Alphabetical (7 page)

ix)
       
whether pictures should or should not be used in conjunction with letters or words

x)
        
whether to teach reading through what we would call ‘morphology' which includes how words can be changed by doing such things as adding plurals, prefixes, suffixes, verb endings such as ‘-ing' and ‘-ed', internal verb changes such as ‘drink-drank-drunk'

From the seventeenth century, some guides talked of rules for spelling:

    
E at the end of words no sound doth make,

    
Only in these which for Example take . . .

The words ‘Chloe', ‘Jubilee' and ‘Galilee' are cited as the exceptions. Some books list as many as sixty-five rules which had to be learned.

Alongside these varying approaches which try to teach reading from what has been called the ‘bottom up', others pondered on whether it could be taught in a top-down way, from learning whole words, titles, phrases or even whole passages. Origins of the ‘look-and-say' method of teaching to read can be found as early as 1799, when it was suggested that children could learn to read ‘logographically', learning whole words by their appearance. This was sometimes called ‘reading without spelling'. Yet another theory believed that dictation was the best method, whereby the teacher (or older pupil) read slowly while the children wrote what was being read. (This was a regular part of my learning French in the 1950s and 60s.) For each of these arguments, there were counter-blasts disproving the worth or efficacy of the method.

Alongside these school-based approaches, many other kinds of initiations into literacy were going on. Some small-time popular printers produced booklets like the phenomenally popular
Reading Made Easy
, a title that originated from at least as early as 1786 and which came to be known in the trade as ‘Reading Easies'. The alphabet rhyme begins:

    
A was an Acorn, that grew on the oak;

    
B is a Boy, who delights in his book.

    
C is a Canister, holds mamma's teas;

    
D is a Drum, you may sound if you please . . .

It finishes:

    
W is a Wren, that was perch'd on a spray;

    
X was King Xerxes, well known in his day.

    
Y is a Yew Tree, both slender and tall;

    
Z Zachariah, the last of 'em all.

From the mid-sixteenth century a popular street literature put print into the hands of the little or non-educated. We shall never know for certain what kind of contribution this massive, popular and diverse trade made to literacy levels in Britain but I suspect a good deal.

An invention in another part of the print world had an impact too: the invention of the children's book, sold through booksellers as a source of pleasure in itself. Street literature was supplemented with books for children full of wood-cuts and engravings, with rhymes and give-away toys, the most important of which (in my view) is
Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book
from 1744 – a two-volume book of which only Volume 2 survives. Each page carries a picture and a nursery rhyme – long ones carrying over to further pages – some appearing for the first time, some familiar to us today. The tone is set with the first page of the rhymes:

    
Lady Bird, Lady Bird,

    
Fly away home,

    
Your house is on fire

    
Your Children will burn.

On the last page there is an ‘Advertisement' which speaks volumes of what the prevailing methods of teaching children to read involved and what the book stands opposed to:

    
The Childs Plaything

    
I recommend for Cheating

    
Children into Learning

    
Without any Beating

The author is given as ‘N. Lovechild' where ‘N' is a joke meaning ‘Nurse'. A line stretches from this wild and funny little book through hundreds of thousands of picture books, comics, magazines and annuals for the youngest children, enticing them to read, have fun, ponder and wonder.

As we have seen, across the centuries a theoretical discourse has taken place between experts about order and method. Coming to the present day, a short while ago I was asked to speak at a conference on early reading and was soon engaged in a fiery exchange of opinions with a head teacher about learning to read.

A bit of context: the UK government has stipulated that all ‘maintained' schools (those run by local authorities) in England must follow a specific method of teaching its youngest pupils to read. This is what is known as ‘phonics', the exact flavour of which in England comes with its full title, ‘systematic synthetic phonics'. This is a method which teaches reading according to the ‘alphabetic principle', which is that the purpose and history of the alphabet is to provide us with a set of visual symbols (‘graphemes') representing the sounds we make (‘phonemes') when we speak. It is ‘synthetic' because it shows children how we put sounds together to make whole words. For example, the sound of ‘b' goes before ‘at' to make ‘bat'.

The question that has dominated the debate about the teaching of reading for at least thirty years is whether it's best to use phonics as the sole method, the main method, one of several methods or not at all. Of course, before we get stuck into these debates, it's always good to have agreement about what we mean by ‘reading'. For hundreds of years, the usual way of testing whether a child can read has been to ask the child to read out loud. One problem with this is that being able to
read out loud is no evidence that a child is understanding what they're reading. Most people in education are fully aware of this, which is why the word ‘decoding' is useful. It means, in practice, reading a word out loud accurately – and nothing more. It's argued by some that the best way to teach children to read is first to teach ‘decoding' – making the right sounds for the right letters and letter combinations; the meanings of the words will flow after that. What's more, say the phonics experts, once children are tooled up with the alphabetic principle they can tackle words they have never seen before.

Some say therefore that the best way to pass on these alphabetic tools is to teach phonics, ‘first, fast and only'. This means preventing children from looking at stories and poems that they can't yet read as it will discourage and dishearten them and, they say, one of the main purposes of ‘first, fast and only' phonics is that it's comparatively easy and full of confidence-boosting success right from the start.

Several problems hover around all this. I'll pose them as questions:

1.
    
Do we know whether children who learn phonics ‘first, fast and only' are better able to read unfamiliar and non-phonically regular words than children who learn to read using ‘mixed methods'? After all, it really doesn't matter all that much if a child is brilliant at reading phonically regular words like ‘hat' and ‘trod', if he or she cannot read words like ‘would' or ‘laugh'. The evidence suggests that intensive phonics teaching is no better at helping children to read the non-regular words than teaching by using mixed methods.

2.
    
Do we know whether children who learn phonics ‘first, fast and only' are better able to understand what they're
reading when they're seven, eight, nine and ten years old? No, there is no evidence to suggest that they are better able to do this than children using mixed methods.

3.
    
Some children find it very difficult to learn to read at the time they are first taught in England which is between four and six. There is evidence to suggest that this applies to as many as one in five children. Do we know if all, most, some or few of these children have these difficulties because they haven't grasped the alphabetic principle or are there other reasons?

What we do know is that most such children have several problems and that these vary between children and vary for any given child over time. This variety and range of differences is surely to be expected, given that the ultimate aim is for the child to be able to read unfamiliar or difficult words and to be able to understand what he or she is reading. Learning to read for meaning and understanding is not a simple matter.

In fact, it is so un-simple, no one is absolutely certain how we do it. What's more, the children who learn to read come from a wide range of emotional and physical backgrounds where there is a massive variance in a number of factors: in attitudes to learning and to the place of print in daily life; in experiences of language; and in rates of maturation and development. In addition, some children have a hearing impairment or no hearing at all, so at least some of them will learn to read using visual methods. Anyone who works with children can ‘read' this diversity from the children they teach.

My attitude to language is that it involves making strings of sounds and words in the common ways shared by people in the language community we live in. These strings are the sequences, phrases, sentences, conversations, paragraphs, chapters that we
hear, talk, read and write. We do not talk to each other or write to each other isolated letter by isolated letter, or even by isolated word by isolated word. Everything we hear, talk, read and write is in a context of something else heard, spoken, read or written as well as in the context of something else that will be heard, spoken, read or written – immediately after or later on. This happens as part of daily life even when all we seem to be saying to each other is:

‘OK?'

‘Yep.'

‘Mum?'

‘Not bad.'

‘Uh-huh.'

With nursery rhymes, songs and stories children learn sequences of written English. Part of the problem of ‘getting' what reading is about is precisely in learning how these written sequences work: learning that they are similar to the way we speak but not identical to them. One of the best ways to do this is through hearing the sequences and grammar of writing in your head so that when you sit down to read, those structures are familiar rather than strange. An anecdote to illustrate this: one of the ways my two youngest children learned to read – along with all the other input of written and read material – was using a reading scheme which included the word ‘would'. This posed problems for both of them, who were being schooled in phonics and had not taken in whatever method the school had used to teach them to read ‘would'. Some methods say that they are ‘tricky' words, or some such, and teach the children to read such words by a method that the phonics system replaced: looking and saying (‘look-and-say'), or learning ‘by sight'. Others point out that ‘-oul-' can, in some words (‘could', ‘should' and ‘would'), be sounded like the ‘u' in ‘put'. Whatever method
the school used, it didn't stick with either child. So in my spell of hearing each of them read – separated by four years – I encouraged both of them to do something else: read on and go back to see if it made sense after that. In both cases this worked. That's because they went beyond the alphabetic principle and moved to a grammatical and semantic one. They could hear in that particular context that it said ‘would'; they could make the phrase or sentence make sense if they said ‘would'.

A strange situation is emerging in the world of teaching everyone with the same method of systematic synthetic phonics: a fair proportion of children arrive at school who have learned to read a little, quite a lot or very well indeed. These children are treated as if they are in exactly the same place as those who cannot read at all. They are frequently told now that they are ‘not really reading' or that they have much more to learn because it is thought they have ‘not grasped the alphabetic principle'. Then, in English schools, the children are given a ‘phonics screening check' where such children may well find that they ‘fail' – partly because the test includes phonically regular nonsense words like ‘strom' – a word that a good but very young reader may well try to ‘correct' and read as ‘storm'.

However, the truth is that many of us for hundreds of years have learned how to read without being taught it exclusively through matching letters to sounds, day after day. There is really no reason to think that such children will not learn to read or will learn to read only using a purely phonic method. We did it by mixed methods: some phonics; some whole-word recognition and memorizing; some learning of rhymes off by heart; some drilling with flash cards; some guessing of words from the context we knew from pictures or repetition; some repeated use of high-frequency words; some repeated use of sounds through alliteration, rhyme and assonance; some through reading back
things we said that were scribed for us by parents and teachers; some reading of street signs, adverts, cereal packets, words on TV, product names; some reading of labels on things at school or home; and a little or a lot of being read to by family, friends and teachers.

Meanwhile, the converse is happening: some children are becoming quite fluent readers, passing a ‘reading' test – reading out loud – without understanding what they're reading. I can fully understand this: I can do the same with Italian. I've been taught how their alphabetic principles work, and can read quite difficult passages out loud without understanding much beyond the few words I recognize. I am a good bad reader of Italian, fairly useless in fact. My way of reading this language – and indeed the way some young children read out loud without understanding what they're reading – has been nicknamed ‘barking at print'.