How Schools Teach Reading

How schools teach reading when children are first starting out is a very relevant question at this time at the start of the school year, especially for the parents of children who are heading to school for the first time.

Basically, there are two main methods:

1. Children are taught to memorise a list of high frequency words (often 100 or 200 words), they are taught some incidental (analytical) phonics and are encouraged to use the first and last letters of words and guess the rest, often using pictures to give them clues. This sort of approach is generally referred to as “whole language”, or more recently “balanced literacy”.
2. The other main approach is explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics – synthetic because children are taught the sounds of letters and then how to make (synthesise) words using these sounds.

I first came across method one in late 1984 when my youngest son, who is now 36, was about to start school. I remember the infant mistress telling parents, “We don’t teach children to read all of the sounds in words any more, we just teach them to look at the first and last letters and guess what is in the middle.” To me that sounded like a recipe for disaster, so, over the summer holidays, I taught him the most common sound of each letter and how to blend them to read three letter words. At that stage I had not been teaching reading at all. My background was in teaching senior geology and maths.

He then marked time for two terms. This was also the time of “real books” instead of graded readers. In the third term his teacher went on long service leave and he had a young teacher who had trained in England and taught them phonics. He took off and has never looked back. He is now teaching in a university himself.

Things have changed a little since then. Now an emphasis on learning high frequency sight words just by heart has been added to the mix. But we are still left with the problem of what to do if your school uses this type of “whole language” or “balanced literacy” to teach initial literacy. Many major studies have shown that this leads to about 25% of children having significant on-going difficulties with reading and spelling.

So what do parents do? I chose to teach my son myself and he was fine. I started working as a support teacher in a high school setting the year after he started school. In the third year of that job, I had a large group of students come through who were having significant difficulty with reading at a Year 7 level because they just did not know any two and three-letter vowel sounds.

Since then I have spent my life developing material to help parents, students and teachers to tackle this problem in a way that does not require background knowledge – they can pick it up on the way through. Ironically, many teachers have not learned how to teach what is now known as explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics through their teacher training. This leads to confusion with “incidental or analytical phonics” that analyses words when they come across them. Most teachers are good hearted and have their students’ best interests at heart. But, when parents try to raise this issue, the reply is often, “But we do teach phonics.”

So we are still often left with the problem of how schools teach reading and what to do. It is the first year or two that is the crucial time to get the basics right.

I would love to hear other people’s stories and experiences.