Ofsted has published the training course for inspectors on inspecting phonics, here and here. This is essential reading for co-ordinators, as it sets out exactly what is to be inspected and how they can expect inspectors to do their work. The second part of the course has useful examples of writing, with graded texts. Ofsted has designed the course to provide information for inspectors who might not be fully familiar with the issues, and considers that very experienced inspectors will already know much of the content. This is no doubt true, but is also a residue of Ofsted's error in 2005 in allowing any inspector to inspect anything. An inspector who does not have deep knowledge of early reading should not be inspecting it - a course of this nature is no substitute for experience.
I have previously argued that the "simple view of reading" is too simple, partly because it associates decoding purely with phonics, and partly because "comprehension" is only one of several elements involved in fluent reading. I'm still not sure that considering "comprehension" in terms of spoken as well as written language solves the problem, but think the difficulty may lie in the title. An activity that involves as many facets of human intellect as reading is not simple.
Further issues arise later. In what I've described as "phonics' second wind", longer words of Latin (rather fewer of Greek) origin have a high degree of phonic regularity. Like Spanish words, however, English words almost always have a single main stress point, that may vary even among words of the same family (photograph, photography, photographic). The letters won't tell us where this stress point is - we have to know the word, so that comprehension, if we accept it as including spoken language, actually aids decoding in these cases, and the information from letters has to be interpreted in its light.
Then there is phrasing. Children observed for Professor Katharine Perera's doctoral thesis (Manchester, 1989) only began to group words into meaningful phrases once they could read 60 to 70 words a minute accurately. This shows that word identification, aka decoding, is essential to comprehension. But there is a twist. The French government's analysis of English phrasing, here, shows that the pulse in individual words is part of a further stress system, in which one word in each sentence or phrase is emphasised more than the others.
Placing and weighting this stress depends on a combination of fast word identification, quick thinking and understanding of the language. It has much in common with music, and should be taught in the same way. Incidentally, it is this problem with intonation that has made it so hard to design computerised speech engines in English.
My concern that irregular features need to be fully explained and taught is only partly addressed in the Ofsed materials. The fact that "tricky" words include some letters that behave as expected - eg said - is true enough, but does not go far enough. Why do we have to suspend part of what our teacher tells us is the way to read a word? Children may (rarely) ask the question, but weaker readers are more often confused, and panic, guess or give up when they can't sound out a word one letter at a time.
The solution is to explain to children, in terms they understand, why the way we speak does not always quite match the way we write. This is much more effective than giving them a lot of things to learn separately just because they are "tricky". Languages and their spelling systems are human, and so have human foibles. Like most children, they behave most of the time, but not all of the time. Like most parents, they are usually in a good mood, but not always. They are influenced by habit, fashion and other languages, most notably French - saying table in French so that children can hear the l before the e is an effective demonstration. Then, once children know what they can and cannot expect from letters, much of the uncertainty and confusion that continues to dog reading can be dissolved, to be replaced with realistic expectations. Much like the rest of life.
This point is much more important than most reading specialists realise - Sue Palmer's recommendation of my work in The TES, here, and the invitation at the top of this weblog, have resulted in my resolving some of the most difficult cases, including many who have failed to learn to read despite intensive teaching by virtually every other method, including synthetic phonics. Tests carried out prior to my involvement in current work with a ten year old could not have been clearer - he read correctly every completely regular word, and could not read any that could not be simply sounded out. In every case over the past twenty years, a clear, accurate and realistic explanation of English spelling, warts and all, has been the key to enabling people to read and write. In the end, it is a question of telling the truth.
