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Expert sounds off over phonics test
Whether kids, parents or teachers like it or not, phonics tests will be introduced for year one students. Nationwide.
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Whether kids, parents or teachers like it or not, phonics tests will be introduced for year one students. Nationwide.
Please login below to view content or subscribe now.
It just shows how out of touch education ministers and ‘so-called’ experts are out of touch with what actually is happening within our school systems. The problem with education is we are paying too many experts to implement rubbish which does not do anything for learning and quite often is detrimental to improving standards in our schools. What the government should be doing is funding schemes which will ensure all pre-school aged children have access to programs which give them exposure to reading (stories, books, etc) as the majority have had parents shove a screen in front of their face instead of interacting with their children. This would achieve more than a ‘phonics’ test. FUNDING!
Whilst a test may reveal reading problems, it is imperative that a synthetic phonics program is implemented in the classroom, in order to achieve the literacy results, which we all want.
Implementing synthetic phonics in the classroom is dependent upon the knowledge and training which the teacher has. If a teacher does not know about synthetic phonics, or thinks that a safety-net of incidental phonics, following a student’s failure in a look and say, memory-based attempt at learning to read, the student will be disadvantaged.
Much depends upon the teacher and of course this relates to how the teaching of reading is dealt with in our teacher training institutions. If they are not taught it at uni, they won’t teach it in the classroom. The method for teaching the reading of the English language has been an ideological and political football for decades. Unfortunately, children have to endure the results of such debate.
There is plenty of evidence indicating that phonics is the effective way of teaching children how to read the English language. Unlike languages based upon ideographics, the symbols in the English language represent sounds. Written English thus is a sound-symbol language system.
This early focus upon sounds and their symbols does not discount the importance of sight vocabulary, predictive skills etc. as some critics of phonics simplisticly allege. What phonics does for the learner reader is to give the basic sounds as combined with the written symbols at the beginning of the learning-to-read process. As the learner masters the phonemes, more complex processes follow which enable the learner to master the greater complexities of learning to read English.