SHOULD A LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY BE SPENT ON AN UNINFORMATIVE TEST AS THE PHONICS SCREENING CHECK?

Australia is considering Phonics Screening Check, used in England.  Academics, there are highly critical of this non-essential national test instigated by politicians and professionals on the periphery of the school/classroom (e.g. speech therapists).

I will begin by explaining the Phonics Screening Check.

-          In England towards the end of year 1, children are checked on the ‘sounding out’ or blending of 40 phonemic words.  20 are pseudo (nonsense) words, for example, ’f-e-p’ and they are placed first on the check, followed by 20 known English words, for example,

c-a-t, f-l-i-p. Note: pseudo words are a part of the Sutherland Phonological Awareness Test used by ‘periphery’ professionals.

-          This check is given to all year 1 children towards the end of the school year, regardless of the time spent at school, and regardless of whether they are considered age-appropriate competent readers.

-          Children’s pass mark must be 32. If they ‘fail’ they repeat the test the following year.

That piece of ‘checking’ cannot happen unless the teaching of Synthetic Phonics teaching happens (see: lizsimonliteracyconsultant.blogspot.com October, 2017).

In England, publishers have eagerly publishing books and video games that cater for this type of contrived, limited word learning.

As the Phonics Screening Check is being seriously considered as a national test in Australia, let us firstly analyse it.

Margaret Clark et al, point out the pass/fail decision will result in parents being told their 5-6 years old are failures. So young to have this ‘badge of honour’ hanging around their necks. My philosophy of teaching is that children begin with what they know and teachers continue to build on that knowledge (and skill development).

Margaret Clark et al are concerned about the lack of any diagnostic features as the check is a numerical recording only. Furthermore, there is no suggestion of alternative interventions other than the continuance of Synthetic Phonics.

If governments want a check on children’s progress after a full year at school, I would suggest that a teacher who is concerned by the lack of reading progress of a child/children in his/her class administer this diagnostic assessment that Marie Clay, devised (1993), ‘An Observation Survey of early literacy achievement. Teachers learn to assess individual progress and that information guides their teaching. The 5 aspects of the assessment cover all the early functions of a child learning to read independently, for example:

-          Concepts about print, e.g. ‘knowing where to start reading, line by line direction, etc’.

-          Letter identification, where children recognize all letters both the lower-case and 
           uppercase.

-          The word test, assesses a variety of word patterns, phoneme-grapheme match e.g. ‘and’ 
            and sight words e.g. ‘was’.

-          A Hearing and Recording sounds in words (a dictation task).

-          Writing words assessment.

-          Running Records, which are taken as a child reads, ‘smoothly’ if they are understanding 
           and ‘word on word’ which may indicate a problem. Further, children are asked 
           questions to check their comprehension.

The Observation Survey is an informative assessment, with no confusing elements such as the inclusion of pseudo words. Teachers are trained to analyse each part of the assessment and are trained to use appropriate intervention strategies. This would have more ‘bite’ than the simplistic Phonics Screening Check training.

During my appointment, recently, as a Literacy Consultant in an Adelaide school, the principal asked me to diagnose 5 children he was concerned about (the information of this concern came from knowing teachers). I applied the Observation Survey. This is what was found from one of the children’s assessments:

LETTER IDENTIFICATION Confusions                           G  Y   HW    F                                               Y  Q   M      G Unknown capital   I   Confusions                        n    e    p     b      e                                            h    l     q      d     i Letters unknown     v Useful STRATEGIES USED: X knows many letters. He can move from alphabet names to sounds. Problem STRATEGIES USED: The lower-case  letters to work on immediately are h, l, q, i and the  confusion between d and b. RECOMMENDATIONS: X has not learnt all letters in Jolly Phonics programme. Try another way.  Alphabet books (must be similar to PM’s), finger writing on desk, back of chair, teacher/assistant’s  back. Independent Activities – alphabetic jigsaws etc. Although there are 5 capital letter confusions (Y, Q, M, I, G) only attend to  ‘I’ as he will need to know that letter if he wants to write the pronoun ‘I’ when beginning a sentence. Place a ‘b’ on his desk for him to trace his finger around any time during the day, saying ‘b’ quietly.

CONCEPTS ABOUT PRINT – Directionality Ö     Bottom of upturned picture Ö    Knew ?         Match Hh (not Mm) Did not find line, word, letter alterations. Does not know punctuation     , “  “ Knowledge, what is a word/letter not secure. Does not know capital letter. RECOMMENDATION: X concepts of print are not secure, this learning will be improved through Shared Reading, explicitly highlighting these concepts one at a time and repeated for a week. Also, working with an assistant who also highlights these concepts.

WORD TEST – few words known – me, not, too Not able to get to most words without using sound-out method m-o-t-h-e-r, a-m, a-w-a-g, c-i-l-b-r-e-n, w-i-d-h confusions         lick    with                            help    here unknown – meet Useful STRATEGIES USED: has a small collection of 2-3 letter words. Build on these by making  analogies. Problem STRATEGIES: not listening/looking for first sound, first letter Lack of knowledge of words will interfere with comprehension,

WRITING VOCABULARY   - 11 correctly written words Confusions -   A   too   het   he   ti     it        got                         a     to     am   in   of    like    go                        r          he    ret    let      rot   sot                                                                          are       me   car   look   for    so  unknown – my, went, going, this, came HEARING SOUNDS IN WORDS        (a Dictated piece)     9/37 sounds SPELLING      Writing collection of words that often do not begin with the sound, end with the sound. Left many words that he was unsure of.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                RECOMMENDATIONS: It seems that X’s strength is writing words, so this must be utilized. He learns to decode/encode words flowing from sentences, not as individual words. All word learning is done within a sentence. He is to say the word slowly to hear the sounds. He is to look carefully at sight words, find the ‘tricky parts’.

RUNNING RECORDS: TEXT reading Useful STRATEGIES USED: prediction: ‘Monsters’ (title of book) Problem STRATEGIES: not 1-1 matching, not at Level 3 reading COMPREHENSION – not enough correct reading to ask comprehension questions. RECOMMENDATIONS:  X to be considered as a new reader (not attended school for a full year). Begin with Interactive writing and make small books for him to take home for reading. Read these books during his day at school. For more information about Interactive writing, see Should Synthetic Phonics be controversial, lizsimonliteracyconsultant.blogspot. October 2017)

NOTE: Shared reading each day with a particular focus for the week; each day the focus would have a different emphasis and would be followed up by an activity that relates to the focus of learning and be included in Independent Activities. This would allow Text, Word and Letter problems to be catered for.

Rather than being told, your child has failed the phonic test, a parent conversing with the teacher about intervention strategies that will be put in place based on the analysis of performance, is a positive approach.

Reading is about making meaning and yet the Phonics Screening Check has not shown any reading comprehension improvement when a child is tested on comprehension in future national tests (Margaret Clarke et al).

-          In the Phonics Screening check there is no analysis of the child’s strengths/weaknesses (how can they when the test is contingent on one part of literacy learning) and no consideration is given to a child being utterly confused by the inclusion of pseudo words!

-          Margaret Clark et al, points out that “political intervention in England plays fast and loose with evidence.” With this an appropriate Shakespearean quote comes to mind,

There are more things in heaven and earth [education ministers] than are dreamt of in your philosophy [about literacy learning].

GENERAL COMMENT

It is an insult to the professionalism of the education community that teachers have implanted on them a Mickey Mouse assessment and further told to teach only phonics and to teach it a certain way and neglect learning about word patterns per se.

I would want to know far more than whether the children in my class can make phoneme-grapheme match.

Train teachers, how to implement diagnostic assessment, especially for children who are not progressing normally. Provide teachers with the resources where they confidently make decisions about each child’s true literacy understandings and whether to provide challenges or whether to intervene by giving children strategies to help themselves.

Margaret Clarke et al, 2017 Reading the Evidence: Synthetic Phonics and literacy learning: an evidence-based critique, e-book, Australian Literacy Education Association.