Lessons in Teaching Phonics in Primary Schools

David Waugh, Jane Carter, Carly Desmond

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781473927063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Lesson planning in line with the new Primary National Curriculum! Phonics is taught every day in primary schools across England. It is fully embedded in the National Curriculum and is a huge part of teaching children to read. How do you ensure that you understand both what and how to teach? How do you separate good phonics teaching from the many phonics schemes that are used? What does a good phonics lesson look like? This text provides exemplar lessons in phonics and supports you to teach tricky words, alternative spellings, and pronunciation as well as addressing other phonics teaching challenges. It explores the most popular phonics schemes and shows you how good phonics teaching works across schemes. The adaptable and inspired lesson plans included, highlight how phonics teaching can be fun, offering ideas for teaching phonics outdoors, whole class phonics teaching and nonsense words. Did you know that this book is part of the Lessons in Teaching series? WHAT IS THE LESSONS IN TEACHING SERIES?
Suitable for any teacher at any stage of their career, the books in this series are packed with great ideas for teaching engaging, outstanding lessons in your primary classroom. The Companion Website accompanying the series includes extra resources including tips, lesson starters, videos and Pinterest boards. Books in this series: Lessons in Teaching Grammar in Primary Schools, Lessons in Teaching Computing in Primary Schools, Lessons in Teaching Number and Place Value in Primary Schools, Lessons in Teaching Reading Comprehension in Primary Schools, Lesson in Teaching Phonics in Primary Schools

Chapter 1 Why phonics?

Learning Outcomes

This chapter will allow you to achieve the following outcomes:

• gain an historical perspective of the role of phonics in the teaching of early reading;
• develop an understanding of some of the theoretical underpinnings for the teaching of early reading and phonics;
• gain an overview of some of the research evidence.

Teachers’ Standards

Working through this chapter will help you meet the following standards:

• 3. Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge:
  • Have a secure knowledge of the relevant subject(s) and curriculum areas, foster and maintain pupils’ interest in the subject, and address misunderstandings.
  • Demonstrate a critical understanding of developments in the subject and curriculum areas, and promote the value of scholarship.
  • Demonstrate an understanding of and take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher's specialist subject.
  • If teaching early reading, demonstrate a clear understanding of systematic synthetic phonics.

Introduction

It is clear from the Teachers’ Standards above that the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics has a high priority in terms of the knowledge and understanding required to meet the Standards. There are no other examples in the Standards where a particular approach to teaching is stipulated, and so clearly the reasons behind this emphasis and priority require some discussion and explanation.

Why the Focus on the Teaching of Reading?

The impetus for developing effective teaching of reading practice is found in the evidence that tells us that being a reader is an indicator of future socio-economic success (OECD, 2002) and that motivated readers who read for pleasure and purpose are also more likely to be higher attaining readers who achieve wider academic success (DfE, 2012). Neil Gaiman, a highly regarded children's (and adults’) author, addressed the Reading Agency Conference in 2014 and shared an experience he had in America. He said:

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based about asking what percentage of ten and eleven year olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

There is no debate about the need to get the teaching of reading right for all children: the debate focuses around the question of how this can become a reality. This debate has been termed the ‘reading wars’, due to the ferocious nature of arguments and the fervently held beliefs on all sides. To the student teacher, this appears like a rather complex picture and, yes, reading is a complex business, but if we are clear about the ultimate aim of a teacher of reading it becomes possible to build the picture, based on the research evidence, of the approaches and strategies that will support all children in becoming readers.

What is Reading?

What comprises ‘reading’ and the ‘best way’ to teach reading are perhaps the most intense areas of debate that have consumed educationalists over many years. The words here give us a clue to the breadth and depth of the debate: what is meant by the ‘best way’ to teach reading and in fact, what do we understand by the term ‘reading’? Does this mean the most effective in terms of children's word reading skills – so the child that can look at a word and say the word – or is ‘reading’ also about comprehension of what is read, both in terms of the individual words and comprehension across a sentence and a whole text?

It could also be argued that the approach taken to the teaching of reading needs to ensure that children also become self-motivated and engaged readers. Teachers often talk about the difference between children in their class who can ‘read’ and those who are ‘readers’ – the difference between children who can lift the words from the page and ‘read them’ compared to those who can do this and understand, engage and respond to those words and who can articulate their reading preferences and are able to make choices about their reading to match different purposes.

It is this final definition, with all its constituent parts, that we need to aim for as teachers of reading. These different elements of a reader are also found in the National Curriculum (DfE, 2013). It is helpful to look at the expectations of the curriculum at key points in a child's reading journey to understand what these elements of a reader might look like in practice and what we should teach to enable all children to become readers.

Reading in the Curriculum

The statement in the new curriculum about reading gives a very clear message about the expectations for the outcomes of the approach taken to teach reading. It states that:

All pupils must be encouraged to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum. Reading widely and often increases pupils’ vocabulary because they encounter words they would rarely hear or use in everyday speech. Reading also feeds pupils’ imagination and opens up a treasure-house of wonder and joy for curious young minds.

It is essential that, by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education.

(DfE, 2013, p4)

In addition to this, the curriculum organises the elements of reading into two areas: word reading and comprehension.

The National Curriculum gives the following overview of word reading (DfE, 2013, p13).

Skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Underpinning both is the understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words. This is why phonics should be emphasised in the early teaching of reading to beginners (i.e. unskilled readers) when they start school.

Phonics is identified here as the prime approach to the teaching of reading.

Activity: Elements of Reading

Can you sort the following elements of reading (taken from the National Curriculum programmes of study) into ‘word reading’ or ‘comprehension’?

• Link what children read or hear read, to their own experiences.
• Read accurately by blending the sounds in words.
• Check that the text makes sense as you read and correct inaccurate reading.
• Predict what might happen on the basis of what has been read so far.
• Read words containing common suffixes.
• Read accurately recognising alternative sounds for graphemes.

What is Phonics?

Phonics is an approach to the teaching of early reading that involves the linking of spoken sounds to letters or groups of letters. Phonics is distinct from, but linked to phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is about the awareness of sounds and abilities to hear chunks of sound in the spoken word. Goswami (2010, p103) explains phonology as the way the brain represents the sound structure of spoken language. Jolliffe and Waugh with Carss (2012, p4) cite a range of research that demonstrates that from a young age babies and children are able to manipulate the sounds of language, even being able to orally blend the sounds in words into the words themselves. Playing with words, rhyming, manipulating sounds for effect, creating a rhythm, a poem or song, are all...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Why phonics?
• Chapter 2 Phonics in Context
• Chapter 3 Reception: Developing Phonemic Awareness
• Chapter 4 Reception: Beginning to Read and Write using CVC Words
• Chapter 5 Year 1: Teaching Grapheme–Phoneme Correspondences
• Chapter 6 Year 1: Long Vowel Digraphs
• Chapter 7 Year 1: Decoding and Encoding Text
• Chapter 8 Years 1 and 2: Morphemes – Prefixes, Suffixes and Root Words
• Chapter 9 Year 2: Homophones and Contractions
• Chapter 10 Year 2: Phonics into Spelling
• Chapter 11 Teaching Tricky or Common Exception Words
• Chapter 12 Moving On
• Glossary
• Index