Just to be clear, we were just reporting the views of the academic who was questioning the value of phonics for able readers - and we did emphasise that his views are controversial.
We absolutely did not mean our article to appear as though we at MFM agreed with his comments. We're not academic or teachers, so we're well aware that we're not even slightly qualified to make a judgement!
We're grateful to you for putting forward the counter view, and pointing out that teachers don't 'blindly teach all children the same way'.
It would be great to hear from you - and other teachers - how you think the current emphasis on phonics is working.
As a reception teacher, any child that came into my class with a love of books and an ability to read at any level, would not be forced to read books only containing the letter sounds taught at school. I'm sure that the majority of teachers are sympathetic to the different needs, abilities and interests of ALL children in the class. This article assumes that teachers just blindly teach all children the same thing in the same way. There is clearly a lack of understanding of what the teaching profession is all about here.
In my opinion synthetic phonics is not a good way to learn how to read. This system primarily does not work in the English language as so many of the letters have different sounds for different words. This is not a consistent way to learn to read English and I think this argument that phonics works fall down when the children are being taught phonics and the sounds and then told a lot of the words phonics doesn't work on. How confusing is that? I was taught to read in the 70's and don't remember phonics. What I do rememberer is reading with my teacher and doing spelling tests where you learnt the words. As such I am able to spell and read. I know a lot of children cannot read properly and certainly cannot spell. I think this is a result of teaching synthetic phonics.
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Thanks for your comments, HelenFenton.
Just to be clear, we were just reporting the views of the academic who was questioning the value of phonics for able readers - and we did emphasise that his views are controversial.
We absolutely did not mean our article to appear as though we at MFM agreed with his comments. We're not academic or teachers, so we're well aware that we're not even slightly qualified to make a judgement!
We're grateful to you for putting forward the counter view, and pointing out that teachers don't 'blindly teach all children the same way'.
It would be great to hear from you - and other teachers - how you think the current emphasis on phonics is working.