A Monstrous Regimen of Synthetic Phonics: Fantasies of Research-Based Teaching ‘Methods’ Versus Real Teaching

Abstract

In England, Higher Education institutions, together with the schools whose staff they train, are being required to incorporate synthetic phonics as one of the key approaches to the teaching of reading. Yet even if synthetic phonics can be identified as one of the component 'skills' of reading, an assumption vigorously contested in this paper, it does not follow that it can or should be taught explicitly and independently of reading for meaning. Imposing such a 'method' is, at a deep level, incompatible with teachers acting as teachers and potentially constitutes a kind of abuse of early readers. Moreover, because of the conceptual difficulties confronting any attempt to specify synthetic phonics as an approach, there cannot exist, in principle, empirical research that actually supports its value. Current policy in England since the Rose Report, at least, assumes the opposite. All this cannot be dismissed as a little local difficulty for England concerning the teaching of reading English with all its spelling irregularities: there are broader implications for the relationship between research and teaching, together with continuing tendencies to impose 'teacher proof' approaches on schools and their staff in many countries. bs_bs_banner

The effectiveness of synthetic phonics in the development of early reading skills among struggling young ESL readers

“…Blevins (2006) outlines four steps in synthetic phonics: (a) teaching letter name knowledge, (b) teaching correspondent sounds, (c) teaching blending in SCHOOL EFFECTIVENESS AND SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT 3 forming words, and (d) providing opportunities to blend unknown words in context. Davis (2012) adds that this allows for practice in the reading-for-meaning approach. The effectiveness of this approach has been proven for the development of early reading skills (Dixon et al, 2011;Johnston, McGeown, & Watson, 2012) among struggling readers in the ESL context (Lesaux & Siegel, 2003;Vadasy & Sanders, 2011;Yeung, Siegel, & Chan, 2013).…”

“…In the experimental group, all eight selected respondents indicated they mainly employed a similar decoding strategy for reading the text independently and fluently, which was using sounding and blending (Blevins, 2006;Davis, 2012). Respondent 1 stated "I sound out the words, one by one.…”

To read or not to read: decoding Synthetic Phonics

“…The threads were started by 'Moonpenny' , who instigated them by quoting passages from the original conference paper I wrote on this topic. A much-improved version of that paper appeared in a special issue of Journal of Philosophy of Education (Davis, 2012). Some contributors to the forum, especially 'thumbie' , helped me to understand key aspects of the debates much better, and others enabled me to shape my arguments more effectively (or so I would like to think) by their energetic opposition to all things non-SP.…”

The positions of primary and secondary schools in the English school field: a case of durable inequality

“…So much so that the New Labour government elected in 1997 introduced the Literacy and Numeracy strategies which prescribed in great detail what and how all primary teachers should teach. And, more recently, the present government imposed synthetic phonics as the 'preferred' method of teaching reading (Davis 2012). In the context of primary secondary relations these interventions were highly significant.…”