognizable and predictable patterns.
The 20 most common words in English, in order of frequency:
the of and a to in is you that it
he for was on are as with his they at
The next 30 most common words:
be this from I have or by one had not
but what all were when we there can an your
which there said if do will each about how up
And the next 50 most common words:
out them then she many some so these would other
into has more her two like him see time could
no make than first been its who now people my
made over did down only way find use may water
long little very after words called just where most know
Table 8.2 The 100 most common words in written English (Carroll et al., 1971)
Can’t we just start children off with the

easiest words?
Starting children off with the ‘easiest words’ is what many phonics schemes
have tried to do over the decades. Starting children off with words such as ‘bat’
and ‘cat’, ‘man’ and ‘pan’, with a straightforward one-to-one relationship between
phonemes and letters, demonstrates the alphabetic principle. But it’s very hard
to make a readable text without words such as ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘I’ and ‘you’. The harsh
fact is that it’s the commonest words in the English language which have the
most irregular spellings; Table 8.2 shows this clearly.
Although this list is from the United States and is 25 years old, it is accepted
as having a continued relevance for us in the United Kingdom. Looking at these
lists, we can see that it would be hard to construct even a simple text for young
children learning to read without using a number of these words. To read a
range of texts with any degree of fluency and accuracy – such as that required
to demonstrate a Level 2 in England’s national curriculum (the notional level
for a 7-year-old) – a child would have to be able to recognize all these words.
Words with totally transparent one-to-one

phoneme–letter relationships
So how can we rate the transparency of the spellings in the 100 commonest
words in written English? Start by taking the ideal notion of a one-to-one
correspondence between phonemes and letters, and go through the first 20 words
on this list to find how many meet this criterion, making sure you pronounce
the words in an unforced way, as you would in conversation. Highlight these
‘totally transparent’ words. Do the same with the next 30 and the same again
with the last 50.
Only 5 of the first 20 words on this list can really be said to be ‘transparent’,
leaving 15 spellings that are less than transparent. Of the next 30, 9 are
transparent, leaving 21 non-transparent spellings. With the next 50 the ratio
gets slightly worse: only 5 of them can be said to have a fully transparent
spelling, leaving 45 non-transparent spellings. If you have highlighted more
than 19 words, check them again carefully. Out of the 100 words most used in
written English, 81 fail to meet the test of fully transparent spellings, where one letter
consistently represents one phoneme.
Words with two-letter graphemes consistently

representing single phonemes
Now try highlighting (perhaps in another colour) words in which common two-
letter graphemes, such as ‘ee’, ‘th’ and ‘ow’, are used to represent single
phonemes. Count your results. By this means your tally of non-transparent
spellings (those still not highlighted) should have dropped to 12 for the first 20,
17 for the next 30 and 32 for the next 50, making 61 in all. Check again if you
come up with different figures. But we’re already bending the rules slightly: the
‘th’ grapheme is used to represent two different phonemes: the sound at the
beginning of ‘the’ and the one at the end of ‘with’ are really quite distinct.
We certainly can’t stretch the rules to count ‘where’ as a regular spelling of
this sort, since the ‘wh’ grapheme in ‘where’ actually stands for two phonemes,
which would more accurately be represented as ‘hw’. And in ‘who’, it stands for
something closer to the ‘h’ in ‘hat’, whereas in most pronunciations of ‘which’
it stands for something more like the ‘w’ in ‘wet’. So out of the 100 commonest
words, 61 cannot be regarded as orthographically transparent.
These are words that can’t simply be ‘sounded out’ one letter, or even one
grapheme, at a time. This has a profound implication for the teaching of phonics.
If we are not to confine children to artificial texts with a restricted range of words,
our phonics teaching has to reflect other patterns in addition to the one-to-one
phoneme–grapheme correspondences of the ‘c-a-t’ or ‘ch-i-p’ variety.
Sets of words sharing rimes and rhymes

Highlight (in a third colour) and list the words from Figure 8.2 in rhyming
groups. You can do these between sections, as well as within them, grouping ‘to’
with ‘do’, for example. Make sure you are pronouncing the words in an
unforced way when you make your judgements. As you will have found, there
are patterns in these 61 less-than-totally transparent spellings. We can see and
hear that ‘to’, ‘do’ and ‘who’ go together, as do ‘no’ and ‘so’, and ‘is’ and ‘his’,
and ‘as’ and ‘has’. Then ‘he’, ‘be’, ‘we’ and ‘she’, ‘would’ and ‘could’, ‘there’ and
‘where’ (but not ‘were’) form similar patterns. How many other groupings of
this sort can you find, both between words on the list, and also between them
and other words in common use?
Patterns in the remaining words

Look at the words still not highlighted. Can you see any other patterns at work?
You may find one or two, but there is no escaping the fact that most of these
have to be learned as ‘sight’ words, and as singletons, at least initially. If children
are to have texts that are not totally artificial, they will need to learn words such
as ‘was’, ‘you’ and ‘one’. Even the initial letters are not necessarily reliable, parti-
cularly if they are vowels. ‘Sounding out’ is unlikely to yield words such as
‘other’ or ‘any’. This is the ‘deep orthography’ of English.
Where does this leave us?
Teaching children to read in English is not the same as teaching them to read a
transparent orthography such as Italian, Spanish, Finnish or Swahili. It is more
complex. More patterns are involved and we need to be aware of this. And then
there are the exceptions to the patterns. So we need to teach children not only
the alphabetic principle, but also the other patterns that shape English
orthography, particularly rhyme/rime patterns. And we also need to teach them
those essential ‘one-off ’ words.
Exactly when and how we do this is a matter of careful decision making about
young children’s capacity to learn different sets of patterns, their need for
meaningful ‘naturalistic’ texts and their capacity to learn in different ways. But
phonics teaching that is, consciously or otherwise, founded on the idea that
English spelling is straightforwardly phonographic will not meet the
requirement of teaching children to teach themselves the words they need to
know to become effective readers of English.
Compare Dombey’s argument (this chapter) concerning the deep

orthography of English spelling to Huxford’s argument (Chapter 7)
concerning how we use phonics in the teaching of spelling. How do
the authors agree? In what ways do they differ?
SOMETHING TO READ
If you are interested in exploring more about the complex history of the
English language, try:
Bryson, B. (1990) Mother Tongue: The English language. Harmondsworth:

Penguin.
Crystal, D. (2002) The English Language. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bragg, M. (2004) The Adventure of English. London: Sceptre.
SOMETHING TO DO
If you have not already done so, complete the activities relating to
Table 8.2: The 100 most common words in the English language.
Then select two or three popular books for young children. See how
many of the words in the first few pages fit any of the patterns you
have explored. Which are words that would need to be learned
individually? What are the implications for reading such books for
children using only a synthetic phonics approach?
Chapter 9
Sounds Familiar: The History of

Phonics Teaching
Moya Cove
There are many competing detailed methods each with its own supporters and
detractors, but it is now generally recognized that no single method is
applicable to all children on all occasions.
At first glance this comment from a government-initiated report on the teaching

of reading looks as if it has come straight from the seminal Bullock Report of
1975, A Language for Life. It bears strong resemblance to one of Bullock’s most
celebrated conclusions, namely that ‘There is no one method, medium, approach,
device, or philosophy that holds the key to learning to read’ (DES, 1975: 521).
The above extract, however, is taken from a pamphlet entitled Reading Ability:
Some Suggestions for Helping the Backward and was produced by a 1947
government committee in response to post-War concerns about the extent of
school illiteracy among school leavers in England (Diack, 1965: 37).
One might be excused for wondering what happened in the intervening 28
years and why there was need in 1975 to give such a similar message, and why,
indeed, these signposts from other times still have critical resonance for us today.
These matters are, of course, far from straightforward, but the two quotations do
serve to illustrate one of the most striking features of the history of phonics – and
that is the number of commonalities, in the debates and theoretical positions,
across the decades. How far these seemingly recurrent discourses have helped or
hindered effective practice in the classroom is a question we might ask ourselves
of the history, and constitutes at least part of the phonics debate at the beginning
of the 21st century. This chapter offers an historical overview of the teaching of
phonics in England and America and highlights, from the extensive literature,
105
just some of the episodes which have shaped our thinking and practice in the
teaching of phonics within early reading.
Teaching reading before the advent of phonic

methods: the alphabet and the growth of the
alphabetic method
The alphabets most commonly used throughout the world today are descended
from the Phoenician alphabet developed during the 12th century BC. The
Phoenician alphabet gradually developed from a pictographic form into a more
abstract form of a phonetic, consonantal alphabet which was adopted by the
Greeks and modified to include vowel representations. They became the first
Europeans to write using an alphabet and, with the ensuing growth of modern
European languages these alphabetic approaches dominated the teaching of
reading from the Greek period to the 19th century.
The alphabetic method was centred on teaching children to recognize and
name the letters of the alphabet, both capital and lower case, in alphabetical
order. For the most part this was achieved through progressing from the
alphabet to spelling out and saying the words of the bible. Diack reports that in
1846 one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors commented that the ‘. . . sole text for all
reading instruction was the language of Scripture in the authorized version’
(1965: 11). However, in his study of the development of reading pedagogy,
Diack also refers to teaching materials which seem to have departed from
dependence on the Bible. One such example is the ‘hornbook’ developed in
England in 1450, which comprised one sheet set in a wooden frame covered
with transparent horn. It depicted the cross of Christ, the alphabet – in small and
capital letters – and columns of ab, eb and ib syllables. The existence of these
syllables caused Diack to question whether it was possible to differentiate with
precision between alphabetic and phonic methods since the vowel–consonant
pairing in the hornbook would suggest a focus on learning sounds rather than
mere letter names. The hornbook, then, might be seen to herald a move towards
a phonic approach. Interestingly, hornbooks spawned the ‘gingerbread method’
in the 18th century, when letters were made into gingerbread in an effort to
enliven the ‘wearisome drill’ and inspire children to learn their letters – an
early version, perhaps, of alphabetti spaghetti!
The 18th century saw the publication in America of Noah Webster’s ‘Speller’,
one of the most popular texts in the history of teaching reading and selling
80 million copies during the century following its publication (Congdon, 1974).
This might best be described as a forerunner of the reading ‘primer’ and, while
it employed a predominately alphabetic approach to teaching reading, the logic
and organization of the approach points towards the beginning of phonics
methods and again highlights the intricacies involved in making absolute
Sounds Familiar: The History of Phonics Teaching 107
distinctions between reading methodologies that emphasize code above context – an

issue that continues to exercise us today.
In contrast to the alphabetic method, which so dominated ‘formal’ reading
education in the 18th century, is the glimpse we can gain from consideration of
Morag Styles’ absorbing account of women writing poetry in their own homes
for their own children which she describes as ‘. . . the secret history of domestic
literacy’ (1997: 154). Styles illustrates this through the work of Jane Johnson, a
mother writing in 1740s England who, through her inventive poetry, offered her
children an alternative introduction to early reading steeped, as it was, in the
warmth of sharing richly captivating texts – and being more akin to the kind of
support for emergent and beginning readers we so readily advocate today.
Teaching reading in the 19th century: the phonic

method makes an entrance
The alphabetic method continued well into the 19th century, but began to be
replaced by a phonic approach around 1850 which quickly gained popularity in
both England and America. In England, HMI endorsed the use of a new ‘phonic
method’ when, during the 1840s, Battersea Training College introduced this
approach into their training programme. The ‘new’ approach, as described by a
college president of the time, involved learning the sound ‘. . . not by its
common arbitrary name but by the sound which it has in composition’; he went
on to explain that after working on combinations of letter sounds on a slate
board a reading book was introduced but ‘. . . not until the child has a necessity
of it in his further progress; it is then a relief and not a task’ (Diack, 1965: 28).
Phonics teaching was widely embraced and approaches such as the Dale
method (Diack, 1965: 105), which was prevalent in England between the late
19th and early 20th centuries, helped popularize the approach. This method
was highly systematic and, in essence, involved a range of ‘pre-reading’
perceptual activities, introduction of letters and the fusion of separate sounds
into words – all hallmarks of established practice at that time.
Publishers were not slow to exploit the opportunities presented through the
new phonic method, and a number of books designed to help children grasp
‘sounding out’ began to appear. Hunter Diack reports on young Master Winston
Churchill’s experience (around 1880) with one such book published in 1857,
Reading Without Tears, A Pleasant Mode of Learning to Read, and cites this
revealing quote from Churchill’s autobiography My Early Life: ‘Mrs. Everest
produced a book called Reading Without Tears. It certainly did not justify its title
in my case. I was made aware that before the Governess arrived I must be able to
read without tears. We toiled each day. My nurse pointed with a pen at the
different letters. I thought it all very tiresome’ (Diack, 1965: 30). How many
children over a hundred-year period, we might ask ourselves, identified with
Churchill’s heartfelt recollections?
It might be tempting to believe, as we have perhaps sometimes assumed in

recent decades, that those teachers who subscribed to the phonics approach
did so as their sole method of instruction. However, practice in the mid-19th
century, such as that revealed by Hilary Minns’ study of Derby’s poor schools and
their work with Irish immigrant children, seems to dispel such notions. Evidence
from the work of these schools, under the auspices of the Sisters of Mercy, appears
to unearth a mixture of techniques, including ‘alphabetical and synthesizing’
methods (Minns, 1997). Minns reports that the overall approach to teaching
reading was firmly child-centred and describes it as a catechetical method which
gave ‘. . . high priority to understanding the meaning of words and sentences’
through careful questioning (1997: 182). This practice points ahead to the 20th
century where phonics is seen to take a more supporting role, albeit essential,
within the whole reading process – rather than the exclusive role of the single
method approach. Moreover, close scrutiny of the history of pedagogical
perspectives and practices in the development of early reading shows that the
Sisters of Mercy in Derby were not alone in their meaning-emphasis approach.
In America historical accounts of teaching reading show that between 1890
and 1920 a phonic system, where children were ‘. . . started out immediately
with practice on sounds of isolated letters and family words’ was the favoured
method. Nila Smith, writing about this in the 1960s, described the approach as
an ‘elaborate synthetic system’, and by the mid-20th century approaches
resembling this method had become firmly established. One such example,
Rebecca Pollard’s ‘Synthetic method of reading and spelling’, which involved
successive recognition and sounding of letter after letter to build up words, was
widely used. In his extensive examination of specific systems for teaching
reading, the psychologist Edmund Burke Huey was critical of Pollard’s method;
in particular, he questioned her view that there should be ‘no guesswork, no
reference to pictures and no waiting for a story from the teacher to develop
children’s thinking’ (Diack, 1965: 50). Huey went on to influence significant
changes to practice in America with his advocacy of word methods.
Teaching reading in the first half of the

20th century: phonics reframed within newer
thinking on reading development
As advances in the understanding of the development of reading informed practice,

the early part of the 20th century saw a changing scene. Nila Smith’s (1963) review
of practice in America shows that between 1920 and 1935 the phonic method fell
out of favour as more emphasis was placed on silent reading to ‘. . . get the thought’
(Chall, 1967: 161), but between 1920 and 1935 phonic methods were revived.
The major shift, both in Britain and America, came with a move to the word, or
‘look-and-say’, method. This was promoted in America by Huey from 1908
onwards, and became well established in England during the 1940s through the
influence of Gestalt learning theory and its consequent impact on reading theory.
This resulted in treating whole words as basic learning units.
Chall reported on a period of relative consensus on methodology in America
from about 1930 and details a set of eight principles on which effective
pedagogy was founded from the 1930s to the 1960s. The statement on phonics
specified that ‘Drill or practice in phonics should be avoided; instead phonics
should be “integrated” with meaningful connected reading. In addition, the
child should not isolate sounds and blend them to form words. Instead he
should identify unknown words through a process of visual analysis and
substitution’ (Chall, 1967: 14). This desire for balance (similarly advanced in
the 1947 English pamphlet referred to at the beginning of the chapter)
resonates across the decades to the present day.
Teaching reading in the second half of the 20th

century: phonics, politics and positioning
Word methods continued to prevail until the mid-1950s, when the efficacy of
the approach was called into question. In England, disquiet was expressed
when a number of reading surveys highlighted that ‘failing’ readers lacked
phonic knowledge, which generated considerable concern about children who
were unable to read. In America the publication of Why Johnny Can’t Read
(Flesch, 1955), in the form of a letter from the mother of a child who had found
reading difficult, caused an unprecedented public debate. Flesch’s vehement
criticism of word methods caused a significant backlash for the approach and
brought calls for a return to phonics. Public unease was intensified when
America suffered the space-race humiliation of Russia launching the first
satellite in 1957, causing the Americans to look critically at their education
system. In the aftermath, Jeanne Chall’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate of
1967 explored reading pedagogy in detail and ultimately favoured phonic code
methods. Chall found great diversity in the range of phonics programmes but
concluded that they incorporated most of the conventional wisdom of the day
with one major departure – the issue of pacing. The authors of the separate
phonics programmes felt that phonics teaching through the basal readers was
‘. . . too little, too late’ (Chall, 1967: 23), and their own published programmes
reflected this with an earlier and more intensive emphasis on phonics.
In England, the impact of Flesch’s book was not insignificant, particularly
since public interest in developing a strong education system was acute in the
post-War period. The teaching of reading became increasingly politicized in
England and America and, with the growth of state education systems and
educational research, there came a wider and more rigorous debate. Although
the pendulum swung back to an emphasis on phonics, newer varieties of the
method appeared, such as the phonic–word method developed by Daniels and
Diack in the 1950s and reported by Southgate as ‘. . . an analytic approach to
phonics in contrast with the older synthetic approaches . . . beginning with

whole words which were contrasted with similar words and the differences
analysed (Southgate and Roberts, 1970: 41). But while teachers now had a wider
range of approaches to draw from, methodologies and teaching materials were
still predominately code-based.
The groundbreaking Bullock report (DES) of 1975 helped to establish
holistic, language experience approaches and encouraged the principle that
reading, writing, talking and listening should be treated as a unity; moreover,
the report stressed the vital role of the teacher (and the teacher’s thorough
understanding of the breadth of factors at work in the development of reading)
as the most critical ‘resource’ in the teaching of reading. The message on the
importance of a balanced ‘eclectic’ approach was accentuated and, as new
insights into reading development transpired from emergent literacy theory
(Holdaway, 1979; Hall, 1987), the period into the 1980s saw many practice shifts
into whole language techniques.
However, the 1980s also saw increasing polarization of practitioners through
their alignment with either a code or a meaning emphasis on the teaching of
early reading. This was most notable through the growth of the ‘real books’
approach (Waterland, 1985) where the emphasis on decoding artificially
constructed texts was challenged and real reading experiences, using real
books, was promoted. David Wray, writing in 1989, refers to the upholders of
‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ positions as actors in ‘The New Debate’, and
contrasts this with the issues in Chall’s ‘Great Debate’ – he draws the
distinction between the 1967 debate, which centred on the relative merits of
code versus code methods, and the 1980s debate, which centred on the relative
merits of meaning versus code methods in the teaching of reading.
Entrenchment of positions remained a feature of the practice scene until the
research on phonemic awareness and phonological processing (pioneered by
the work of Peter Bryant, Usha Goswami and Lynette Bradley in the early
1980s), began to impact on policy, practice and reading schemes in the late
1980s and early 1990s. This research, discussed elsewhere in this book, brought
about a watershed in the treatment of phonics, with the stress on teaching phonic
knowledge within the reading process. This reframing of phonics, described by
Nicholas Bielby in Making Sense of Reading (1994) as the ‘new phonics’, led to a
greater focus on phonological processing and widespread uptake of what has
been termed, in a catch-all way, ‘analytic phonics’. Bielby presses home the
distinctions between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ phonics and is emphatic that the
updated rationale for phonics teaching should not be confused with the ‘first
and fast’ approach associated with early rote drills.
From the late 1990s, as analytic phonics became widely practised and a
balanced approach was further endorsed within the National Literacy
Strategy’s Searchlights Model, a period of relative harmony ensued. This
period, however, was to be short-lived. The emergence of Johnston and Watson’s
research evidence from Clackmannanshire (SOEID, 1998) on the success of
children taught to read using synthetic phonics opened up a renewed focus on
how phonics was taught; the Clackmannanshire findings set in motion a chain
of events which included a national review of the teaching of phonics in
England and which culminated with the publication of the Rose Report (DfES,
2005a). This most recent chapter in the history of teaching phonics is well
documented elsewhere in this book, but suffice it to say here that there may
well appear to be echoes of earlier history resounding in 2006.
Teaching reading in the 21st century:

what now for phonics?
Looking at the history of the teaching of phonics brings about a distinct sense of
déjà vu, and the unhelpful phonics dichotomy could so easily lead to a state of
confusion for the class teacher whose prime objective is to support reading
development in the most effective way possible. The more contested issues – of
what form of phonics approach to use, how systematic it should be, when to start
it and how fast to pace it – run through the history as familiar leitmotivs. But at
the same time the history shows that, from as early as the 18th century, there
have been champions of reading for meaning and mixed-teaching methods.
The evidence on how the most effective teachers of literacy support reading
development (Medwell et al., 1998) yields important insights with regard to
teaching phonics, most notably that they place an emphasis on ‘. . . embedding
systematic attention to word and sentence level aspects of reading and writing
within whole text activities which are both meaningful and explained clearly to
pupils’ (1998: 31). Moreover, the effective teachers studied by Medwell and her
colleagues were found to have ‘. . . developed a variety of coherent theoretical
positions and were able to synthesize these into a working philosophy which
underpinned their teaching’ (1998: 66). The importance of this kind of informed
belief system has been pointed out many times (Diack, 1965; Southgate and
Roberts, 1970; Bullock in DES, 1975) and is reinforced most recently in the
United Kingdom Literacy Association Submission to the Review of Best Practice
in the Teaching of Early Reading where the ‘profound role’ of the teacher is once
again highlighted (UKLA, 2005).
The question Chall posed in the 1960s of ‘Why don’t we learn from the past?’
(1967: 93) still seems apposite today, and one that we must surely address if we
are to avoid phonics history repeating itself. The key recommendations in the
UKLA submission to the review of best practice suggest that we need neither
an allegiance to one or other phonics approach or new teaching materials but,
rather, we should enhance the quality of implementation of existing
programmes. It would be heartening to be able to report in years to come that
this had been harmoniously achieved, but given that the history shows an
outbreak of phonics panic every ten years or so (with uncanny proximity to the
mid-decade point), perhaps we should all watch this space in 2015!
‘Why don’t we learn from the past?’ (Chall, 1967: 93): discuss with
colleagues why the debates around phonics are still so fierce today.
What would help teachers to move forward and avoid yet more
polarization of thinking and practice?
‘What is right at one level of teaching reading may be insufficient at
another . . . and wrong at yet another. Furthermore, the question of
teaching reading is not a question of teaching either this way or that
way, but in most cases teaching both this way and that way’ (Jansen,
1985: 172): what are the implications of this in relation to the
teacher’s role in teaching phonics and in supporting children’s
reading development?
SOMETHING TO READ
Jeanne Chall reviewed and evaluated hundreds of research studies

on reading covering the period 1910 to 1965, and in addition visited
classrooms and interviewed teachers and textbook publishers.
Sifting the literature took Chall three years, writing up her
conclusions took a further two. Learning to Read: The Great Debate
(1967) is an important book available from most university libraries,
or summaries are easily found on the Internet. It is interesting to see
in what ways the debate remains the same and in what ways it has
changed since 1967.
SOMETHING TO DO
Collect examples of beginning reading books written in decodable

text, which use only words that display a direct phoneme-to-grapheme
correspondence. Compare them to beginning reading books that do
not have this characteristic. Consider the advantages/disadvantages
of each type of book for readers.
Ask children and adults who are confident, competent readers to
reflect on the support they received to use decoding strategies when
they were beginning readers. Can they remember, for example, what
worked for them or what struggles they encountered along the way?
Can these insights inform our practice?
Chapter 10
Responses to Rose: The Final

Report of the Independent Review
of the Teaching of Early Reading
In this chapter, educationalists with differing views on the best way to teach reading
give their response to the final report of the review into the teaching of reading,
undertaken by Jim Rose on behalf of the Department for Education (DfES,
2006). Although not statutory, this report will guide future policy on the teaching
of reading in England. Its recommendations are of considerable significance to
that country and may have a wider impact as a model for those in other countries
who wish to see more attention given to the teaching of phonics.
The Road to the Rose Review
The setting up of the Rose Review was the culmination of a campaign over
several years by pressure groups and individuals who believed that the multi-
strategy approach (including phonics) advocated by the National Literacy
Strategy/Primary National Strategy was ineffective. They believed that the
model of phonics teaching offered by the NLS was flawed. Some of these critics
argued that an explicit ‘synthetic phonics first and only’ approach would be
more successful in teaching children to read. The introduction to this book
gives a detailed outline of these debates. At the same time as some critics were
arguing for more phonics teaching, others argued for a return to a less structured
113
(or regimented, as they saw it) approach to literacy teaching with a greater emphasis
on reading for enjoyment and reading quality books.
In the years from 2000, many parliamentary questions relating to synthetic
phonics were asked, mainly by a small group of Conservative Party MPs (see
Hansard website), and newspapers printed articles asking why there was not
more phonics teaching in schools. In 2003, in response to what appeared to be
a concerted campaign in parliament and the media, and following the publication
of Teaching of Phonics in Primary Schools (Ofsted, 2001), the DfES held an
invitation seminar on phonics teaching. Advocates of a synthetic phonics ‘only
and early’ approach were represented at the seminar, as were authors of a range
of phonics programmes, phonics experts from the research community and
representatives of the NLS. The papers from this seminar are available online at
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/686807/
In response to this seminar, the National Literacy Strategy slightly amended its
advice on the pace and sequence for teaching phonics and produced new support
materials, Playing with Sounds (DfES, 2003a). It advocated both synthetic and
analytic phonics and re-emphasized the importance of regular, systematic
teaching of phonemic awareness skills and phonics from foundation stage
onwards. Nevertheless, debate on the best way to teach beginning readers
continued in the press and in parliament. In 2004, the House of Commons
Education and Skills Select Committee set up a parliamentary inquiry to
investigate ‘the methods used in schools to teach children to read’:
We took evidence from witnesses who argued that ‘phonics’ programmes should
have more prominence in the early teaching of reading (these programmes
concentrate on establishing an early understanding of sound–letter
correspondence). We took evidence from others who questioned the utility of
this approach, preferring to focus on the development of vocabulary and the
enrichment of linguistic experience, as well as from those who support the
current Government advice in the form of the Primary National Strategy. Many
of those who contacted us during this inquiry argued passionately for or against
these different methods. Our aim was to determine objectively which method
worked best, based on the available evidence, or, if the evidence was insufficient,
to recommend steps that should be taken in order to reach a conclusion. (House
of Commons Education and Skills Committee, 2005: para. 3)
After an inquiry lasting several months, the committee came to no definitive
conclusion but recommended that:
In view of the evidence from the Clackmannanshire study, as well as evidence
from other schools where synthetic phonics programmes have been
introduced, we recommend that the Government should undertake an
immediate review of the National Literacy Strategy. This should determine
whether the current prescriptions and recommendations are the best available
methodology for the teaching of reading in primary schools. . . We strongly
urge the DfES to commission a large-scale comparative study, comparing the
National Literacy Strategy with ‘phonics fast and first’ approaches. (House of
Commons Education and Skills Committee, 2005: para. 52)
Responses to Rose 115
As a result of these recommendations, in June 2005 the DfES appointed Jim

Rose (the former HMI, Director of Inspection at Ofsted) and a panel of
advisers, most of whom had a background in psychological research, to
‘examine current evidence about practices for teaching children to read to
ensure that the Strategy can continue to provide the most effective support for
assuring children’s progression in reading’ (DfES, 2005a).
The ‘Rose Review’, as it became known, was charged with examining five aspects:
1 What best practice should be expected in the teaching of early reading and
synthetic phonics.
2 How this relates to the development of the birth-to-five framework (now
known as the Early Years Foundation Stage) and the development and
renewal of the National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching.
3 What range of provision best supports children with significant literacy
difficulties and enables them to catch up with their peers, and the relationship
of such targeted intervention programmes with synthetic phonics teaching.
4 How leadership and management in schools can support the teaching of
reading, as well as practitioners’ subject knowledge.
5 The value for money or cost-effectiveness of the range of approaches the
review considers.
In giving the committee this remit, the DfES also made clear that as phonics was
‘already a central part of the approaches recommended by the Primary National
Strategy’, the issue for the review was ‘not whether to teach phonics, but how’
(DfES, 2005a).
Recommendations of the final report
The interim report was published in November 2005 and the final report was
published in March 2006. The final report recommends that:
In relation to aspect 1 (best practice in teaching phonics)
– Priority and clear guidance should be given to developing children’s
speaking and listening skills.
– High-quality, systematic phonic work as defined by the review should
be taught discretely as the prime approach in learning to decode (to
read) and encode (to write/spell) print.
– Phonic work should be set within a broad and rich language curriculum.
– The Primary National Strategy should continue to exemplify the kind
of teaching all children should experience (quality-first teaching).
In relation to aspect 2 (early years, foundation stage and renewal of the
NLS framework)
– For most children, high-quality, systematic phonic work should start by
the age of five. This should be multi-sensory.
– The Searchlight model of reading should be reconstructed.

– The early years, foundation stage and the renewed literacy framework
must be compatible with each other and give guidance on continuity
and progression in phonic work.
In relation to aspect 3 (supporting children with significant literacy

difficulties)
– High-quality phonic work should be a priority within normal classroom
teaching.
– Additional support should be compatible with mainstream practice.
– Interventions should be matched to the different types of special
educational needs.
In relation to aspect 4 (leadership and management and practitioners’

subject knowledge and skills)
– Leaders should make sure that phonic work is given appropriate priority
in the teaching of beginner readers.
– At least one member of staff should be fully able to lead on literacy,
especially phonic work.
– Leaders should monitor the quality and consistency of phonic work and
give staff feedback.
The report also recommends a series of additional training and professional

development opportunities to increase teacher, trainee and teaching assistant
knowledge about early reading, particularly phonics (aspect 5).
Practioners, teacher associations and literacy associations have welcomed
some of these recommendations. Others are more controversial. This range of
reactions is reflected in the response pieces that follow.
A Rose is a Rows: a Celebration of the Importance

of Accurate Word Reading to Ensure Understanding
of Texts
Rhona Stainthorp
‘What do you think of the Rose Review, . . . in 500 words, . . . by the end of the
month?’ said the e-mail. Since we’re talking here of the Independent Review of
the Teaching of Early Reading (DfES, 2006a), it is clear that, indeed, a rose by any
other name would smell as sweet: this report will always be known as the Rose
Review. Any other independent chairperson and there may have been no pleasing
alliteration. No shared initial phonemes and, as we all know, awareness of
phonemes really is useful for mapping letter–sound correspondences. And
mapping letter–sound correspondences is essential for achieving the alphabetic
principle, thus paving the way for accurate word reading. Under different
guidance we might not have had such a wise and thoughtful report. And, as in
so many other areas, Shakespeare got there first:
Servant: . . . but, I pray, can you read anything you see?

Romeo: Ay, if I know the letters and the language.
Romeo and Juliet: Act 1, Scene II
It took Gough and Tumner (1986) another 400 years or so to come up with the
‘simple view of reading’. But better late than never.
There are many positive aspects of the Review, but I want to focus on the
decision to steer the teaching of reading away from its predication on the
‘searchlights model’ towards a recognition that reading is the product of
accurate word reading and language comprehension. As is made explicit in the
appendix to the review, there is clear empirical evidence that skilled readers
are accurate, fast, effortless word readers but poor readers are slow, laborious
and often inaccurate. Beginner readers also find word reading challenging.
However, if they are taught the letter–sound correspondences and how to blend
sounds into words, they are armed with a strategy for reading words
independently. No one argues that this will produce 100 per cent accuracy in
English as would be the case in a transparent orthography like Turkish.
However, if children have this knowledge they have a necessary tool for
developing fluent word reading. The searchlights analogy was a distraction
because it proposed that the four searchlights were equally useful and
interchangeable. The Review has accepted that this is not the case. In
acknowledging the ‘simple view of reading’ as a more accurate account, the
importance of language comprehension for reading has also been highlighted.
Quite rightly, the report recognizes that there are teacher education
implications if the recommendations for teaching early reading are to feed
forward to better school achievement. Initial teacher education will have to
move from ‘this is what to do and how to do it’ towards ‘this is why you should
do it and here is the literature with the empirical evidence to back this up’. This
throws the ball squarely into the universities’ court to guide students through
the research evidence.
The review is not a nice knock-down argument, but it is a knockout. It’s a
genuinely thoughtful, measured document that deserves to be read in full. It
should form the basis of university seminars and school inservice sessions on
the teaching of reading.
And don’t forget to read the appendix – ‘there’s glory for you’. Well, she
would say that, wouldn’t she!
Editors’ note: Rhona Stainthorp was one of the authors of the appendix to the
Rose Review.
Getting Phonics into Perspective
Jennifer Chew, on Behalf of the Reading

Reform Foundation
The Reading Reform Foundation (RRF) welcomes the Rose Review, which
deals clearly and fairly with important issues.
The searchlights model
Most important of all is the way that it deals with the ‘searchlights’ model which
was at the heart of the original National Literacy Strategy (NLS) Framework for
Teaching (DfEE, 1998a). This model, based on views which had been strongly
held in Britain since at least the early 1980s, proposed that children should, from
the very beginning of learning to read, identify printed words by using not only
grapheme-phoneme knowledge but also grammatical knowledge, contextual
knowledge and the recognition of whole words. As the Rose Review says,
however, ‘a model of reading which encourages switching between various
searchlight strategies, particularly when phonic work is regarded as only one
such strategy, all of equal worth, risks paying insufficient attention to the critical
skills of word recognition which must first be secured by beginner readers’
(DfES, 2006: para. 116). A similar comment from an Ofsted report is quoted in
para. 118. The RRF has always opposed the searchlights model and welcomes the
scholarly account of the real relationship between ‘word recognition’ and
‘language comprehension’ which is given in Appendix 1 of the Rose Review.
Blending
The Rose Review notes that ‘nearly half the schools visited did not give enough
time to teaching children the crucial skill of blending (synthesizing) sounds
together’ (DfES, 2006: para. 232). This is probably a consequence of the

searchlights model: blending is an important part of phonic decoding, but the
need to teach it is obscured when other ways of identifying words are seen as
being as valid as phonic decoding. Synthetic phonics, which the RRF has
always supported, teaches beginners to use phonic decoding as their only means
of identifying words in reading, and therefore teaches them not only how to
produce sounds for graphemes from left to right all through each word, but also
how to blend these sounds together. It should be easier for teachers to
understand the need for this once they have understood the Rose Review’s
criticism of the searchlights model, and once they realize that Rose is also right
to say that learning to decode phonically can be rewarding and stimulating for
beginners. This approach also allows the reversibility of reading and spelling to
be stressed much more than is possible with a multiple-cueing approach to
reading. Related to this is the matter of decodable texts: the Rose Review does
not come down firmly in favour of these, but it allows that there may be a place
for them (they can enable children to benefit from ‘quick wins’ and gain
confidence – 2006: para. 82) and it makes the point that decodable books of good
quality are now available. Allowing children to practise on these books does not
preclude the reading aloud of more advanced books by teachers.
Research and common sense
Where directly applicable research findings were felt to be inconclusive, the Rose
team decided that observation based on common sense was a reasonable guide.
The RRF agrees, and would point out that research findings might have been
more conclusive if more rigorous studies had been carried out by government
departments and/or by others who have argued against a pure synthetic phonics
approach for beginners. The NLS, which we have had since 1998, has itself not
been based on rigorous research, as is clear from Appendix 1 of the Rose Review.
While the research cited in this Appendix may not provide clear evidence that
synthetic phonics is better than analytic phonics, it does provide justification for
the abandoning of the searchlights model. From this point of view, the way
forward that the Rose Review proposes is more research-based than the multiple-
cueing approach, which has been officially sanctioned since 1998 and which was
widely promoted in Britain for many years before that.
Conclusion
The RRF believes that the Rose Review provides the rationale for an approach
to literacy teaching which is not only scientifically sound but also lively and
stimulating for children. This approach, if properly implemented, should raise

reading and spelling standards significantly and quickly.
Keeping Phonics in Perspective
John Stannard
The Rose Review presents a sensible appraisal of the teaching of early reading. It
reiterates advice the NLS has been giving since 1998, reinforced with evidence
from more recent research. He doesn’t much like the ‘searchlights’ and wants it
replaced with Morag Stuart’s and Rhona Stainthorp’s ‘dual-route’ model (see
Appendix 1, The Rose Review). They posit a ‘simple’ account of reading in which
word recognition and comprehension are distinct but parallel components,
dimensions or processes which, they argue, must exist separately because they can be
more or less separately described. The model is used to imply that the reading
curriculum should consist of two parallel but distinct streams designed to develop
these allegedly distinct psychological processes. Although the model is heavy with
presupposition, Rose’s conclusions still make a lot of sense. On the one hand he
wants to see early, focused and fast teaching of phonics, or to paraphrase:
At Key Stage 1, there should be a strong and systematic emphasis on the
teaching of phonics . . . pupils should be taught to:
• discriminate between the separate sounds in words;
• learn the letters and letter combinations most commonly used to spell
those sounds;
• read words by sounding out and blending their separate parts;
• write words by combining the spelling patterns of their sounds. (DfEE,
1998a: 4)
But this description is taken not from the Review but from the introductory text
in the NLS Framework for Teaching explaining the diagram of the searchlights
metaphor.
In parallel, Rose argues that there should be a rich experience of books and
reading and a renewed emphasis on speaking and listening, to develop positive
attitudes, vocabulary and communication skills. Route 1 sounds like Progression in
Phonics (DfEE, 1999a) or Jolly Phonics (Lloyd and Jolly, 1995) plus carefully levelled
texts, while route 2 is more like shared reading and story telling. In time these two
‘routes’ should fuse into one, though it is not entirely clear how this is supposed to
occur.
The searchlights metaphor does not make this hard-and-fast distinction, but
applies different emphases at different stages of reading. In the early stages,
children should use phonics as a first strategy for decoding. If they cannot decode
a word phonically, they should use other knowledge to help work it out, then check
it back; if they decode a word but don’t understand it, they should try to derive its
meaning from the text and, if the text is predictable, they should use its
momentum to accelerate the decoding of words. Critics don’t much like this
because they think it confuses children.* But this is opinion, not fact. While we
know that phonics improves decoding, there is no evidence that, where children
are taught phonics systematically, using other strategies to make sense of texts
confuses them. On the contrary, it is how most successful readers learn. Far from
‘guessing’ at words, as it is sometimes pejoratively described, they learn to predict,
make sense, create connections, self-correct and build autonomy. This strengthens
rather than diminishes the importance of phonics as the first line of attack on
words, and underlines the value of teaching it early, systematically and rapidly.
We should get this into perspective. For teachers, nothing much hangs on
which metaphor or model is preferred, provided we are clear about what
strategies work in practice, and allow reasonable latitude for teachers to
differentiate and apply them wisely. Rose has set this out pretty well, bearing in
mind the sensitivities of the various lobbies, and aligned his advice carefully
with the NLS. The much-vaunted Clackmannanshire study (Johnston and
Watson, 2005), if it shows anything, shows that good phonics teaching delivers
reading accuracy and fluency but has little impact on comprehension.
In 2005, 84 per cent of year 6 children in England achieved level 4 in national
tests for reading and more than 90 per cent achieved level 3. These scores could
go down. Getting more children to level 4 (the expected level for 11-year-olds)
means improving the performance of level 3s, who already ‘. . . read a range of
texts fluently and accurately [and] read independently, using strategies
appropriately to establish meaning’ (English National Curriculum Statutory
Order, Level 3 description, DfES and QCA, 2000). Improvement depends more
on teaching comprehension and even more on the effective teaching of writing.
Sadly, neither of these was within Jim Rose’s remit, and I doubt that mandating
phonics in the National Curriculum or investing money in training teachers on
the Stuart and Stainthorp model will make the necessary difference.
Editors’ note: John Stannard, CBE, designed and directed the National
Literacy Strategy from 1998 to 2003.
An Instructional Perspective on the Rose Review
Jonathan Solity
There are three issues that any approach to teaching literacy has to address.
The first concerns the standards of lower-achieving pupils. It is generally
*See, for example, Teaching Children to Read (Education and Skills Committee, 2005), Report of the
House of Commons Select Committee 21 March 2005, pp.13–14, where the Reading Reform Foundation
and Ruth Miskin characterize it as ‘contradictory’, ‘impossible’, and a recipe for reinforcing failure.
recognized that approximately 20–25 per cent of pupils fail to reach acceptable
levels at end of key stage 2, and that the majority of these children are from
low-income families. This is a worrying state of affairs given the vast number of
initiatives that successive governments have introduced to raise standards over
the last 25 years.
The second issue concerns children’s attitudes to reading. The evidence
indicates that children in England are less positive about, and enjoy reading
less, than their peers in comparable countries (Bell, 2005; PIRLS, 2001; Ofsted,
2004). The third issue concerns the extent to which progress has been made in
implementing genuinely inclusive practices into schools. The NLS, through its
three-wave model, effectively ensures that failing readers are excluded from
mainstream classrooms and are withdrawn for additional one-to-one or small
group help teaching.
The Rose Review skilfully addresses a range of issues and provides a starting
point for addressing the above areas. Most notably it draws on research, where
possible, to inform the advice offered. The Review is highly critical of the
searchlights model; it was based on the flawed instructional premise that
determining how to teach was best achieved through an analysis of experienced
readers rather than a logical analysis of the skills required by beginning readers.
Its withdrawal, given the dogma and vigour with which it was introduced, is the
educational equivalent of Tony Blair acknowledging that there were never any
weapons of mass destruction. The alternative framework focuses on decoding
and comprehension. Carnine et al. (1997) provide a detailed analysis of their
respective roles in teaching reading.
Rose recognizes the value of synthetic phonics, but notes the considerable
differences between advocates of the approach. These are most obvious in
relation to ‘how much’ phonics to teach and the role of reading schemes and
real books. Gontijo et al. (2003) analysed 160,595 different words and found
that they can be represented by 195 graphemes and 461 grapheme–phoneme
associations. Solity and Vousden (2006) have shown that teaching as few as 60
grapheme–phoneme correspondences enable children to read the majority
of monosyllabic words that they will encounter. Teaching multiple mappings
(where one phoneme represents more than one grapheme or one grapheme
represents more than one phoneme), as recommended by the NLS and certain
phonics programmes, is of little value as the majority occur rarely and potentially
confuse children as there is no logical basis for selecting one representation
rather than another.
It is assumed that phonic skills are best taught in conjunction with reading
schemes rather than real books. However, their limitations, particularly for low-
achieving pupils, have been well documented. These children rarely become
‘free readers’ and so quickly lose interest and motivation. Furthermore, recent
research has demonstrated that the structure of real books and reading schemes
is similar and the claimed advantages of reading schemes are questionable
(Solity and Vousden, 2006). Rose recognizes the potential value of real books
when noting that they can fulfil ‘much the same function’ as decodable books
(DfES, 2006: para. 84).
There are few issues raised by the Rose Review which were not also covered in
the Bullock Report (DES, 1975). It is staggering that so little progress appears to
have been made in over 30 years. Will the Review be seen to signal another swing
in the pendulum back towards teaching phonics, or represent a substantial and
enduring shift in practice? Potentially, the status of the Review will be judged on
whether the outcomes for the lowest 25 per cent change in the future.
Recent research (Shapiro and Solity, 2006; Solity and Shapiro, 2006) suggests
that two critical changes need to occur in practice. The first is that, contrary to
conventional wisdom, lower-achieving pupils are best taught through a
combination of real books and a small, optimal number of core phonic and
sight vocabulary skills. Second, they should be taught through differentiated,
whole class teaching, which meets a diverse range of needs.
The Review is informed by research. It would be a fitting tribute and legacy
if outstanding questions and concerns were also examined through appropriate
mainstream, classroom-based experimental investigations, delivered by teachers
rather than researchers, so that future decisions about what to teach are research,
rather than rhetoric, based.
Synthetic Arguments
Michael Rosen
The announcement that the government is going to force schools to teach

children to read using synthetic phonics is a sledge-hammering political
intervention into a matter that needs flexibility, subtlety and humanity. My own
view is that the decision can be explained quite simply according to the David
Blunkett formula of policy-making: if the Right says it’s good, we’ll go for it too.
The conclusions drawn from the research that claims to prove the
effectiveness of synthetic phonics (Johnston and Watson, 2005) cannot be
sustained. They commit the cardinal sin of all conclusions from experiments:
they fail to compare like with like. That is to say, the conditions under which
the children were taught using synthetic phonics were not held constant and
identical with the conditions of children learning how to read by other
methods. As Susan Ellis (University of Strathclyde) has shown, there is a lot of
variability between the schools in question, many of which were assisted and
resourced (very well) by a number of other programmes running simultaneously
and in support of the synthetic phonics programme (Ellis, 2005). Before
drawing conclusions from a piece of research, the question that has to be asked
is: Can it be replicated? And we have a definitive answer: We don’t know. In
other words, government policy has been made on the evidence of an

experiment from which certain conclusions cannot be made and the
experiment has not been through trials. If it was a drug that was about to be
unleashed on children with this kind of research, there would be an injunction to
stop it being used.
Meanwhile, there’s one thing we know for certain about learning how to read:
we do not know exactly how it is that each and every single child does it. What’s
more, even when we think we know, it’s quite possible that we don’t. I’ll explain
that: it is simply not possible to summate every single relevant language
experience that a child has which may lead that child to be able to read. For
example, crucial breakthroughs in cracking the problem might be achieved by
a child reading crisp packets, playing on her older sibling’s computer, reading
advertisements, learning stories off by heart and finding them in books, writing
thank you letters for birthday presents and so on.
The excitement about phonics can be traced to its apparent simplicity. Many
people imagine that our spelling is an organized system for indicating sounds
and, vice versa, that the sounds we make with our mouths are represented
systematically by letters. Neither of these two propositions is true. Using the
famous c-a-t case: the letter ‘c’ can make a variety of sounds and vice versa, the
hard ‘c’ sound can be spelled in at least two other ways (‘k’ and ‘ck’); the ‘a’
sound in the middle of ‘cat’ is, yes, always made with ‘a’ but the letter itself
is used to make a variety of sounds; the ‘t’ at the end of ‘cat’ is nearly always
pronounced differently when it begins a word, in some words it’s silent (‘castle’),
while the sound at the end of ‘cat’ is often made by, for example, the ‘-ed’ ending
on some verbs.
The way all phonic systems work is by pretending that the letters (or
combinations of letters) regularly make one sound. Then, based on that
simplified system, you present the child with those words that conform. If this
is the dominant method being used (which is what the government is
demanding), then in a stroke you deprive children of two things:
a set of strategies with which to manage the vast amount of reading that
doesn’t fit the simplified system; and
a good deal of time spent proving that reading is a worthwhile and
interesting thing to do.
Virtually every initiative taken by this government has made classrooms places
that are less and less likely to spend time providing this. Children are human
beings, with drives, culture, habits and feelings. Books deal with these human
characteristics. Learning how to say a set of words that fit the phonics bill pays
no attention to them. Those children who have already been convinced that
reading a whole book will be a great thing to do (probably by their parents reading
to them) will have little or no problem making the leap from phonics to real
books and staying with them. For the millions of others who aren’t convinced
that reading is interesting or cool, no matter how good they are with their
phonics, it’s not clear why or how they will want to stick with it.
Rose-tinted Spectacles: Synthetic Phonics, Research

Evidence and the Teaching of Reading
Dominic Wyse
After the media attention given to the interim Rose report, the release of the
final report was something of a quiet affair. But it shouldn’t have been. The
Rose Review represents one of the most controversial documents on the teaching
of reading in England ever to be released. For example, it is the first official
publication to recommend the real book approach!
There is no doubt, too, that the simple text in some recognized favourite
children’s books can fulfil much the same function as that of decodable
books. Thus it may be possible to use these texts in parallel, or in place of
them. (DfES, 2006: 27, my italics)
Well, if not whole-hearted advocacy of the real book approach, it does offer
minimal recognition of the significance of children’s literature, at least for
supporting decoding.
This, of course, isn’t the most controversial aspect at all; it is the lack of
attention paid to the wealth of research evidence on the teaching of reading.
Rose concluded that:
Having considered a wide range of evidence, the review has concluded that
the case for systematic phonic work is overwhelming and much strengthened
by a synthetic approach. (DfES, 2006: 20)
The research evidence is quite clear on the question of whether synthetic

phonics is better than other phonics approaches. The Department for
Education and Skills-funded research review, which was completed during the
time of the Rose enquiry and which included one of the advisers to the Rose
enquiry, concluded that ‘There is currently no strong RCT evidence that any
one form of systematic phonics is more effective than any other’ (Torgerson
et al., 2006: 49). This was in line with the influential American National
Reading Panel, which said that ‘specific systematic phonics programs are all
significantly more effective than non-phonics programs; however, they do not
appear to differ significantly from each other in their effectiveness’ (National
Reading Panel, 93).
As I reported in Wyse (2000), the research does show evidence that children’s
word reading can be enhanced by systematic phonics teaching contextualized
within a rich literate environment particularly for children aged between five
and seven. Twenty out of the 43 studies covered by the NRP and the Torgerson
review were carried out with children aged six to seven. Only nine studies were
carried out with 5 to 6-year-olds. No studies were carried out with 4-year-olds
or younger. It is also important to note that these phonics instruction studies
showed gains for whole-language philosophies such as oral reading of stories
and discussion; language-based reading activities; language development training;
a focus on comprehension; and embedded (or contextualized) teaching of
phonics. The idea that children younger than five will benefit from the kind
of synthetic phonics programme advocated by some contributors to the Rose
Review is not supported by research evidence, and is one of its most worrying
recommendations.
It is extraordinary that a report on a subject of such importance fails to
exploit fully the research evidence because of alleged ‘uncertainties’. Instead,
claims are made on the basis of inspection evidence and the ambiguous notion
of ‘leading-edge practice’. Rose claims that:
Despite the content of phonic work being a statutory component of the

National Curriculum over that time [1989 to 1998], HMI reports show that
it was often a neglected or weak feature of the teaching. (DfES, 2006: 12)
Even this use of inspection evidence is not sufficiently balanced. In 1990, the
HMI report (Ofsted, 1995) observed that in the teaching of reading in England
‘phonic skills were taught almost universally and usually to beneficial effect’
(1995: 2) and that ‘Successful teachers of reading and the majority of schools
used a mix of methods each reinforcing the other as the children’s reading
developed’ (1995: 15). During 1993–94, inspection evidence found that ‘In most
schools pupils acquire satisfactory phonics skills and a range of strategies for
understanding printed texts’ (1995: 6). This picture accorded with research
which found regular and judicial use of phonics teaching as part of a balanced
approach to be the norm (Cato et al., 1992).
The main piece of research used by the Rose Review is the Clackmannanshire
study (Johnston and Watson, 2005). Resigned to the fact that the study ‘received
some criticism by researchers’, its use is defended by a focus on the classroom
practice that was featured. In that case, why use this study and not one of the
hundreds of other studies about reading teaching? Or, why not look at other
kinds of reading pedagogy that have been successful, including whole-language
teaching?
The Rose Review remit would have been more useful if it had required an
examination of the NLS as a whole, including addressing the question of
whether it should be replaced with something better. As far as phonics is
concerned, there is an urgent need for another round of the ‘reading wars’ to ensure
that any revisions to the NLS represent a truly evidence-informed picture. The
danger of a renewed emphasis on synthetic phonics is that other equally

important practices may not receive the full attention that they deserve.
Poor Mr Rose!
David Wray
You have to feel a bit sorry for Jim Rose. He has been involved in primary
education at the very highest level for many years, as a senior HMI he has
guided policy and practice, and as a member of the ‘Three Wise Men’ he had an
enormous impact upon the nature of primary teaching in this country. Yet, as
his career draws to its close, what is it that he will be most remembered for by
primary teachers? I fear it will be as the man who said that young children were
not allowed to read books until they had mastered their 44 phonemes. ‘Phonics
first and fast’ may well be his lasting epitaph!
All of which is a bit unfair really. Especially as that is not quite what he
actually says in his final report. On page 3, for example, Mr Rose states, ‘the
introduction of phonic work should always be a matter for principled,
professional judgement based on structured observations and assessments of
children’s capabilities’ (DfES, 2006). There is probably not a single teacher,
commentator or parent who would disagree with this claim. Yet the result of
this report will be to supplant such ‘principled, professional judgement’ with
the requirements of ‘the programme’ of teaching phonics. Mr Rose himself lays
great stress on ‘fidelity to the programme’, which seems to mean that a teaching
programme should be followed to its bitter end even if it is manifestly not
working for individuals or groups of children.
Again, on page 16, Mr Rose claims that ‘It is widely agreed that phonic work is
an essential part, but not the whole picture, of what it takes to become a fluent
reader and skilled writer, well capable of comprehending and composing text’
(DfES, 2006). It is a shame, then, that his report is being claimed as thorough
vindication of the position of those extremists who claim that phonics work is the
whole picture for beginning readers. One such person, the writer of a commercial
teaching programme focused on phonics, even claims that her programme ‘is
intended to replace the National Literacy Strategy for those children who are in
the early stages of learning to read (at or below NC level 2b)’ (Miskin, 2004: 4).
The children encompassed by this definition include the majority of children at
key stage 1. So ‘the whole picture’ for these children will therefore be phonics
work, not the more rounded and balanced programme which the NLS currently
suggests, and which Mr Rose’s claim seems to support.
So, what is going on here? The cynical interpretation is that, however
balanced and ‘wise’ a report Jim Rose has written, the damage has already
been done. Government ministers, and Rose himself, try to dress the report’s
recommendations as based on a consensus derived from research. This is

actually nonsense (although establishing that would take much more space
than I currently have available). What has actually happened is that pressure
groups with axes to grind (and, usually, teaching programmes to sell) have
caught the ear of politicians and the Rose Review was never going to be a
balanced interpretation of the evidence. So, whatever the ‘wise’ statements that
Mr Rose makes, his report will be remembered for the imposition on our children
of a uni-dimensional approach to the teaching of a multi-dimensional process.
And when this fails, as it inevitably will, Mr Rose will bear a large share of the
blame.
Poor Mr Rose!
Chapter 11
Using this Book for Staff

Development
Sue Ellis and Maureen Lewis
Effective staff development is always going to be complicated. Education is a

complex matter and literacy education particularly so. An effective reading
curriculum impacts widely on children’s experience of, and success at, school.
It is important that schools and teachers get the reading curriculum right and
that staff development effects real change in classrooms and in teaching.
The research on rolling-out school reforms shows that getting the reading
curriculum right in schools is not a simple matter of choosing a successful
teaching programme, distributing the resources and asking teachers to get on
with it. Even with vigilant monitoring, programmes and resources that are
highly successful in one context may not be successful in others. This is not
because they are good or bad per se, but because the way that a programme is
introduced, managed and used within the school is as crucial to its success as
the content and design of the programme itself (Coburn, 2003).
Achieving successful change
Various factors influence the success of a new programme. Blackmore argues

that when standardized programmes are imposed in ways that ignore the local
context, it creates a ‘culture of compliance’ in which the only thing teachers
want to know about a new initiative is ‘how to do it as painlessly as possible’
(1998: 472). The absence of genuine intellectual engagement means that staff
understanding of the content and design is often superficial and lacks the
grounding essential for effective and responsive teaching. Moreover, superficially
129
committed teachers are slower to identify and solve problems as they arise. This
further impacts on the programme’s success.
When changes to literacy policy are initiated by central government and
monitored by external inspections, it would be easy to see schools and teachers
as passive victims of circumstance. But the context for implementation is
created by the practical things that real people do (Datnow et al., 2002).
Teachers, classroom assistants, literacy co-ordinators, head teachers and school
governors create and control the experiences, structures and culture within
their school. They create the local context of implementation and thus
determine the impact any new phonics programme or resource will have.
Ownership and empowerment
A key factor in successful change is the extent to which school staff understand
and buy-in to the new ideas. Staff buy-in will increase if a new phonics
initiative is clearly located within the school’s wider literacy curriculum and if
they can see how it contributes to the long-term strategic plan to raise
attainment and benefit the children (Ofsted, 2004).
Success is also more likely when teachers feel empowered, and central to this
is respect for the knowledge and experience they bring. ‘Uniform change’ and
‘effective change’ may not be the same thing. Co-ordinators and head teachers
who see their role as policemen protecting the fidelity of a bought-in phonics
programme are likely to be less successful than those who see their role as
hands-on facilitators whose aim is to help staff integrate the programme into
their teaching and work out how to use it most effectively to meet the needs of
the children. Reform models with such flexibility are also more sustainable.
Effective facilitators will introduce and implement staff development on
phonics in ways that deepen professional understandings and support changes
in pedagogy. At the same time, they will encourage teachers to mould the
initiative to ensure that it fits well with the school’s wider literacy strategy and
with pupils’ learning.
Good leaders are able to keep people going, remind them of their successes
and keep them focused. Although they have a vision of how they would like
things to be, they are not totally blinded by it; they listen to what others say.
When school reforms fail, the head teacher is often seen as supporting the
reform from a distance rather than directly leading it (Datnow et al., 2002). In
highly effective schools, head teachers are seen as the instructional leaders,
with a clear understanding of how reading is taught, assessed and monitored
(Ofsted, 2004).
The first point when considering the school’s policy and practice on phonics
teaching, is for all staff, including the senior management team, to think about
the issue from different angles:
Using this Book for Staff Development 131
The children’s learning: Do the children find the content of the phonics
programme intellectually interesting, and do they have sufficient
opportunities to practise and apply their new knowledge and skills?
The children’s achievements: Does the existing phonics programme achieve
good results for the children, in line with, or better than, other schools
with similar intakes?
The wider literacy curriculum: New initiatives often have a ‘ripple effect’ on
other teaching and may distort the wider aims of the curriculum. It is
important to ensure a balanced, coherent experience for children. The
bottom line is that the phonics programme should contribute to a
successful, engaging and emotionally satisfying literacy curriculum, not
become an end in itself.
The staff’s capacity to deliver: Different beliefs about literacy, different
understandings of phonics and different experiences of teaching the
literacy curriculum all affect how a new initiative will be interpreted and
implemented. Staff may need to consider their own content knowledge as
well as the content and sequence, pace and variety of their phonics
teaching and how they nudge and support children to apply and use their
phonic knowledge in new situations.
Encouraging teachers and classroom assistants to describe what they do, how they
do it and the next steps they might take develops content knowledge and ensures
ownership of the curriculum. Analytical discussion of specific children and of
how to move their learning forward, deepens content knowledge and broadens
pedagogical understanding. Working from specific examples enables educators to
link theory and practice within a particular context. Research shows that whole
staff identification of issues, followed by agreed action to address the issues and
sharing the outcomes, is a powerful form of professional development (EPPI,
2003). Whole staff discussion is a vital first step in this process.
Staff development
Deepening knowledge and skills is central to any professional development.

Teachers obviously need subject knowledge about phonics and a strong repertoire
of teaching activities to ensure that children develop and use their phonic
knowledge. They also need to be ‘noticing teachers’, who are sufficiently flexible
and analytical to spot children who are not being challenged or who are
struggling, and be confident enough to do something about them.
Ofsted (2002) notes that schools are beginning to adopt a wider and more
comprehensive view of professional development. The most effective developments
are likely to be embedded in the curriculum and in teachers’ concerns. They allow
‘cooking time’ for new ideas, space for teachers to experiment and practise, and
they allow opportunities to analyse children’s learning with others.
There does, however, need to be a clear focus and drive. Boyle et al. (2005)
note that the most common staff development activities in England were
observation of colleagues and sharing practice, but ‘coaching’ and ‘research
inquiry’ were reported as having most impact. Study groups involving regular,
sustained and collaborative work on topics chosen by the group as well as
coaching or mentoring arrangements, where teachers work with an equally or more
experienced colleague, have both proved successful.
How this book can help
If teachers are to feel empowered rather than undermined by change in the

literacy curriculum, they need some input into the development agenda. But
discussion must be informed by an up-to-date knowledge of research and best
practice if it is not to become a cosy confirmation of prior beliefs. Chapters of
this book can be used as study guides to prompt and guide the group
discussions that will help the whole school progress towards confident and
coherent change.
One strategy is for groups of staff to design their own study and discussion
sequence, perhaps around the issues detailed below.
Locate phonics within the wider

literacy curriculum
For years, the subject of phonics has polarized professional debate. Teachers are
likely to have different and compelling opinions about how much phonics should
be taught, when, and how quickly, as well as different understandings of
successful teaching activities for phonics and of how phonic knowledge can be
useful to developing readers and writers.
These professional differences need to be acknowledged in a way that
locates them within a complex conversation about teaching reading rather
than as simplistic polarized debating positions. Some teachers may fear that a
renewed focus on phonics will lead to an over-emphasis on the mechanics of
reading and a lack of attention to aspects such as reading engagement and
comprehension. Others may be keen to explore whether a stronger and more
structured emphasis on phonics could supplement the current literacy
programme and further empower children as readers and writers. A third
group may welcome a strong phonics programme because it appears to offer a
more linear, prescribed and ‘certain’ curriculum. They may interpret a focus
on phonics as giving them ‘permission’ to omit aspects that they currently find
difficult and complex.
Discussion of Chapters 1 and 2 can help to raise these issues in a non-
confrontational way. As they discuss which ideas are new to them, which they
agree with and which they do not, staff will be articulating:
Using this Book for Staff Development 133
their own values, beliefs and assumptions about reading and learning to read;
what they believe to be important and effective about their own practice; and
their observations of children and of possible benefits that could result
from a review of phonics teaching in the school.
It goes without saying that discussion needs to be collegiate and reflective,
rather than argumentative and confrontational. Explicit acknowledgement that
the ultimate aim of the reading curriculum is to help children make sense of
and respond to text may be important, along with detailed discussions of how
any changes in teaching phonics might contribute to this.
Find an authentic starting point: target staff

knowledge and skills
Successful development initiatives either have good buy-in from staff at the
start or they establish it quickly. It is important that teachers quickly identify
specific benefits for their own knowledge and understanding and for the
curriculum, the children and the school.
Studies show that there is considerable variability in how phonics
programmes are delivered. This means that teachers will undoubtedly realize
different benefits from a review of phonics teaching. In England, Ofsted (2004)
reports that the best phonics teaching is systematic and that teaching sessions
are frequent, short and brisk. Effective teachers are well-informed, build on
what pupils already know and develop their confidence. Ineffective phonics
teaching is often too slow and not systematic. Low teacher expectations and
poor teacher content knowledge lead to confused and boring lessons.
Two chapters will raise these issues for discussion. Chapter 4, in which three
teachers present different accounts of effective phonics teaching, will help
teachers to identify and discuss aspects of their own practice and can provide a
springboard for raising issues about coherence and change.
Staff may use the information in Chapter 3 to deepen their own content
knowledge. They will need time to discuss the content, identify implications for
their own practice, experiment with changes and monitor the effects. The issues
arising from this may provide a good basis for peer coaching sessions. In terms
of policy, the chapter may deepen understanding of:
the sequence of sounds covered;
how systematically sounds are covered;
how quickly sounds are covered;
the pace of teaching and the range of teaching activities used; and
how and when the children use phonics in reading and spelling.
Consider the learners

Any focus on teaching needs to be balanced by a consideration of learning.
Good teachers notice when children appear not to understand phonics, but
often don’t know what to do about this. Chapter 6 explains the articulatory
basis of speech and how to identify children who may need additional help or a
different kind of help with phonic work.
Make links to writing and spelling and understand

the limitations of phonics
Successful readers and writers have a high level of self-efficacy; they believe in their
abilities and will ‘have a go’ at applying their knowledge and skills in new contexts.
They are not deterred by the thought of making mistakes and tend to see problems
as things to resolve only when and if they arise. Young children’s self-efficacy is often
tightly localized to particular tasks. Teachers need to promote self-efficacy and
confidence by encouraging children to use their phonic knowledge for both reading
and writing. When this happens, the children use their phonic knowledge more
frequently and the additional practice feeds an upward spiral of attainment in which
the practice consolidates the learning, makes skills more automatic and further
develops confidence. Chapter 7 provides the content knowledge and background to
help teachers do this effectively in relation to spelling. Chapter 8 explains the
limitations of this within a language that is not always phonically regular in a way
that will equip teachers to make their teaching informed and flexible.
Consider the child beyond school

Families are important influences on how children progress in school. Information
needs to flow in two directions. Schools need to know about the rhymes, songs,
stories, books (both fiction and non-fiction) and multi-modal texts that children
enjoy at home, and actively ensure that the school curriculum acknowledges and
builds on this. Families are also important allies for teachers, and schools need to
communicate their views about phonics as part of their literacy policy and enlist
parents’ help where possible. Chapter 5 will inform discussion of this.
Put policy in perspective

It is detrimental when education reforms are seen as short-term ‘cures’ (Datnow
et al., 2002). Where effective schools work strategically and keep in mind
long-term goals, ineffective ones tend to have one-off events (Ofsted, 2004). An
understanding of the historical context can help teachers to appreciate how
ideas have evolved and why an initiative gains credence at a particular point
in time. Chapter 9 places phonics teaching within an historical context and
reminds everyone of the importance of keeping a sense of perspective and
balance within the literacy curriculum. Finally, Chapter 10 shows the breadth
of views that still exist and are likely to exist within any school community.
Lewis(phonics)-3436-Glossary.qxd 8/21/2006 6:25 PM Page 135
Glossary
Affricates The sounds made in speech when the air-stream is

stopped as for a plosive but released as for a fricative
sound. English affricates are ‘ch’ and ‘j’.
Assimilation Describes how the articulation of phonemes is influenced

by, and accommodates to, the articulation of the
surrounding sounds during rapid, connected speech.
Alphabetic code/ A system used for writing where graphemes formed

alphabetic principle from letters represent sounds.
Analytic phonics A whole-to-part teaching approach in which children

do not learn each phoneme in isolation, but might
discuss and analyse a number of words containing
the sound and are helped to see letter patterns and
draw analogies with other words. In writing a new
word, analytic phonics programmes would encourage
the child to think of similar-sounding words they can
write and use this knowledge to work out how to
write the new word.
Big book A larger version of a children’s book, used for sharing

and discussing the text with the whole class.
Blend/blending Often known as ‘phonemic blending’. Merging

individual phonemes together to pronounce a word,
for example, ‘c-a-t’ blended together makes ‘cat’. To
read an unknown word the child must recognize each
grapheme, not each letter, for example, ‘th-a-t’, not
‘t-h-a-t’.
135
Closed class A category of words or parts of speech that rarely

acquires new members, for example, pronouns such
as ‘he’, ‘she’; conjunctions such as ‘and’, ‘that’, or
determiners such as ‘the’, ‘an’. It contrasts with ‘open
class’ word categories such as nouns and verbs, to which
new words are quite commonly added.
Consonant clusters Also known as adjacent or consecutive consonants.

Two (or three) letters making two (or three) sounds.
For example, the first two letters of ‘brake’ and the
first three letters of ‘string’ are consonant clusters.
Consonant clusters should not be confused with
digraphs.
Concepts about print/ The understandings about the rules or accepted

conventions of print practices that govern readers’ and writers’ use of
print. For example: understanding that English texts
are read left to right, top to bottom, left page before
right, that words consist of letters and that spaces
indicate the boundaries between words and so on.
Consonant The sounds made when breath from the lungs is stopped
or occluded before it emerges from the mouth. They
can be voiced or voiceless.
Cursive font/writing A style of handwriting where letters are joined to

produce a continuous joined script.
CVC/CCVC words Abbreviations for consonant and vowel, used to show

the consonant/vowel structure of words, for example,
dog is a CVC word; stop is a CCVC word and stamp
is a CCVCC word.
Decodable books Books written with a vocabulary that is restricted to

words made up of the phoneme–letter correspondences
that have been taught.
Decoding Usually understood to mean reading an unknown

word by sounding out and blending the phonemes
represented by the letters. A reader can decode a
word without knowing what it means. However, in
psychology ‘decoding’ means accessing the print on the
page. This can include both reading words automatically
as well as by blending sounds.
Glossary 137
Deep orthography A writing system that does not have consistent or

(opaque orthography) one-to-one correspondence between the phonemes
and morphemes of the language and the graphemes.
English is an example of a deep orthography.
Digraph/vowel A two-lettered grapheme. Two letters making one

digraph/split digraph sorund, for example, consonant digraphs ‘th’ and
‘ch’; vowel digraphs ‘oo’, ‘ai’, ‘ow’. A split digraph
is where the two letters of the digraph are
separated by a consonant, for example, ‘a-e’ in
‘take’ or ‘o-e’ in ‘bone’.
Diphthong A vowel in which there is a perceptible change in

quality during the syllable (as in ‘fear’, ‘coin’).
Environmental print Words and symbols seen in the environment and

used in everyday life, such as product labels, logos
and traffic signs.
Fricatives The sounds made where two parts of the mouth

or throat come so close together that we hear the
turbulence in the air stream. (English fricatives are:
‘f ’ as in ‘fish’; ‘v’ as in ‘verve’; ‘s’ as in ‘soap’; ‘z’ as
in ‘zoo’; ‘sh’ as in ‘shy’; ‘zh’ as in the middle of
‘treasure’; ‘th’ as in ‘this’ and ‘their’. Scottish English
has two more: ‘wh’ as in ‘which’ and ‘ch’ as in ‘loch’,
and Welsh adds ‘ll’ sound illustrated by the first
sound in the word ‘Llanelli’.
Glides (liquid sounds) Sounds made by air passing through the mouth
more freely than for stops or fricatives, but less
freely than for vowels. English glide sounds are ‘l’,
‘r’, ‘w’, ‘y’.
Grapheme A letter or group of letters that are the written

representation of a phoneme, for example, ‘a’, ‘t’,
‘ch’, ‘kn’ or ‘ough’ (as in though).
Graphological awareness The developing awareness of print. How grapheme

can be used to represent and manipulate meaning.
Guided reading With beginning readers, the teacher provides

support for a small group reading a book that is at an
instructional level of difficulty, helping them to use
reading cues and strategies independently. In

shared/supported reading, the teacher may
be reading with the whole class and the book
may be at a level beyond that which the
children could read independently.
Letter–sound correspondence/ These terms all refer to the relationship

phoneme–grapheme between sounds and the letters that represent
correspondence/ those sounds.
grapheme–phoneme
correspondences (GPC)
Logographic A system where one written symbol, or logo,

represents a whole word. For example, the
International Red Cross sign or Chinese script.
Long-term memory Stores information and knowledge about the

world over a long period of time, creating
schema which influence how we attend to
future information.
High-frequency words About 100 words that make up roughly half of

all the words occurring in most non-technical
texts. Because these words occur so frequently
in text, teachers aim to ensure that children
can recognize them easily when reading and
read them rapidly ‘on sight’.
Mnemonic A sentence or phrase that aids memory/recall.

Mnemonics can be used as an aid to remember
how to spell a word (for example, ‘because’ –
big elephants cannot always use small exits)
or to recall a letter shape (for example, a
snake for the letter ‘s’).
Morpheme The smallest unit of meaning in a language.

For example, the word ‘talk’ is one morpheme,
but ‘talked’ is two morphemes; ‘talk’ plus the
past tense marker ‘ed’.
Morphological Based on the meaning of stem words and their

added morphemes.
Name game A game common in New Zealand. Children

orally identify the first sound in their name
by saying ‘My name is . . . It begins with . . .’.
Glossary 139
National Literacy Strategy (NLS) The NLS is a non-statutory, government-

funded initiative for improving children’s
achievements in literacy in England. It
consists of a framework of teaching objectives,
professional development materials for
teachers and classroom materials, promoted via
a national network of literacy consultants.
Onset and rime The onset of a syllable is the consonant or

consonant cluster at the beginning of the
syllable and before the vowel. The rime is the
vowel and any consonants that follow. Syllables
beginning with a vowel (for example, ‘egg’) have
no onset.
Orthography The complete writing system for the language.
Phonemes Single identifiable sounds of language, for

example, the letters ‘th’ represent just one
sound, but ‘sp’ represents two, /s/ and /p/.
Phonemes make the contrasts between words
so that changing the phoneme changes the
meaning, for example, ‘cat’, ‘that’, ‘sat’.
Phonemic awareness The ability to recognize and manipulate the

individual sounds in a word.
Phonemic blending – Combining individual phonemes to form a

(see Blend/blending) word or syllable.
Phonemic segmentation The skill required to segment words into

individual phonemes.
Phonics teaching/instruction Teaching that is focused on the relationships

between letters and sounds.
Phonetics A science studying the characteristics of, and

providing methods for, the description,
classification and transcription of human
sound-making, particularly speech sounds.
Phonographic A system where written letters represent

speech sounds.
Phonological access How quickly phonological information can be

retrieved. It is measured by rapid naming tasks.
Phonological analysis The ability to identify or isolate phonemes from words.
Phonological awareness The conscious awareness of, and ability to manipulate,

phonology. It requires sensitivity to, or explicit
awareness of, the phonological structure of the
words in language.
Phonological knowledge Knowledge of the sounds and sound patterns of a

language.
Phonological memory The brief retention in working memory of

non-meaningful sequences of letters, digits or
spoken non-words.
Phonological processing A general term referring to the processes used

to identify, contrast, manipulate, produce and
remember speech sounds.
Phonological synthesis The ability to blend phonemes presented separately

into whole words.
Phonology The study of the sound system of language, or the

sound system itself.
Plosive The sound made when the air from the lungs is
completely stopped for a short time in the mouth,
then released. Also called a ‘stop’. English plosives
are ‘p’, ‘b’, ‘t’, ‘d’, ‘k’, ‘g’.
Quadragraph Four letters that make one sound, for example, ‘ough’
as in ‘ought’.
Reading cues The graphophonic, syntactic and semantic clues

that prompt a reader to decode and make sense of
text.
Reading Recovery A one-to-one teaching intervention designed by

New Zealander Dame Marie Clay to identify, analyse,
teach and monitor the progress of children who,
one year after starting school, need to ‘catch-up’
with their peers.
Rhyming strings A number of words that all rhyme with each other.
Glossary 141
Rime The part of a syllable that contains the vowel and any
consonant or consonant cluster that might come after
the first vowel. The rime in the word ‘tea’ has no
consonants. The rime in the word ‘teach’ is ‘each’.
Segmenting Hearing and breaking a word up into its individual

phonemes, for example, ‘th-a-t’, or into syllables, for
example, ‘rep-re-sent’.
Semantic Pertaining to meaning.
Shallow orthography See Transparent orthography.
Supported reading See Guided reading.
Syntax/syntactic The rules, or grammar, that govern sentence structure.
Synthetic phonics Comes from the word ‘sythesize’ – bring together. In

synthetic phonics the phonemes (sounds) associated
with particular graphemes (letters) are each isolated,
pronounced and blended together (synthesized) to
read and write the word. For example, when reading
an unknown single-syllable word such as ‘dog’, the
child would sound out its three phonemes and then
blend them together. In writing, the child would
segment the word into its individual phonemes and
say and write them. In synthetic phonics programmes,
children are systematically taught phoneme–grapheme
correspondences. They learn the sounds represented
by letters and letter combinations, blend these sounds
to pronounce words, and finally identify which phonic
generalizations apply.
THRASS A picture-based programme to Teach Handwriting,

Reading And Spelling Skills.
Transparent (shallow) A writing system in which there is a consistent corres-

orthography pondence between the phonemes of the language and
the graphemes. Finnish is an example of a language
with a transparent orthography.
Trigraph Three letters making one sound (phoneme), for example,

‘dge’ in ‘bridge’ or ‘tch’ in ‘itch’. A three-letter grapheme.
Voiced When air from the lungs is given a ‘buzz’ from the vocal
cords vibrating together. In English, the sounds ‘d’
and ‘b’ are voiced and compare to their unvoiced
counterparts ‘t’ and ‘p’.
Voiceless When air passes through the larynx without the vocal
cords vibrating.
Vowel The sound made when breath from the lungs is given a
buzz from the vocal cords vibrating together but not
stopped or occluded in other ways. English words
contain at least one vowel. In the alphabet a, e, i, o, u (y)
are known as vowels and they are used in all the
graphemes that form vowel digraphs and trigraphs. The
letters ‘w’, ‘y’ and ‘r’ are also used, for example, ‘ow’, ‘ay’
and ‘ar’.
Vowel owl A permanent, working wall display. Pictures of big owls

sit on a tree, each with a vowel on its breast. The teacher
or a child chooses a vowel owl for the day and children
look for words that have that particular vowel in them.
At first they point the vowel out, but as the year
progresses, they write the word and circle the vowel
before pinning it to the tree.
Working memory The temporary storage of information being processed.

Lewis(phonics)-3436-References.qxd 8/21/2006 6:25 PM Page 143
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Lewis(phonics)-3436-Index.qxd 8/21/2006 6:25 PM Page 153
Index
accomplished teachers, 18–20 blending cont.

activities, analysis of, 38–9 segmentation and, 83, 86
Adams, M.J., 36 steps of learning, 91
affricative consonants, 73, 135 books for children, 57
alliteration, 40, 57, 91 ‘bottom-up’, 110
alphabetic method, 106–7 Bradley, L., 86
alphabetic principle, 10–11, brain, pattern recognition and, 14
25–8, 135 Broadbent, L., 64
alphabets, 106 Bryant, Peter, 86, 90
analysis of reading and writing, 81 Bullock Report (1975), 105, 110, 123
analytic phonics, 135 Byrne, Brian, 25
analytic programmes, 4–5, 110–11
analytic/synthetic, 4–5, 12 Can’t you Sleep, Little Bear? (Waddell), 57
application, 18–19, 41 Carney, E., 97–8
approaches to teaching, 45–58 Carnine, D.W., 122
mixed approach, 50–3 Castle, A., 80
play and planning, 54–8 The Cat in the Hat (Seuss), 57
synthetic phonics, 45–50 Cataldo, S., 86
articulatory phonetics, 41 Chall, Jeanne, 109, 112
assessment, 80–1 Challenge Dad Pathfinder Project, 68
assimilation, 75, 135 ‘Chelsea’s’ route to reading, 24–5
Australia, 1, 2, 3–4, 5 Chew, Jennifer, vii
children’s attitudes, 122
baby talk, 77 Chomsky, C., 86
Baker, L., 62 chunking, 36, 40
balance, 105, 109, 127 Churchill, Winston S., 107
Bayley, R., 64 Clackmannanshire research, 12, 45–6,
best practice, 8, 132, 133 110–11, 121, 126
best practice review, 111, 115 clapping games, 55
Bible, 106 classroom environment, 51
Bielby, Nicholas, 110 closed class, 136
Big Books, 26, 135 coaching, 19
bilabial fricatives, 73 Coltheart, M., 80
bilingual families, 66–8 comic-lending library, 68
Bissex, G., 84 common words, 101
Blackmore, J., 129 communicative knowledge, 17
Blakemore, S.J., 15 comprehension, alphabetic knowledge
blending and, 16–18
definition, 135 concepts of print, 136
importance of, 4 consecutive consonants, 91
in old phonics, 37–8 consolidation, 47
Rose Review, 118–19 consonant clusters, 77, 136
153
consonants educational psychology, 40

classification, 72–5, 74t effectiveness
definition, 136 evidence for, 3, 18–20, 111
hearing of, 76–7, 77t, 88 ownership and empowerment, 130–1
spelling, 76 staff development, 133
consonants/vowels, 41 successful change, 129–30
constrained/unconstrained skills, 16–17 Ehri, Linnen, 27, 86
context, 50 Elkonin boxes, 37
Cove, Moya, vii Ellis, N., 86
cueing, 5, 119, 120–1 Ellis, Sue, 6, 123
cultural knowledge, 17 emotional context, 42
Curiosity Kits scheme, 68 empowerment, 130–1
cursive font, 47, 48, 136 engagement, promoting, 63–6
CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, enjoyment, 54–8, 62
38, 91, 136 enunciation, 35
environmental print, 137
Dale method, 107 etymology, 85, 93
debates Evans, Sally, vii
Great Debate, 109, 110
New Debate, 110 families, 11, 134
role of phonics, 2–3 see also parents
synthetic arguments, 114 Farmer Duck (Waddell), 57
understanding, 11–12, 54 Farmer, Sandra, viii
decodable books, 49, 110, 119, 123, 125 fathers, 68–9
decoding first/last letter, 28–31
definition, 136–7 Flesch, R., 109
pattern recognition, 14, 99–101 formative assessment, 19
play and planning, 56, 57 Framework for Teaching (DfEE), 3
Rose Review, 119, 122 French, influence of, 97–8
searchlights model, 120–1 fricative consonants, 73, 76–7, 137
word recognition process, 31 Frith, U., 15, 86
deep orthography, 16, 137 future of phonics, 8, 111
Developing Early Writing (DfES), 92
development, 7 games, 55, 57, 91–2
developmental sequences, clues generalizations, 14
about, 13–14 Gentry, R., 84
developmental writing, 85, 86 Gestalt theory, 109
Diack, Hunter, 106, 110 gingerbread method, 106
digraph/split digraph, 137 glide consonants, 73, 76–7, 137
digraph/vowel, 137 glossary, 142
digraphs, 31–2, 37, 73–4, 88, 102 ‘glue-ear’, 42
dimensions of literacy, 10–11 Gontijo, P.F.D., 122
dipthongs, 137 Goodwin, Prue, viii
Dixon, Maureen, 26 Goswami, Usha, 13, 20, 27
Dodd, B., 77 Gough, P.B., 117
Dombey, Henrietta, vii grammar, spelling and, 90–1
Dr Seuss, 57 grapheme-phenome correspondence, 138
drill, 109 graphemes
dual-route model, 120 definition, 41, 137
dyslexia, 42 numbers of, 96
voiced/voiceless, 73–4
Early Literacy Support (DfEE), 51 see also digraphs
early phonics teaching, 23–33 ‘grapho-phonics’, 40
Early Spelling (Kress), 85 graphological awareness, 137
Early Years 115–16 Greek alphabet, 106
easiest words, 101t grouping, 19, 42
Index 155
guessing, 5–6, 108, 121 letters, phoneme confusion and, 36–8

guided reading, 50, 137–8 letters, talking about, 34–5
level 4 statistics, 121
Hall, Kathy, viii Lewis, Maureen, viii
handwriting, 47, 48 Liberman, Isabelle, 83
Harrison, Colin, 20, 34 lift-the-flap books, 43
Hatcher, P., 36 Literacy Association, 111
hearing loss, 42 literacy difficulties, 115, 116
‘Heather’, 13–14 literacy, dimensions of, 10–11
high-frequency words, 138 literacy hour, 3
Holland, 98 literacy theories, 110
home practices, respecting, 61 Literacy Training Pack (DfEE), 3
hornbooks, 106 lobbies, 20
Huey, Edmund Burke, 108 logographic, 138
Hulme, C., 15 logographic stage, 86
Huxford, Laura, viii long-term memory, 138
‘long view’, 3
‘I Spy’, 13 long vowels, 91
ICT resources, 51–2 ‘look and say’, 108–9
idiosyncratic spellings, 100 low-achieving pupils, 9, 109, 121–5
Independent Review of the Teaching of Early
Reading (DfES), see Rose Review Macnair, Lyndsay, viii
initial/final phonemes, 28–31 McCartney, Elspeth, ix
Initial Teaching Alphabet, 96, 97 MacNaughton, Colin, 57
inspection evidence, 126 made-up words, 15, 32
instructional density, 19 magnetic boards, 46
integration, 18–19, 109 Making Sense of Reading (Bielby), 110
interaction, 41–2 management, 115, 116
interaction with parents, 64, 65 manipulation, 40
intervention studies, 32 Marsh, Jackie, ix
invented spelling, 85, 86 Masterson, Jackie, 26
isolated naming, 79 meaning-making, 56
Italian, 96 meaning versus code, 110
meaningful texts, 43
Johnson, Jane, 107 Medwell, J., 111
Johnson, Val, 66 Minns, Hilary, 108
Johnston, R., 110–11 Miskin, R., 37
Jolly Phonics (Lloyd), 32–3, 120 mixed strategy approaches, 4–5, 6, 50–3
mnemonic, 138
Key Stage 2 statistics, 9 Montessori, M., 86
knowledge Morais, J., 80
concepts of, 9–10, 13–14 morpheme, 138
integrating, 16–17 morphemic analysis, 93
Kress, Gunther, 85 morphemic principle, 100
Kuhl, P.K., 76 morphological, definition of, 138
morphology, 85, 90–1
language therapy, 77–8 motivation to read, 10
Latin influence, 98 motor skills, 76
leadership, 115, 116, 129 multi-strategy approach, 7, 41–2, 113
learning, 9–11, 13–14, 24–5 multicueing approach, 6
The Learning Brain (Blakemore), 15 multiple mappings, 122
Learning to Read (Chall), 109, 112 My Early Life (Churchill), 107
letter formation, 47
letter knowledge, 15, 24, 91 name game, 139
letter position, 46 names and sounds, 34–5
letter-sound correspondence, 138 naming, 79
National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy Paris, Scott, 16–17

(DEST), 1, 2 past tenses, 90, 98–9
National Literacy Strategy (NLS) pattern recognition, 14
in the classroom, 50–3 patterns of orthography, 99–103
definition, 139 peer support, 47, 48
early reading pilot, 8 perception and categorization, 76
ineffectiveness of, 113–14 Perkins, Margaret, ix
introduction of, 3 Peters, Margaret, 85
research and, 126–7 Phonecian alphabet, 106
spelling and phonics, 85–6 phonemes
National Reading Panel, 1, 5, 21 definitions, 71–2, 139
national tests, 1 graphemes and, 36–7, 37t, 102, 138
New Debate, 110 letter confusion and, 36–8
new phonics, 37, 110 over/under representation, 88
new sounds, 47 phoneme-chunking, 36
No child left behind legislation, 1 phoneme-letter transparency, 102
Norman Conquest, 97–8 phoneme sensitivity, 15
‘noticing’ practice, 42 phonemic analysis, 93
Nunes, Terezinha, 90 phonemic awareness, 12, 34, 40, 139
nursery rhymes, 13, 55 phonemic blending
see blending
‘odd one out’, 40 phonemic identification, sight vocabulary
Ofsted, 3 and, 28–30
Old English, 97 phonetics, definition of, 41, 139
one-to-one tutoring, 19 phonic knowledge, 17
onsets and rimes phonic stage, 86–7
CVC or, 38 phonic-word method, 109–10
definitions, 139, 141 phonics
pronunciation and, 100t definitions of, 40, 54, 84
research, 12, 13 introduction of, 107–8
rhymes and, 79–80, 103 steps of learning, 91
segmenting, 15 ‘phonics first’, 127
opaque orthography, 96, 137 phonics teaching, definition of, 139
ORIM Framework, 63, 64–5 phonographic, 40, 140
orthographic stage, 86–7 Phonographix, 86
orthography, 95–103 phonological access, 79, 140
overview, 6, 7, 16 phonological analysis, 78, 140
chaos of English, 96–7 phonological awareness
definition, 139 activities for, 55
historical influences, 97–9 definitions of, 40, 78, 140
patterns of, 99–102 early stages, 24–5, 31–2
relevance of, 95–6 focussed teaching, 81–2
see also spelling onsets and rimes, 15
‘over-teaching’, 41–2 reading and, 79–80
ownership, 130–1 spoken language, 78–9
phonological development, 76–8
pace, 6–7, 41–2, 46, 52, 133 phonological knowledge, 13–14, 140
parent buddies, 69 phonological memory, 78–9, 140
parents, 60–9 phonological processing, 79, 80–1, 140
overview, 7 phonological synthesis, 78, 140
bilingual families, 66–8 phonology of English, 71–6, 140
engagement, 63–6 picture books, 24
fathers, 68–9 picture cues, 50
key principles, 61–4 Pitman, Sir James, 97
key roles, 63–4 play and planning, 54–8
opportunities for, 64, 65 Playing with Sounds (DfES), 50, 52–3, 57, 86,
synthetic programmes, 48 91–2, 114
Index 157
pleasurable reading, 54–8, 62 revision, 46–7

plosive consonants, 73, 140 rhyme
poetry, 13 patterns of orthography, 99
politics, 109–11, 123 for phoneme sensitivity, 13, 24–5
Pollard, Rebecca, 108 rimes and, 79–80, 103
popular culture, 64–5 spelling and, 91
pre-school experiences, 7, 24–5 rhyming strings, 141
predictors of reading skills, 12, 15, 24 riddles, 13
pressure groups, 113, 128 rimes
Preston Pig (MacNaughton), 57 see onsets and rimes
Primary National Strategy, 50 role models, 64
print, concepts of, 136 Rose, Jim, 115, 127
printing, 98 Rose Review, 113–28
professional development, 53, 116, 129–34 overview, 1, 3, 5–6, 8
programme failure, 20–1 accurate word reading, 116–18
progression, clues about, 13–14 getting perspective, 118–19
Progression in Phonics (DfEE), 3, 52, 86, instructional perspective, 121–3
91, 120 keeping perspective, 120–1
pronunciation, 73, 74, 75, 90, 96–7 recommendations, 115–19
pure alphabetic systems, 95–6 research, 5
purpose, making explicit, 41 research evidence, 119, 123–4, 125–7
responses to, 116–28
quadragraphs, 37, 140 road to, 113–15
synthetic arguments, 123–5
Raising Early Achievement in Literacy (REAL) Rosen, Michael, ix
Project, 63–4 route to reading, 24–5
Read, C., 84
Read, Kingsley, 96 scheme failure, 20–1
READ project, 80 schools, organizational factors, 18
reading ‘schwa’, 35
phonological awareness and, 79–80 Scotland, 4–5, 8, 12
stages of, 86–7, 87t Scottish English, 73, 75
successful segmentation, 86 searchlights model, 117, 118,
reading analysis, 81 120–1, 122
reading cues, 5, 119, 120–1, 140 segmentation
reading primers, 106 blending and, 83, 86
Reading Recovery, 86, 140–1 definition, 141
Reading Reform Foundation, 5, 118 importance of, 4, 15
reading schemes, questionable phonemic awareness and, 40
advantages, 122–3 programmes, 86
real books approach, 110, 122–3, 125 and reading success, 86
reasoning, 17 spelling and, 84
received pronunciation, 96–7 steps of learning, 91
recognition by parents, 64, 65 self-efficacy, 134
recursive learning, 57–8 self-teaching, 25–6, 29, 30–1, 99–102
relevance, 41–2 semantics, 17, 141
research serial naming, 79
overview, 4–5, 8 shallow orthography, 96, 141
analytic/synthetic, 12 Share, David, 25, 29
failings of, 123–7 shared reading, 26, 50, 55
lobbies and, 20 shared writing, 57
Rose Review, 119 Shavian extended alphabet, 96–7
resources Shaw, George Bernard, 96
guidance for teachers, 54 sight vocabulary, 26–30, 50
mixed strategy approaches, 51, 52 Simple View of reading, 117, 120
play with language, 57 singing, 55
synthetic programmes, 46, 49 skipping, 55
Smart, Morag, 120 ‘Synthetic method’ (Pollard), 108

Smith, Nila, 108 synthetic phonics, definition of, 141
Smith, Vivienne, ix synthetic programmes
social context, 11, 13–14, 42 overview, 4–5
Solity, J.E., ix in the classroom, 45–50
songs, 13 commentary on, 49–50
‘sound to symbol’, 40 debates about, 114
sounding out, 25–6 ‘how much’ phonics, 122
sounds and names, 34–5 introduction of phonics, 127
sounds, making, 35 research, 123–7
Southgate, V., 110 structure and pace, 46–7
Spanish language, 99–100 systematic phonics, 5, 6, 31–3, 133
speech therapy, 77–8
Speller (Webster), 106 Tanka Tanka Skunk (Webb), 57
spelling Taylor, B., 11
overview, 7 teacher as resource, 110
common confusions, 88–90 Teaching of Phonics (Ofsted), 3
common words, 101–2, 101t Teaching Reading (DEST), 1
examples, 89 terminology, understanding by adults, 39–41
and phonology, 75–6 terminology, understanding by children, 36
place of in phonics, 85–7 text variation, 19
place of phonics in, 84–5 THRASS, 86, 141
sessions of, 92 tongue twisters, 13
teaching and learning, 91–3 ‘top-down’, 110
understanding children’s, 87–91 Torgesen, J.K., 5, 78
writing and, 37 training, 3, 116, 117
see also orthography transparent orthography, 96, 141
spoken language transparent phoneme-letters, 101
development of, 76–8 trigraphs, 37, 142
parental help, 60–1, 62 Tunmer, W.E., 117
phonological awareness, 78–9 Twain, Mark, 43
phonology of English, 71–5
spoonerisms, 40 UKLA, 111
Springfield School case study, 66–8 UNESCO, 1
staff development unfamiliar words, 25–6, 29, 32, 50
see professional development United Kingdom Literacy Association, 2
Stahl, S.A., 5 United Nations, 1
Stainthorp, Rhona, ix United Nations’ Literacy Decade, 1
stammering, 42 upper/lower-case, 35
Stannard, John, ix USA, 1, 5, 20, 108–9
state education, 109 usefulness, 41
Stone, B.H., 81
stop consonants, 73, 140 velar fricatives, 73, 77
storybook reading, 62 verbal reasoning, 17
stress, 98 visual memory, 27
structure and pace, 6, 46–7, 133 voiced consonants, 73, 142
Stuart, Morag, ix, 30, 32 voiceless, 142
Styles, Morag, 107 Vousden, J., 122
Submission to the Review of Best Practice vowel digraphs, 30–1
(UKLA), 111 vowel owl, 142
successful change, 129–30 vowels, 72, 75–6, 142
supported reading, 141
‘symbol to sound’, 40 Waddell, Martin, 57
symbolic stage, 86–7 warm-up, 46
syntax, 17, 50, 141 Watson, J., 110–11
synthetic/analytic, 4–5, 12 Webb, Steve, 57
Index 159
Webster, Noah, 106 Word Wizard, 51

Wells, J., 90 working memory, 142
whole class teaching, 19, 42, 92, 123 worksheets, analysis of, 38–9
whole language approach, 54–8 workshops for parents, 63
whole word approach, 16 Wray, David, ix
Why Jonny Can’t Read (Flesch), 109 writing, 37, 81, 86–7, 87t, 92
wider literacy programme, 2, 5–6, 50–3, 130–3 writing analysis, 81
wider picture, 1–8 Wyse, Dommic, ix
word making, 47
word recognition process, 31 York University, 12

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Lewis(phonics)-3436-Prelims.

qxd 8/21/2006 6:23 PM Page i

© Maureen Lewis and Sue Ellis 2006

Chapter 1 © Kathy Hall 2006

First published 2006

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or

Paul Chapman Publishing

SAGE Publications Inc

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006902801

ISBN-10 1-4129-3085-5 ISBN-13 978-1-4129-3085-7

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

1 How Children Learn to Read and How Phonics Helps 9

2 Learning to Read the Words on the Page: The Crucial

3 Teaching Phonics: The Basics 34

4 Inside the Classroom: Three Approaches

5 Involving Parents and Carers 60

6 Developmental Issues: Speaking and Phonological

7 Phonics in Context: Spelling Links 83

8 Phonics and English Orthography 95

vi Phonics: practice, research and policy

9 Sounds Familiar: The History of Phonics Teaching 105

10 Responses to Rose: The Final Report of the Independent

11 Using this Book for Staff Development 129

Jennifer Chew is a retired teacher of English to students aged 16-plus. It was

Moya Cove is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Glasgow

Henrietta Dombey is Professor Emeritus of Literacy in Primary Education at

Sue Ellis was a primary teacher in London before joining Strathclyde

viii Phonics: practice, research and policy

Sandra Farmer is Senior Teacher Adviser in Lancashire, with particular

Kathy Hall is Professor of Education at the Open University. She researches in

Laura Huxford was director of professional development in the National

Maureen Lewis is an independent education consultant and Honorary

Lyndsay Macnair is Deputy Headteacher at St Ninians Primary School in

Elspeth McCartney lectures in the Division of Speech and Language Therapy,

Jackie Marsh is Reader in Education at the University of Sheffield, where she

Margaret Perkins lectures in literacy education at the University of Reading,

Michael Rosen is a well-known poet, writer and broadcaster. He published his

Vivienne Smith lectures at Strathclyde University in the Department

Jonathan Solity is a lecturer in Educational Psychology and Honorary Research

Rhona Stainthorp is a Professor of Education in the School of Psychology at the

x Phonics: practice, research and policy

from cognitive and developmental psychologists about the development of

Morag Stuart is Professor of the Psychology of Reading at the Institute of

Dominic Wyse is a lecturer in Early Years and Primary Education at the

The Association was founded in 1963 as the United Kingdom Reading

Learning to read is a vital foundation to becoming a literate, educated person.

2 Phonics: practice, research and policy

The evidence is clear . . . that direct systematic instruction in phonics during

It went on to recommend that:

whether children are being taught phonics/enough phonics;

Phonics: The Wider Picture 3

Are children being taught phonics?

4 Phonics: practice, research and policy

Different approaches to phonics teaching –

Phonics: The Wider Picture 5

Policy decisions in England to promote synthetic phonics are not therefore

Phonics as part of a wider literacy programme

6 Phonics: practice, research and policy