Maybe I'm slow off the mark here but I was alerted this week to a programme that is on sale now that will teach children 'reading fluency'. I'll come to what it is in a moment, but first a few words about where we've got to with 'learning to read'.
In 2011, I was present at the launch in the House of Commons of the Reading Association's Summer Reading Challenge, a nationwide effort to get children going to libraries and reading books. Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister at the time gave a speech. He hardly mentioned the Reading Challenge at all. He used the occasion to launch his government's policy on phonics, which would involve compulsory phonics sessions in every maintained school in England with a phonics screening test at the end of Year One. Nick Gibb said that this would 'eradicate illiteracy'.
At the time, I thought that that was a bold claim. All sorts of efforts over the last 100 years or so in many different countries have been tried out to 'eradicate' illiteracy and to date all that had been found was that there were competing ways to 'improve' literacy.
Digression: I was taught to read using a scheme called 'Beacon Readers'. In the teachers' guide to the scheme, the writers pointed out that it would be a great mistake to teach reading in a way that either only worked on what they called 'phonetics' (what we would now call 'phonics') or solely on 'meaning'. The scheme, they claimed, would combine both. And indeed it did. Stories, words lists using repeated phonemes all linked together.
When Nick Gibb's phonic revolution came in, one way they did it was to claim that the obstacle facing children was 'Look and Say', a method which supposedly or actually tried to teach reading by teaching 'whole words'. What surprised me at the time was that I was of a generation that wasn't taught to read that way and yet I didn't ever hear the argument against the Beacon Readers method.
So, phonics came in and here we are 14 or so years later, and simple question: has illiteracy been eradicated? If not, why not? If so, what are the problems that remain?
I can't answer those questions directly but I'm picking up a few hints. Firstly, is the one concerning the Key Stage 2 scores. I've heard experts talking about how they're worried that these scores seem 'difficult to budge'. Really? Surely after all this phonics, then we should have seen huge leaps in the KS2 scores. This would be or should be the proof in the pudding. Teach phonics: push up reading scores for 11 year olds. No?
Well there's one theoretical problem here: phonics is a way of teaching the alphabetic code as an abstract skill - it matches phonemes and graphemes. It's supposed to be detached and detachable from reading-for-meaning. A good phonics performer, it's claimed, can see most words for the first time and read them or at least have a good shot at them. On the other hand, the KS2 reading test asks the children to answer questions related to the meaning. (I have strong criticisms of this but I'll leave that to one side.) The key word here is 'meaning'.
Those of us who were critical of the phonics revolution kept using this word 'meaning'. We were (and still are) concerned that children were spending a lot of time looking at texts (reading schemes) and not relating their knowledge of the alphabetic code to meaning. As a result, the actual process of what we all commonly understand reading to be (ie reading for meaning) was, and is, taking a back seat.
When we raised this, we've been pushed away and told that we're doubters and people who are trying to prevent children from progressing. Hmmm. The lack of 'progress' accusation seems to be the one that can be directed at this failure of the system to get the Key Stage 2 scores to budge.
Oh no, say the defenders of phonics, look out our PISA scores! What these show is that England has risen in the international table. Hooray! But they only show a tiny improvement on scores. How can that be? Well, anyone who follows football knows precisely how. You can win the league one year with, say 85 points, but the next year you can get 85 points and come second. There is not a direct correlation between raw scores and places in a league. This elementary fact seemed to escape the notice of the commentators and, stand by for when or if this government introduces some changes to reading policies and the newspapers will again mis-read the meaning of the PISA tables. That's because they will have been briefed by people who defend the phonics revolution.
But now we have another very big hint that all might not be well with phonics revolution and 'phonics-will-eradicate-illiteracy' line. The remarkable Ruth Miskin who devised a phonics programme (as well as advised the government on phonics - surely a coincidence), has developed a reading fluency programme.
What schools should do is buy the programme and buy the training. Of course. As a writer for children, I will immediately declare an interest here: money from school budgets to buy Ruth Miskin's phonics programme and money from school budgets to buy Ruth Miskin's reading fluency programme is less money to buy books for children. I reveal this fact to anticipate the argument that I am only talking about this stuff because it affects my pocket.
Nevertheless, I will take the view that Ruth Miskin herself has clocked that even her fail-safe phonics scheme may not enable children to read fluently. So, simple question again, why not?
What possible obstacle to reading fluently can there be if nearly all children are passing their phonics screening check?
I have some recent experience of this with myself. I have done some Yiddish classes. Yiddish can be written with the same letters I'm using here (so-called 'Roman alphabet') but traditionally it's written with Hebrew letters. I have done phonics with these in order to learn them. What do you think my difficulty has been? Reading fluently! So, though I could say out loud each letter, I found recognising words and getting the 'flow' quite difficult. I think I know why. I didn't do any writing so I didn't get to express myself in writing in Yiddish (though I can say quite a lot of elementary things and colloquial stuff that my parents said.) And also I didn't immerse myself in enough simple texts to be able to become fluent. Further, in a way that is similar to English, there are exceptions to the regular forms. Unless these are artificially excluded from texts, they pose problems if you want to be fluent.
So, excuse me for using my own experience but I can see some analogies here with the problem that I suspect even Ruth Miskin has spotted. Real texts and real reading of real texts are more complicated then saying out loud simplified texts devised in order to teach phonics.
So will Ruth Miskin's second batch of materials do the trick? I will say, in spite of my declared interest, what's the matter with real books? If the aim is to get children reading and understanding real books, why not give them real books? Why create yet another level before you get to read real books ? Anyway, there'll be fewer real books available because all the money has gone on phonics materials and fluency materials!
I am expecting there will be a third tier of materials soon. Why not the Ruth Miskin anthologies so that children won't need to read real books, instead they follow programmed reading all the way through primary schools? There really isn't any need for children to read real books at all, is there?
Here's Ruth Miskin's fluency programme. Buy, buy, buy.
(The title 'Beyond Phonics' is a bit of a giveway, innit? 'Beyond'? But I was told that phonics could do it all. Native speakers, people told me, would do phonics and then be able to read. I've seen TV programmes on it. But now we need 'Beyond Phonics'. Buy, buy, buy.)
https://www.ruthmiskin.com/comprehension/
