Dumbing us down or making our kid literate?
Learning to read at primary school is extremely important, because without it no pupil can derive much from secondary education. Enabling the bottom 25% of the ability range to do so remains a huge challenge.
These problems have bedevilled the whole English-speaking world for decades, despite umpteen changes in teaching methods. Now phonics is about to join the ranks of approaches that briefly raised expectations but failed to make much of a difference in the long run. This will be true of the synthetic as well as the analytic variety.
Phonics was doomed to yield disappointing results, because half of all English words contain one or more non-phonic elements in them. Or as John Hart wrote in 1551, the problem stems from 'the vices and faultes of our writing, which cause it to be tedious, and long in learning; and learned hard, and evil to read'.
What makes English 'evil to read' is using identical letters, or letter strings, to represent different sounds: 'the - he, go - do, friend - fiend, eight - height, treat - threat, are - care, move - over - oven, count - country - groups, cough - rough - through - although - bought, miners / minerals, later - lateral, menu - emu.
Quite a few identically looking whole words have to be read differently in different contexts:
read, lead, live, bass, minute, house, use, deliberate, graduate, second, etc.
English spelling is even more 'tedious, and long in learning' because of the need to memorise hundreds of unpredictable spellings, particularly for vowels. English has no standard phonic method for spelling many of its vowel sounds. The medial EE-sound can be spelt as in 'steep, leap, people, period, piece' or 'police'. The short E as in 'bed, head, said, friend' or 'leopard'.
The final OO-sound as in 'to - two - too - true - blew - through - flu. And so on and on.
Because English has at least 3500 common words which contain some element of spelling unpredictability, even bright children need many years of intensive practice to become proficient spellers and slower learners become completely overwhelmed by the task.
Poor reading standards first began to attract serious attention in the late 1940s. Since then, many studies and surveys have reported that approximately 25% of English speakers, right across the world, are 'functionally illiterate' on leaving school. Our spelling system guarantees this failure rate. It has so far defeated all attempts to reduce it, including the current Literacy Strategy.
For a couple of years the Strategy made a difference. But research carried out by Professors Tymms and Fitz-Gibbon at the University of Durham, suggests that improvements as measured by government tests are indeed illusory. They have been administering a literacy test to 122 schools since 1997 - but one that schools do not specifically teach to or revise for. As measured by this test, there has been no real change in reading or vocabulary scores between 1997 and 2002.
For as long as our writing system continues to apply phonic principles very loosely, learning to read and write English will remain 'long' and 'tedious' and around 20 - 25% of learners will continue to leave school with little to show for the time they spent there. Not even J.K. Rowling has made much difference to this.
For the foreseeable future, our police and courts are likely to remain very busy, our prisons overcrowded and our insurance premiums high. We shall continue to pay heavily for our crazy spelling system.
posted by Unknown at 6:12 AM
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