Fads and fashion in the teaching of reading

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 !!!!

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.

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!

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.

JamesandJon33

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

As does my best friend!

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”!

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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. 😂😂😂

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

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.