My boyhood hero, Bobby Charlton, used to say that a footballer was as good as his last match. So it was good to hear that my new 11 year old pupil last week told his mother on the way home that it had been the best English lesson he’d ever had. He had been assessed as dyslexic, wrote by putting together a rough approximation of the sounds needed to represent each word, and read similarly, using some, but not all, of the information conveyed by the letters, with guessing from context. As usual, this caused hesitation and frequent breakdown, as he tried to make sense of an error by misreading the words that followed it.
Why was I not surprised? The pattern is repeated hundreds and thousands of times over, the legacy of the reading wars, failed strategies, and the version of phonics endorsed by both major parties over the past 20 years. Labour’s review, by the late Sir James Rose, was followed by appointing the leader of a pressure group, the Reading Reform Foundation, as lead of a group designing national guidance, when they had no experience of teaching people to read. Conservatives made it worse by enforcing the same approach, whole phonics rather than real phonics, across the country. It helped in the earliest stages of reading by orienting children towards print rather than guessing, but then caused confusion as the variations in spelling, caused by our history, were not explained, chiefly because those in charge did not understand them. Five years after his review, Sir James understood and endorsed my approach. Politicians, across the spectrum, ignored it.
Simon, as we shall call him, did not fall into the trap of using another word if he could not spell the one he wanted, and the school responded by circling the errors rather than correcting them. Or, rather, most of them, as almost one word in two was misspelled. I’m teaching a girl a year older, who has almost exactly the same problem, and has just done very well in a science test because her teacher had time to go through what she had actually written to get at what she meant to write. As the teacher said, that is not something she can count on in real life.
The solution, for these children and everyone else I’ve helped since the 90s, is to help the person adjust their thinking to take account of the way the alphabet is really used in English, including what can be done with 26 letters, when the language has a substantially greater number of sounds. I’ve described the approach in detail in my article for the Chartered College of Teaching . It usually starts with the letters in the person’s name, and moves quickly to the Norman conquest, which made just as big an impact on the language as it did on the landscape. Explaining this, starting with the simple example of “table” – say it in French and you can hear the le in the correct order – unlocks large numbers of words that cannot be read by “decoding” them from left to right. Computerised dictionaries put the proportion as just under a third of the language, including the large number of words of Latin and Greek origin that are shared between English and French.
A couple (shared word) of simple questions and maxims make the whole picture clear. The language is 1000 years old, and if we were 1000 years old, we’d have a few wrinkles. Languages, like children – and adults – do not behave perfectly all the time, and we need to be ready for that. The letters will always help us, but will not always tell us everything we need to know. This includes the English phenomenon of emphasising one syllable in words containing more than one, which the letters will rarely tell us. So, we use what the letters tell us, but don’t believe the letters tell us everything. We then practise what we’ve learned. Brain research tells us that this results in myelin being put onto the new neural connections, speeding things up so that we no longer need to build words from scratch.
The reading lesson comes to resemble a music lesson, with each new element carefully introduced and explained, taking care to match the work to the developing knowledge and understanding of the learner. The adaptation for spelling – where just four elements need to be borne in mind – uses the same principle. A Hackney deputy head, who had watched me teach a lot, summed it up thus – “Make it perfectly clear, then practise”. More examples and comments from parents and teachers, who have seen the work at first hand, are on this website. It is much harder to make an impact on organisations, whether the Department for Education or voluntary associations and pressure groups. Organisations synthesise beliefs and knowledge in order to form and promote policies. They do not explore in sufficient depth to ensure that knowledge, beliefs and policies are soundly based. At the moment, they are not, and lives are blighted as a result.
Sir James told me that he believed the other members of his review had been too quick to discard research evidence, but the issue is, rather, that they have not scrutinised enough of it, or it closely enough. Castles et al have shown that the key contribution of phonics is to establish the principle of using the alphabet to read. Perera (1989) that fast accurate word identification is the basis of phrasing. Wilkins, Evans and Irlen that sensitivity to light, especially fluorescent light, makes reading more difficult for a significant minority. Bradley and Bryant that conscious awareness of patterns in sound is important in using phonic connections. Crystal that letter patterns in English often represent the sounds of other languages. Snowling that early hearing problems, including glue ear often cause difficulty withnreading. Each of these issues can affect learning to read, and can be expressed and explained in plain English. But power dictates policy for good or ill, and power plus error makes an irresistible combination. Unless those in power can be made to see sense, the misery will continue.