Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step. The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all, and we regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.
If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.
> Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step
Well, part of the problem is that it's unclear what people are suggesting. Until pretty recently there was a big gap between "phonics works pretty well" and "here's how you build a phonics curriculum". Teachers actually need that gap to be closed. What happens in practice is someone hears this podcast, and shows up at meetings demanding that teachers teach phonics and the science of reading without knowing what any of it is.
> The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all
This is a big exaggeration. Phonics works better but whole language works OK.
> regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.
We'll see how well phonics does. My guess is that reading is pretty hard and phonics will help, but we'll still see poor literacy rates. The UK has been doing synthetic phonics and it's not been going great [0], for instance.
> If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.
> Phonics works better but whole language works OK.
The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for low SES students.
Again, phonics is just about decoding language. Comprehension require a lot of vocabulary exposure, cultural competency, and other adjacent things that help build a mental schema of the language. The study the Guardian is citing says exactly this.
It's important to understand that the Guardian is engaged in a political debate around phonics and is criticizing it for "encourage a love of reading," which is not the point of teaching the decoding step to begin with. The Guardian article grossly misrepresents the actual study, which says in its conclusion that NO study in the UK met the evidentiary requirements for their inclusion criteria but other studies from the broader Anglosphere suggest that phonics is important in learning to read
>> Phonics works better but whole language works OK.
> The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for low SES students.
Again "fails totally" is wrong, but also low SES students are a difficult group for complicated reasons, none of which teachers control.
> Again, phonics is just about decoding language. Comprehension require a lot of vocabulary exposure, cultural competency, and other adjacent things that help build a mental schema of the language. The study the Guardian is citing says exactly this.
Totally agree, my beef is that most of the legislation and parental demands around phonics and SOR force teachers to use phonics in situations where they know it won't work, or actively isn't working.
> It's important to understand that the Guardian is engaged in a political debate around phonics and is criticizing it for "encourage a love of reading,"
I mean maybe, but go beyond it and look at the stuff they cite: the report and the PISA study. Teachers aren't just responsible for getting students to sound out words correctly, they need to take illiterate children and make them functioning members of advanced societies. The report has lots of data on how the focus on phonics undermines this long term goal.
The quote from the DoE is:
"Since the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012, the percentage of Year 1 pupils meeting the expected standard in reading has risen from 58% to 82%, with 92% of children achieving this standard by Year 2."
That's good! But it's entirely unresponsive to the argument the report makes, which is that while phonics works for getting students to sound stuff out, their reading scores in subsequent years drop dramatically. It's Table 1 in their report.
> which says in its conclusion that NO study in the UK met the evidentiary requirements for their inclusion criteria but other studies from the broader Anglosphere suggest that phonics is important in learning to read
I don't think this is what it says, but either way it's pretty common for academic papers to list ways their conclusions could be wrong. This is a sign of a good paper, not a bad one.
I think maybe we're talking past each other a bit here. First I agree that phonics alone is insufficient and in and of itself does not lead to reading comprehension. I think the evidence is clear there. It also seems clear from the report that England is wielding it like a hammer.
> I mean maybe, but go beyond it and look at the stuff they cite: the report and the PISA study. Teachers aren't just responsible for getting students to sound out words correctly, they need to take illiterate children and make them functioning members of advanced societies. The report has lots of data on how the focus on phonics undermines this long term goal.
Yeah, my issue was that the Guardian piece was cherry picking from the report to make it seem like phonics was useless and not based in evidence. Whereas the report makes it clear that phonics is in fact excellent as a first step, but must be followed by broader instruction in language/culture/literature/etc.
> don't think this is what it says, but either way it's pretty common for academic papers to list ways their conclusions could be wrong.
I was paraphrasing pretty directly from the conclusion section. My point being that the Guardian was making stronger claims than the research supports, or rather the existing research wasn't great and the report acknowledges that but the Guardian obscures it.
I think overall England has probably gone in the wrong direction and treats phonics like the proverbial hammer. In particular there seems to also be a weird trend there in abandoning instruction in the cultural competency required to comprehend most extant English language writing. My concern is that here in the US, teaching has to its detriment abandoned phonics in favor of a whole language model which has proven terrible at teaching kids to decode language.
Yeah I think this is mostly fair. I had to read it multiple times to form a reasonable opinion because it's written in this disjointed style.
I think we agree broadly. The US slept on phonics for some regrettable reasons, we're probably gonna swing super hard the other way and over correct, and we'll deal with the fallout from that in a few years haha.
> The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for low SES students.
There's a genetic component there too; my children are adopted and had wildly differing outcomes from the same curricula (and often same teachers). My personal opinion from observation (N=4, plus a few kids of friends) is that some kids will teach themselves phonics even in a whole-language program. Other kids don't. And the kids who don't struggle to read until someone teaches it to them.
You've gotta wonder how a nation's schooling standards shift to something like "Whole language" without, say, at least testing the methodologies to see if it results in better or worse outcomes. Seems like no actual validation was done.
As the sibling comment mentions, it was tested. It got tied up in some weird politics and the George W. Bush administration was championing evidence based reading programs so teaching programs at places like Colombia took the opposite stance. Obviously that's a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the idea.
If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.