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.
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It amazes me just how common it is for primary schools to have countless reading for pleasure initiatives while at the same time teaching reading lessons that are little more than years and years of tedious SATs preparation.
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I promise you that those hours and hours of modelling and practising how to answer 'inference questions' and 'retrieval questions' are an inefficient way to achieve better SATs scores.
This way of teaching reading is bad news even on its own cynical terms.
Thankfully, beyond a few hours of SATs practice in year 6 to help children feel comfortable in the test, by far the most important thing you can do to achieve better outcomes - and support reading for pleasure - is to teach reading meaningfully.
"Students who read above average on ORF are likely reading too fast to make sense of what they are reading."
I worry that this quote is not an accurate or productive framing of what is known about the relationship between fluency and comprehension in developing readers.
I think we need to be wary of suggesting that pupils with above average WCPM are likely to have comprehension issues.
I can imagine teachers interpreting this quote by thinking they need to actively slow down the top quartile (or even the top half) of readers based on WCPM.
Yes, a small minority of pupils in the 75th-100th percentile for WCPM might be rushing in a way that leads to weaker comprehension than some pupils between the 50th-75th percentile.
I've spent the last few years working with hundreds of schools, enough to spot some patterns and (I hope) to write some useful threads over the coming months.
Here's the first one...
In my opinion, what do primary schools commonly get wrong with their reading lessons? 🪡
When I talk about reading lessons, in this case I'm not talking about phonics, story time, spelling, etc, despite the crucial contribution these make to reading development.
I'm talking about the (usually) daily reading lessons that have their own slot in the timetable.
What I see again and again are schools that are doing great things with one aspect of reading and ignoring other aspects that require attention.
A sensible way to avoid this mistake is to consider *three priorities* for reading lessons...
Yep. Kids need to feel prepared for KS2 SATs, but this should not dictate how children are taught for the preceding half of a decade.
Yep. Far too many 'reading activities' exist that are little more than holding activities. These are usually done when kids could be actually reading and discussing texts if only the reading lessons were organised with this in mind.
1. Write a one-sentence summary of the entire book, each chapter and each paragraph *in advance*. Some people can just throw words at a page and then tidy afterwards, but in most cases this leads to flabby, infocused writing.
2. Be ruthless in simplifying sentences that are tricky to parse. When I have a sentence that is potentially confusing, I imagine that someone has asked me, "What do you mean by this?" The way I would explain it in basic terms to them is almost always a superior version.
In the most basic terms, reading lessons involve a mixture of reading text and responding to it (i.e. discussing text or producing written responses).
And I think that in many (if not most) primary schools the balance between these two things is *way* off.
A thread... 🪡
At the start of my career, I was encouraged to teach reading using a carousel of guided groups. This was hugely inefficient and involved kids being placed into attainment-based groups, something I hated. Thankfully, I soon began teaching whole-class reading instead.
However, for quite a while I did what I think is standard practice in most schools who use whole-class reading: there was a little bit of reading and *lots* of discussion and written responses.