Phonics screening: sense and sensibility

There’s been a lot written about the new phonics test that
is being introduced in UK
schools in June. Michael Rosen cogently put the arguments against it on his
blog this morning. A major concern is that the test involves asking
children to read a list of items, and takes no account of whether they
understand them. Indeed, the list includes nonwords (i.e. pronounceable letter
strings, such as "doop" or "barg") as well as meaningful words. So children
will be “barking at print” - a very different skill from reading for meaning.

I can absolutely see where Rosen is coming from, but he’s
missing a key point. You can’t read for meaning if you can’t decode the words.
It’s possible to learn some words by rote, even if you don’t know how letters
and sounds go together, but in order to have a strategy for decoding novel
words, you need the phonics skills. Sure, English is an irritatingly irregular
language, so phonics doesn’t always give you the right answer, but without
phonics, you have no strategy for approaching an unfamiliar word.

Back in 1990, Hoover
and Gough wrote an influential paper in 1990 called “The Simple View of
Reading”. This is clearly explained in this series of slides by Morag
Stuart from the Institute
of Education. It boils
down to saying that in order to be an effective reader you need two things: the
ability to decode words, and the ability to understand the language in a text. Some
children can say the words but don’t understand what they’ve read. These are
the ones Michael Rosen is worried about. They won’t be detected by a nonword
reading test. They are all-too-often missed by teachers who don’t realise they
are having problems because when asked to read aloud, they do fine. There’s a
fair bit of research on these so-called “poor comprehenders”, and how best to
help them (some of which is reviewed here).
But there are other children with the opposite pattern: good language
understanding but difficulties in decoding: this corresponds to classic
dyslexia. There are decades of research showing that one of the most effective
ways of identifying these children is to assess their ability to read novel
letter sequences that they haven’t encountered before - nonwords. Nonword reading ability has also
been shown to predict which children are at risk for later reading
failure.  It's useful precisely because it tests children's ability to attack unfamiliar material, rather than testing what they have already learned. It's a bit like a doctor giving someone a stress test on a treadmill. They may never encounter a treadmill in everyday life, but by observing how they cope with it, the doctor can tell whether they are at risk of cardiovascular problems.



Some children don’t need
explicit teaching of phonics - they pick it up spontaneously through exposure
to print. But others just don’t get it unless it is made explicit. I’m coming
at this as someone who sees children who just don’t get past first base in
learning to read, and who fall increasingly far behind if their difficulties
aren’t identified. A nonword reading test around age 6 to 7 years will help
identify those children who could benefit from extra support in the classroom.

So that’s the rationale, and it is well-grounded in a great
deal of reading research. But is there a downside? Potentially, there are
numerous risks. It would be catastrophic if teachers got the message from this exercise
that reading instruction should involve training children to read lists of
words, or worse still, nonwords. Unfortunately, testing in schools is
increasingly conflated with evaluation of the school, and so
teaching-to-the-test is routinely done. The language comprehension side of
reading is hugely important, and shouldn't be neglected. Developing
children’s oral language skills is an important component of making
children literate. It is also important for children to be read to, and to
learn that books are a source of pleasure.

Another concern is children being identified at an early age
as failing. The cutoff that is used is crucial, and there are concerns that the
bar may be set too high.  Children at
real risk are those who bomb on nonword reading, not those who are just a bit
below average.

The impact on children’s self-perception is also key. There
is already
evidence that some primary school children are unduly stressed by SATS.
There’s nothing more likely to put a child off reading than being given a test
that they don’t understand and being told they’ve failed it. When I was at
school, we had the 11+ examination that divided children into those who went to
grammar school and those who didn’t. I had friends whose parents promised them
a bicycle if they passed - even though there was precious little practice that
you could do for the 11+, which was designed to test skills that had not been
explicitly taught. Schoolfriends who failed were left with a chip on their
shoulder for years. I’d hope that this reading screen is introduced in a more
sensitive manner, but the onus is on parents, teachers and the media to ensure
this happens. This screening test should serve as a simple diagnostic that will
allow teachers to identify those children whose weak letter-sound-knowledge
means that they could benefit from extra support. It should not be used to
evaluate schools, make children feel they are failures, worry their parents, or
support a sterile phonics-only approach to reading.

References

Connor, M. J. (2003). Pupil stress and standard
assessment tasks (SATs) An update. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 8(2),
101-107. doi: 10.1080/13632750300507010

Hoover, W. A.,
& Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing, 2,
127-160.

Nation, K., & Angell, P. (2006). Learning to read
and learning to comprehend. London
Review of Education, 4(1), 77–87. doi: 10.1080/13603110600574538

Rack, J. P., Snowling, M. J., & Olson, R. K.
(1992). The nonword reading deficit in developmental dyslexia. Reading
Research Quarterly, 27, 29-53.

Snowling, M., & Hulme, C. (2012). Interventions for children's language and literacy difficulties International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 47 (1), 27-34 DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-6984.2011.00081.x