Fads and fashion in the teaching of reading

Yes I was taught to read with ITA and along with being one of the youngest in class I really did struggle with spelling and reading. I didn't realise why till years later that I was taught to read this way. Even now I will look at words and am not sure if they are spelt correctly.

My daughter was taught using ITA,; she has the same problems

Thank goodness I learned with the good old c-a-t etc. method, and the Gdcs, as far as I can tell, have learned in the same way.

Trendy methods have IMO a lot to answer for.

My children did ITA in infant school. The teacher was Mis Humfreez.
They had no problem switching over; son is an English teacher and daughter is a Head of Internal Communications in a very large company. 😂😂😂

In my experience it really doesn’t matter what reading method you use.

Around a third will read very easily using that method.

Another third will need some extra support but will learn to read well using that method.

Another third will really struggle with that method and if they are made to continue with it will experience real difficulties. They need a different method.

The final 10% will always find reading difficult no matter what method is used.

The big problem is when adherents of one particular method gain ascendency and flexibility in approach goes out the window.

We don’t teach reading. We teach children. Or should do anyway.

We don’t teach reading. We teach children. Or should do anyway.

That's a bit of a quibble, isn't it? After all, we teach French, English, geography, maths, physics etc. Mostly to children, but adults can be taught all of these, and reading, too.

As I understand it, ITA was made learning to read very easy because it taught only one symbol per sound. Many languages have a similar structure to their written words, one symbol per sound, but English is an amalgam of many different languages, each with their own system of representing sounds with a letter or group of letters.

The problem with ITA, of course, was the one that those who adopted it didn't give serious consideration to, the conversion from the ITA to the conventional alphabet. Mind boggling when you think about it

It wasn't the only 'fashion' in the teaching of reading that was unevidenced and damaging to many children...

I don’t think it’s a quibble.

I think that people have different ways of learning that work best for them as individuals and that educators need to respect that. To teach the child.

I believe problems arise when a style of teaching becomes the most important thing and ignores individuals’ style of learning. Especially when someone who is struggling to learn with a particular method just keeps being given more and more ‘remedial’ work with the same thing that is causing their failure.

We’ve had this debate before and I know you believe that everybody can learn to read with phonics. And that those who are experiencing difficulties need extra phonics.

And I believe that a number of children will find that approach difficult and will find a different approach works better for them.

The phonics approach has been the main (sometimes only) approach in primary schools for over twenty years now and statistics show that around 30% of children don’t read to an expected standard.

People can reach their own conclusions.

An acceptable level?
When I was at school as a pupil, there was always a group of children who didn’t learn to read, or learned much more slowly than the other children. In juniors (now KS2) we were sorted into A, B, C and R classes. R was always the smallest class. If a child had a reading breakthrough, they were moved from R into another class. That often happened at age 7-8.
In my first teaching post there were still children who couldn’t read well, despite all the efforts to teach, help and support them. I’m not sure that ITA helped those who found reading difficult, it simply added another layer of challenge at the change over and made reading ordinary books and comics for pleasure impossible.

Even now, with synthetic phonics some children struggle. A lot more is known about why some find reading so difficult, encouraging teachers to use different strategies to teach the children.
One thing that has become more apparent is that poor speaking and listening skills -, or limited vocabulary contributes to reading problems.
Make story time at the end of the day official.

Jumping back in, l, personally, think that the best system is a combination of Look and Say and phonics. Old fashioned though it now is, the Ladybird Peter and Jane series that was used at my school, was based on this. Not all English words can be sounded out, which is where it is a good idea to build up an increasing number of sight words with phonics to help where necessary. I was fortunate to find reading easy and the present over emphasis on phonics over sight words would have bored me to tears as l suspect it probably does with quick readers today. Having said that, phonics is the best system very often for dyslexic children. I agree that it should not be a case of one size fits all but I think most teachers would recognise this.

@Mollygro, I couldn't agree more about story time. It is more important now than ever before and should be compulsory throughout primary school

I learnt to read prior to going to Primary School, where ITA was taught. Teachers tried to insist to my mother that I “unlearn” and “relearn” ITA, astonished my mother said no, it took my grandfather, a local grammar school teacher, with whom we lived, to visit the school and insist I be left as I was “reading properly”!

JamesandJon33

My daughter was taught using ITA,; she has the same problems

As does my best friend!

Most phonics schemes agree about “look and say”.
They teach “high frequency” words that can’t be sounded out, but which appear frequently in early books to make them readable; the, was, and here for example.
Reading Recovery has focused on those words for years.

I started school in 1950; I don't ever remember learning to read - I just could!

When I started teaching in 1966, the fashion was for Look and Say with flash cards, but I had seen teachers on my school practices using phonics, so I did a mixture of the two. My school used a mixture of Janet and John and Peter and Jane.

The only other fashion I remember was from when DD went to school in the late 1980s, where they used Letterland, which was really another Phonics method.

When I returned to teaching in the 1990s, I did a lot of work with children with reading difficulties at junior school level, individual and group based, and focussed mainly on phonics and making it fun with games and activities.

I have no idea what the current fashion is!

My daughter learned to read using ITA. I remember one of the other parents saying "If they want the children to learn to read English why are they teaching them Bulgarian first?" She had a lot of trouble with spelling when they changed to proper English. In spite of this she got an A for English A Level and ended up with a PhD. She still sometimes rings me to check spellings though. They had dropped ITA by the time her brother started school, and he has never had any problem with spelling.

Dick and Dora anyone ? Mind blowingly boring I seem to remember. But then my father had taught me to read using the Daily Telegraph ( circling words with a pencil!) probably to keep me out of his hair !!!!

I was a primary school teacher in the early seventies and taught seven year olds. They had just come up from the infants where they had been taught ITA. Out of the 39 children, only six could read conventionally.
It took me over six months to get the rest to read using look and say and phonetic methods. There were a couple who couldn’t get the hang of it at all.
It made me so angry that they would bring in this new ideas without actually realising the consequences!

All my 4 could read before they started school, I think they just absorbed it from having books read to them and always being surrounded by books. I particularly remember my son when , not three years old, was sitting in his car seat and he suddenly shouted 'Expect for Aches'. When he was asked what he meant he said it was a sign on the road. Eventually we realised he'd read the sign 'Accept for Access', he was the eldest of our children and at that particular time his lack of speech was beginning to worry me. Needless to say he was too busy absorbing it all to actually repeat stuff.

I tend to think that all children learn everything differently and at different speeds so whichever system is used it won't suit every child.

My children in the 70s were taught with a very strange METHOD of Look & and Say. They found it difficult, so I went round Jumble Sales collecting Janet&John books and taught them myself!

I am a school reader volunteer, so my little ones get they way I was taught. I was talking to a Y2 about the "magic e" when Head of Infants overheard. He picked up on this and used it himself.
I find it really silly that we teach 5/6 year olds about split digraphs - they do not need to know the name of all the rules, just what they do.

However schools are failing the dyslexic and the hard of hearing because they need different help.

I was taught to read using ITA in the mid 1960s and didn’t have any problems at all. I have always enjoyed reading and constantly have one or two books on the go.
Not reading related, but I remember using ‘Colour Factor’ to learn maths at infant school. They were different coloured blocks, varying in length for the numbers 1-12. They helped with addition & subtraction. Maths was my favourite subject at school, so both these systems must have been good for my education 😀

There will always be a few who need extra help. Let's be frank - the quality of the teaching is what makes the difference .

I learned to read on my mother's knee , so when I started school aged 4 I was already able to read fluently, and was put in a class where phonics were being taught, I was bored rigid and miserable. . Luckily I was eventually moved to a class of older children where I thrived.
In my case it was nothing to do with the quality of teaching., of course.

Mollygo

Most phonics schemes agree about “look and say”.
They teach “high frequency” words that can’t be sounded out, but which appear frequently in early books to make them readable; the, was, and here for example.
Reading Recovery has focused on those words for years.

Most phonics schemes don't 'agree about look and say' at all. Unless of course, phonics schemes have changed a great deal in the last decade. I knew most of the authors of the well known schemes of the early 2,000s and they every one of them would reject Look and Say. The most some of them would do was to introduce a few words which helped with reading and writing early texts and which used sound/symbol correspondences which would be introduced later in the programme.

OTOH, I worked with children in Y7 & 8. Amazing the number of them who came from primary barely able to read, with Statements (this was pre ECHPs) which year after year said that in order to improve their (non existent) reading skills they need to learn the first 45 high frequency words (a whole language concept, of course). Some of them had finally learned that in 6 years, but really couldn't read anything else..

So much nonsense about learning to read really needs to be put to sleep...

I found this interesting because I am sure my sister was taught to read under some new scheme possibly with phonetics. She started school in 1965, which seems earlier than the suggest time frame. I learned to read very easily and have always loved books. I am three and a half years older than my sister who always struggled and couldn't spell very well, she still can't. Of course there's no way of knowing if she would have found it difficult if she had been taught the same way that I was.