Thread by @Suchmo83

A thread on common misconceptions about phonics & reading fluency, how they are spreading and the issues being caused for schools and, ultimately, the children within them:
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Let's start with part of the checklist for English hubs relating to phonics provided by the DfE. Point 5 says that phonics should be continued until pupils can read fluently:

But this is to misunderstood what phonics is actually designed to do. Phonics is not - and never was - designed to take pupils from being initial readers all the way to being fluent readers.

The goal of phonics is to teach pupils *enough* of the most common grapheme-phoneme correspondences - and how to use them - so that they can begin decoding words for themselves.

Fluency requires *lots* of reading practice. Continuing to teach more and more phonics until pupils are fluent would likely be a poor use of instructional time compared to actual decoding practice via reading.

Let's see why:

How do we define fluency? A good place to start might be the DfE's Reading Framework:

Fluent reading requires accuracy and automaticity (and prosody if we are talking about oral reading). 90 words correct per minute is actually pretty slow, but we might charitably consider this a bare minimum for a reader to be considered fluent.

So when do kids tend to reach this point? We don't have great data on this, but the best available that I can find - converted from a US to a UK context - is this:

You'll notice that the *average* pupil isn't reaching what we might think of as the bare minimum for fluent reading until the end of year 3.

Are the English hubs really suggesting that the *average* pupil should still be using a programme of SSP until the end of year 3?

I guess English hubs *could* advocate four years of SSP for all pupils, but this would go far beyond what the evidence suggests and far beyond the recommendations of any reading researcher I've come across.

Maybe future research will suggest that SSP programmes *should* continue for 4+ years for the average reader. But right now, the DfE's list of validated phonic programmes stop much earlier than this, making the idea of 'phonics until fluency' inconsistent and confusing.

Anyone who has taught early readers will know that even when pupils can identify most words in a basic book accurately, this doesn't necessarily mean that they are fluent yet.

But once pupils can identify most words in a basic book accurately, the SSP programme has done its job. The next step is to actually *use* this initial knowledge to learn the much more complex realities of English orthography through decoding experience.

Of course, phonics *can* still form part of the curriculum as pupils continue to learn to spell, something complemented by morphology and orthographic patterns. But there is currently no research to suggest that SSP programmes need to be followed until a pupil is fluent.

So why is this a problem?

First, if teachers are set up to believe that phonics continues until a reader is fluent, then they are within their rights to think that SSP doesn't work when it doesn't lead to fluent readers by the end of the programme.

I come across this understandable gripe a lot. As someone who spends a decent chunk of my time advocating phonics, I am not a fan of anything that makes this advocacy harder to do.

Second, there are lots of dysfluent readers in schools who need support. Sometimes these dysfluent readers already have enough knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and phonemic skills. These kids don't need phonics; they need reading practice.

Don't get me wrong: if a kid lacks the GPC knowledge and related skills to successfully decode many words for themselves, then they should be taught this stuff (i.e. phonics).

But some kids are being unnecessarily given more phonics when intervention time could be better spent.

Third, this misconception leads to odd advice - including from some phonics providers - saying that kids shouldn't take home decodable books until they can read the books fluently.

Some even say that kids shouldn't read decodable books unless they can recognise 90% of the words without consciously decoding them. These books are literally designed for decoding practice, so this doesn't make sense.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly of all, if you tell schools that phonics accounts for pupils' entire journey to fluency, don't be surprised when their curricula downplay or ignore the reading practice and explicit approaches to fluency that are essential to its development.

In short, misconceptions about the purpose of phonics and the development of reading fluency are common, and some well-meaning but flawed messaging is inadvertantly contributing to this.

Teachers and school leaders need to bear in mind that the vast majority of kids will not be fluent readers when they stop learning from a SSP programme. This doesn't mean that the programme has failed. In most cases, it will have achieved exactly what it was designed to do.

It is reading practice that helps pupils reach fluency, and the entire purpose of phonics is to lay the foundations that allow this reading practice to happen.

@laurengue2 ...through accurate decoding from basic texts. Once pupils are accurately decoding most words in such texts and, crucially, decoding using all letters in unfamiliar words as an embedded strategy, then they are likely to be where they need to be. Of course, this doesn't mean...

@laurengue2 ...that phonics has no purpose after this point. It may well still be useful to explicitly add to pupils' growing knowledge while they also build this knowledge implicitly through text experience.