JOLLY PHONICS - BRITISH ENGLISH VERSION: JPHUK01 - HISTORY AND

DEVELOPMENT OF JOLLY PHONICS

READ FIRST

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQEeKxCF9G0

Note on PDF Files

This course contains readings that are in a format called PDF (Portable Document Format). This is a standard format for
documents on the Internet.

Should you have any difficulty in viewing the PDF files in this course, it is possible you need to update your version of Adobe
Acrobat Reader (which is available from Adobe, free of charge).

You may get Acrobat Reader from

this link
.

Downloading, saving course material

Your options for downloading and saving content from this course are as follows:

1. You can save any of the PDF documents you wish to your own computer for future reference.

2. Some modules may have PowerPoint presentations, you can also save these to your own computer.

3. At the end of each module, there is a "View module text" link.

When you click on the module text link (some modules do not have this link) it accumulates all the text from the content pages (not PDF’s)
within the module and displays it on one page (Please allow up to 30 seconds for it to load). You can then save this page as a PDF
document.

4. Saving web links. You can save web links by copying and pasting the links from the web links pages or by copying and pasting from the
module text page (3 above).

The only course elements that you cannot save are forum posts. Your forum posts are saved on your CPD record.

Welcome to the Jolly Phonics online training course

Learning to read is a vital life skill, without which we could never become educated people. Reading offers opportunities for
enjoyment, for increasing our knowledge of the world and for enhancing our imagination and creativity.

The aim of this course is to provide teachers with the knowledge and skills that are needed for teaching children how to read
and write using Jolly Phonics.

Jolly Phonics is a multi-sensory, synthetic phonics programme. With Jolly Phonics, children are taught the English alphabetic
code in a simple, but structured way. Jolly Phonics was developed by teachers who wanted an effective method of teaching
that was also active, interesting and suitable for young children.

It is well known that a high degree of literacy is needed in today’s world; this makes it even more important that all children
learn to read and write in their first few years at school. Literacy is a child's key to a successful future; without the ability to
read, children's lives are frequently blighted. What is not so well known, is how to achieve literacy for all children. In creating
this course, we hope to provide many of the answers to these questions. This course also aims to give an insight into what can
be accomplished with Jolly Phonics, as well as explaining how to prevent reading failure in the future.

The teaching of literacy has been a hotly debated subject for a number of decades. In order to understand the reason for this,
it is necessary to know what methods of teaching have been used previously, especially if we want to learn from the mistakes
of the past. For this reason, at the end of module 1, Jennifer Chew provides a summary of the history of the teaching of
reading in English-speaking countries since the 1960s.

Sue Lloyd

1. MODULE ASSIGNMENT

Instructions on your module assignment

1. Assignment given at start of module: Each participant must complete an assignment at the end of each module. We are
presenting you with your module assignment at the start of the module so you may consider your answer as you progress through
the module. When you reach the end of the module please return to this section and complete your module assignment.
2. How to do your assignment:
1. ​Please post your answer to the Assignment/Discussion forum on the next page.
2. You can answer by posting your own answer to the question posed or by replying to an answer/contribution from another
participant.
3. If your answer is going to take longer than 20 minutes to type we recommend you compose it in Word and copy and paste it
into the forum.
4. Your post to the forum is automatically saved on to your CPD record
3. Important additional notes:
1. Assignment answers: The standard required in your answer must be such as to demonstrate “engagement and
understanding”. While it is difficult to be precise in terms of number of words, we would recommend at least 3 paragraphs
containing at least 3 to 5 sentences each to ensure the standard is met. Where this is not the case, we may contact
participants and request further information.
2. Your Profile: When you click on your name in the forums you can see your personal profile. Please note YOUR PERSONAL
DETAILS ARE NOT VISIBLE TO OTHER PARTICIPANTS. All that is visible is your name, City/town, country, course and
email. You can chose to hide your email if you wish through updating your profile.
3. Disabling emails from forums: To avoid receiving emails of all posts to forums, you need to ensure that the Discussion
subscription button is unchecked when you are making a post.
 If you are subscribed to a discussion forum and you wish to unsubscribe, you will need to go to the discussion thread page
and click the button on the right so it goes from an envelop image to a dot image as shown below.

Please continue to the next page when you are ready.

2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF JOLLY PHONICS

A word from Sue

Sue Lloyd, who is the co-author of Jolly Phonics, provides a brief introduction to this section.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAuJybHJiz4

In the beginning

In the late 1970s, I started teaching at Woods Loke Primary School, which was a large school in Suffolk, England. At that time, the
usual method for teaching reading was 'Look and Say'. With ‘Look and Say’, the children were expected to learn the frequently
used words visually, from flash cards. They were expected to read books from reading schemes, which introduced new words
gradually. The standard achieved at our school was similar to that of other schools. The average quotient on the Young’s Reading
Test, taken at the end of Year 2 (7 year olds), was 102.4. (The Young’s Reading Test is designed so that a score of 100 is the
average.

It is also designed so that half of all children will fall in the range 90-110.) Despite our achieving above average results
statistically, our Head of Infants, Joan Dorr, was not happy that there was always a 'long tail of under-achievement'. She looked at
the older children in the school and noticed that the good readers used blending to read the words they did not know, whereas the
struggling readers rarely did this. When she looked more closely at these strugglers, she realised that they did not know the letter-
sound correspondences; this was especially the case with the vowel digraphs. Consequently, these children were poor at working
out unknown words.
In order to make sure that the struggling children learnt the letter-sound correspondences, it was decided that, in future, all the
children in their first few months at school (4-5 year olds) would be taught the letters and their corresponding sounds, and would
learn how to blend those sounds, before being expected to read books from the reading schemes. This teaching method was far
more effective. All three of us teachers were amazed that our teaching method could make such a difference. The progress we
had noticed was reflected in the average reading quotient, which went up from 102 to 108.2. This was a phenomenal
improvement.

Sue Lloyd

In this video presentation, Sue describes her experiences in the early days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zpjO8Hjc0Q

The research programme

A few years after we implemented the new teaching methods at Woods Loke, we were asked to participate in a research
programme. Although the programme was an organisational nightmare, it did open our eyes to the importance of teaching the
children to listen for and identify all the sounds in words. We simplified the teaching and, by adding extra phonemic awareness
into our approach, we saw another big improvement, particularly at the bottom end.

All the teachers involved thought that the standard of reading at the end of Year 1 was now equivalent to the standard achieved at
the end of Year 2. Our reading quotient had risen again, from an average of 108 to 110+. Just as exciting, was the fact that the
children were writing independently at a much earlier than average age. They listened for the sounds in words and wrote down the
letters that represented those sounds. In order to check that the children’s spelling had not suffered with this new approach to
writing, we tested the 7 year olds on the Vernon Spelling Test every year. The average was always about 8.5 years, which meant
that the children were well above average. Moreover, the improvements we saw could only be attributed to the method of
teaching; it was the only thing we had changed. The teachers remained the same throughout the study. We had gone from a
visual method to a systematic, synthetic (blending) phonics method*. The results we achieved made us realise how important it
was to use correct methods of teaching.

*Although the term ‘synthetic phonics’ was not widely used at the time, the teaching method remains largely the same.

Sue Lloyd

In this video, Sue describes how events unfolded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39LW3nlfWzc

The persistence of the real book approach

Naturally, after our success, I felt sure that the educationalists and advisory service would be interested in our achievements.
However, this could not have been further from the truth. The 'real book' approach (whole language) was in fashion at the time
and the advisors were telling teachers the exact opposite to what we were saying. The advisors did not want the children to
sound out words. Their belief was that children should, and would, pick up reading naturally when given interesting books, just as
children learn to speak naturally. Time has now shown that these advisors were completely wrong. Sadly, many children have
been failed because the advisory service followed fashionable ideas rather than evidenced-based scientific research.

Sue Lloyd

In this video, Sue recalls the approach at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g9qQfixzBU

The Phonics Handbook

In 1990 I met Christopher Jolly, the publisher. He was interested in our method of teaching and the good results we achieved. He
studied the relevant scientific research, realised that it supported our classroom findings, and asked me to write a manual for
teachers. This manual became The Phonics Handbook. At this stage, my colleague Sara Wernham joined me. Her talents have
been invaluable for creating all the materials that are now a part of Jolly Phonics and Jolly Grammar.

Sue Lloyd

In this video, Sue describes how the events occurred at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZCAl7ZkD0Y

The Jolly Phonics programme

The Jolly Phonics programme, which we developed in the classroom, is fun to teach and very suitable for young children. Each
new letter sound (phoneme) is introduced with a story and an action. I had noticed, when I was teaching, that if I used an action
and linked it to the letter or digraph, for example, if I rubbed my tummy and said 'mmmmmm' for the letter ‹m›, or pricked my
finger and said /ou/ for the ‹ou› digraph, then the children remembered the letter-sound correspondences more easily.
Consequently, there are actions for all the 42 letter sounds. Both the stories and the actions keep the children actively involved
and help them to concentrate; the actions also act as a reminder when the children are not sure of the sound.

As the children learn the letter sounds, they are also taught to blend (read) words that use these sounds. The children are given a
thorough grounding in blending regular words before attempting to read books. In addition to their regular blending session every
day in the classroom, each child takes home word boxes or word strips and is encouraged to read at least 10 words each night
(180+ words in total) to his or her parents. For writing, the children are taught to identify all the sounds in a spoken word, and to
write down the letters that represent those sounds. The majority of children taught with Jolly Phonics are able to write
independently at a very early age. Although the children’s spelling may not always be accurate, because there are several ways of
writing individual sounds, it is a satisfying accomplishment for the children when their teacher can read their efforts. As the
children read more and follow a spelling programme, such as that found in The Grammar Handbooks, their spelling gradually
becomes more accurate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FH7Bl0e8Uw

The spread of Jolly Phonics

Over the years, the Jolly Phonics programme has become very popular in English-speaking countries around the world. The
spread of Jolly Phonics can, to a large degree, be attributed to its effectiveness as a teaching programme. Jolly Phonics has been
tested more than any other programme that I know of, and it has consistently been found to produce much better results than can
be achieved with other teaching methods. During the last decade there have been three large evidence-based pieces of research
carried out comparing Jolly Phonics with a control group (the control groups used analytic or mixed methods). On all
measurements, the Jolly Phonics groups outperformed the control groups. Overall, the Jolly Phonics groups had average reading
ages that were about one year ahead of chronological age. These were highly significant results. Many of the children were in
poor socio-economic areas and/or from non-English speaking families. More details of this research are provided in Module 5.

After introducing Jolly Phonics, a number of teachers have experienced the same kind of improvement that we experienced at
Woods Loke in the 1970s, and they have let us know that their 6 year old children were now as good at reading and spelling as
their 7 year old children. Some of these teachers, and their schools, have gone on to take part in a 'Jolly Case Study', where their
children were tested after one year. Each time, the children were found to be about one year ahead of chronological age in
reading and spelling. One of the schools to take part was St Michael's, which is a large school in a poor socio-economic area,
Stoke Gifford, in southwest England. St Michael’s not only trialled Jolly Phonics, but also used decodable books and with this
addition, the children achieved an average reading age 17 months ahead of their average chronological age. In 2003, at Woods
Loke, 97% of the children achieved Level 2 and above for writing (National 75%), and 98% achieved Level 2 or above for reading
(National 82%) in the Key Stage 1 SATs tests. Interestingly, the boys at St Michael’s and Woods Loke schools were, on average,
better at reading than the girls. The 'tail-end of underachievement' had been vastly reduced.

Click on the image above for more Case Studies.

The results of a case study, which assessed the use of Jolly Phonics at a school in Stoke Gifford, England

The principles of Jolly Phonics

It is clear from the research findings, as well as school test results, that Jolly Phonics can be used to overcome many of the
problems experienced by the economically deprived, dyslexic, non-English-speaking children, as well as the 'tail-end' boys. Other
synthetic phonics programmes achieve similar results when the following principles are adhered to.

The children should:

Be taught letter sounds, and how to blend those sounds together for reading, before they are expected to read books
Always use blending (synthesising) as the first strategy for reading unknown words
Be taught to form the alphabet letters correctly, and should be able to say the letter’s (or letters’) corresponding sound
Be taught to identify the individual sounds in spoken words and to write the letter(s) for each sound (this is key to
independent writing).
Learn the tricky words
Only progress to a free choice of books when blending is the automatic response to unknown words and when there is
fluency in their reading

Preferably, the children should be given only decodable reading books until they have achieved confidence and fluency in their
reading. Teachers should avoid giving children reading books containing words that include letter sounds that have not yet been
taught.

We, at Woods Loke, learnt through our classroom experience, and through studying the available scientific research, that
synthetic phonics is the best way to improve reading, spelling and comprehension. It is the best teaching method for all children
because it teaches them to read and write through using the alphabetic code. My colleague, Sara Wernham, came to the same
conclusions, albeit through slightly different experiences. Her experiences are told in the following pages.

Children need to learn the letter sounds and how to blend them before they are expected to read books

3. PHONICS AND ME

Woods Loke Primary School and the ‘Sound Start’

Phonics first made an impact on my life when I joined the reception class (for 4-5 year-olds) at Woods Loke Primary School in
Suffolk, England. A very fitting time it would seem, except I was not a bright-eyed eager 4 year old, but the bright-eyed and eager
probationary teacher!

I had arrived at my first job to be told I was to have the reception class. Having just come from a middle-school training course, I
had no experience at all of how to teach reading. Our ‘English’ lectures at University had consisted almost entirely of ‘writing
books for younger children’, not very useful with a reception class. When asked how to teach reading by the students, our
lecturer’s response had been an airy wave of the hand and an assertion that ‘we didn’t need to know that’, as ‘any 9 year old who
couldn’t read was special needs responsibility and not ours’. Any further pressing proved equally useless. So, there I was: the
reception class teacher, with not a clue as to how to approach the task now facing me.

Adding to my problems was the fact that I had started school at the beginning of the 1970s and had been taught by the ‘Look and
Say’ method. I therefore had no skills to apply or to fall back on. I was fortunate, (though it didn’t always feel like it, as I grasped
for understanding), to arrive at Woods Loke under the eagle eyes of Joan Dorr, Sue Lloyd and Ann Winslade. Even more
fortunate for me was that the school had ready for me virtually the first half-term’s (six weeks’)English work, in the form of Sound
Start. This was the prototype for what was eventually to become The Phonics Handbook’.

Sara Wernham

My first weeks as a teacher and my spelling

As I struggled through my first weeks not only of being a teacher, but of trying to understand what I was being told about sounds
in words, blending, listening for sounds etc., I wondered where on earth I had ended up and just what they were all banging on
about. However, as the term progressed, I did learn and, surprisingly, so did my class. Gradually, light began to dawn and
understanding grew. A complete revelation to me was that the letters in words weren’t just randomly chosen; they went with the
sounds. Although I had always been considered a ‘good’ reader, I had always wondered how people read words that they hadn’t
come across already. In books with names, for example, that I had never heard, I just blanked at the word when I came to it,
almost inserting a picture of that word to represent it in my head. I now realise that I am blessed with a good memory and that this
is what enabled me to read as I did.

Although reading came easily to me, spelling was quite another matter. My memory was not so good at learning spellings and this
caused a great deal of frustration to my family, my teachers, and to me. The weekly spelling test was a great ordeal (I still find it
amazing that my classes now love their spelling test). I never got 10/10 and this was regarded by everyone as a wilful refusal to
make the effort to learn them. “You’re a bright girl, look at what you read, of course you should get the spellings right.” Believe me,
if I could have done, I would have done. Life would have been very much easier.

I remember rows with my mother: “How do you spell whatever?” I’d ask. “Look it up in the dictionary,” came the reply. How? To do
that you need to know (or at least have an idea of) the first three letters. If I could remember those, generally I could remember the
rest of the word. To know how to spell a word, I needed to look it up in the dictionary, but in order to look it up in the dictionary I
needed to know how to spell it: a chicken and egg situation.

My mother thought she was doing the right thing in encouraging me to use a dictionary. She couldn’t understand why I couldn’t. I
didn’t understand why she wouldn’t just tell me how to spell it; after all, they did at school. Why was she so awkward over it? It
became a standing family joke: ‘Sara can’t spell, don’t ask her, unless you want a good laugh of course!’ Any marks for spelling in
essays, I wrote off. If I got one mark, it was a bonus and so it remained through school, university, my first jobs and teacher
training. But finally, revelation!

Sue Lloyd

In this video Sue recalls the early days working with Sara and how events unfolded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLuIlJI6Qog

The i.t.a.

At the time I joined Woods Loke, they still used i. t. a., the Initial Teaching Alphabet, developed by Sir James Pitman, and is very sound
based. I had to learn to sound out words in order to write them. Gradually, I began to make the links and so made the transition to
‘ordinary’ letters and spelling patterns, just like the children in my reception class. I always say that I really learnt to read and write with my
first class.

Once the initial euphoria and delight had calmed, I began to feel angry. I hadn’t been stupid; I hadn’t been lazy; I just didn’t know how
sounds and letters and words worked. All those frustrating hours trying to learn spellings. All those hours my parents and teachers had
spent trying to help me had been wasted unnecessarily. They simply didn’t realise I didn’t understand, and I didn’t know I didn’t understand.

The i. t. a. alphabet

The birth of Jolly Phonics

Through subsequent conversations with my friends and peer group, I have found that I was not alone in failing to understand the
alphabetic code. Had I not ended up at Woods Loke, I could still be ignorant and/or struggling. I still find it slightly incredible that I
can now teach others to read and write, and am delighted that they will never have to go through the frustrations I did.

Teaching in the reception class at that time meant I became involved with the Jolly Phonics programme. Sue Lloyd had recently
met Chris Jolly, who had an embryonic publishing company, and they had just started along the long journey that would lead to
The Phonics Handbook. I trialled some of the materials, suggested additions and generally watched the project develop. I became
directly involved, initially, when I contributed three drawings. I was very enthusiastic, as not only could I see myself and my class
learning, I could also appreciate the ‘ease’ and fun involved in the learning. If a complete novice like myself could use Jolly
Phonics and get results, it had to be good. As time went on I became more and more involved, until now, much to my and my
family’s surprise, I co-write much of the Jolly Phonics material with Sue.

The other thing that I still find amazing, and which stops me dead, is that now my family ask me how words are spelt, and I can
normally answer them! In many ways, my involvement with the phonics movement in general, and with Jolly Phonics in particular,
has been a very personal one. All the more important for me now, as I have a son and daughter of my own, and I am able to help
them in a way I would not have been able to have done to before.

Jolly Phonics teaching is remarkably effective

4. DIFFERENT TEACHING METHODS

Synthetic phonics

Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching children to read and write. The children are taught how the English alphabetic code works
before they are expected to do the harder tasks of reading books and writing independently.
Synthetic Phonics does not start with whole printed words. It starts with single letters and the sounds that the letters represent. As soon as
the children have been taught a few letters and sounds, including one or two vowels, they are taught to look at the words, produce a sound
for each letter (no digraphs should be included at this point) and then blend the sounds all through the word into normal pronunciation. This
‘synthesising’ (blending sounds) is the essential skill for working out unknown words. Increasing numbers of words can and should be
blended as each letter sound is introduced (see sample of Word Bank in Module 3). Once words have been blended a few times, they can
be read without blending, as if they were a sight word.

At the same time, the children are taught how to write letters and how to identify the individual sounds in words. For example, if children
have been taught how to form single letters and can hear that the word ‘dig’ has the sounds /d-i-g/ in it, then they can write this word.

In addition to teaching the sounds made by single letters, synthetic-phonics programmes also teach the sounds made by digraphs, such as
/ai/, /ee/, /oa/, /or/ and /ou/. Although learning the sounds made by digraphs is slightly more difficult than learning the sounds made by
single letters, the children just need to learn to say one sound for the two letters. Care is taken to ensure that the new letter knowledge is
put into practice straight away, with plenty of blending and segmenting of regular words that use the new digraphs.

The Jolly Phonics Letter Sound Poster

Synthetic phonics teaching

Usually, synthetic-phonics programmes teach 40+ letter-sound correspondences initially, that is, they teach one way of
representing each of the main sounds of English. Later on, alternative ways of writing the sounds are covered. For example, the
sound /ai/ might be introduced first as ‹ai› and then the alternatives ‹ay› and ‹a-e› at a later stage.

Frequently used tricky words are taught systematically, by blending them, learning the correct pronunciation and identifying the
‘tricky’ bit.

A fast pace of introducing the letter sounds is recommended in synthetic phonics, with several programmes introducing 4-5 letter
sounds a week. The fast pace is stimulating for the children and enables them quickly to get to the stage when they have enough
foundation knowledge to start reading books.

Generally, reading books are provided when the children can blend unknown words that use the 40+ letter sounds and have
learnt some tricky words. Decodable readers, that use the letter-sound knowledge that has been taught, help the children to
develop their skills and prevent the children becoming frustrated when they cannot work words out.

The important aspects of synthetic phonics are:

To teach the alphabetic code, to use blending

To read words rather than trying to memorise the words by their shape
To avoid asking the children to read or write a word that contains a letter-sound that has not yet been taught
Moat Farm, a Red Level Jolly Reader

Analytic phonics

Analytic phonics is not easy to define because it means different things to different people around the world. In general, analytic
phonics approaches phonics in an incidental way rather than with direct, systematic teaching. The teaching tends to run in parallel
with reading books, which are introduced using a look-and-say approach. The children are expected to memorise whole words,
which are first shown to them and then read out to them. The whole words can be shown to the children on flash cards, or on
labelled objects around the classroom. The teacher might also point to words, during big-book story time.

Typically, the teaching concentrates on one initial-letter sound a week. The children might be shown a series of illustrated,
alliterative words, which start with the sound being taught, such as bus, bed, bike, book and bird. After that, the children are
introduced to the final sounds, as in lip, tap, hop, and then the middle sounds, as in bag, hat, pan. The eventual aim of this
teaching is to provide the children with the necessary phonic knowledge for decoding unknown words. However, introducing
phonic knowledge in this very gradual way means that many children fail to master the alphabetic code and struggle with reading.

The slow pace also means that vowel and consonant digraphs are often not taught until the third year, if at all. In some parts of
the world, only the sounds of the alphabet letters are taught and the vowel digraphs are thought of as being 'too complicated' for
children. Therefore, in order to read books, the children have to rely on their memory and the incidental phonics that has been
taught. Typically, in the past, more systematic phonic teaching was given to the remedial children when they were seven or eight
years old.

Alliterative Flashcards

Onset and rime

Onset and rime is also associated with analytic phonics. With onset-and-rime teaching, the children start in the typical analytic phonics
way: by looking at books and memorising words. Then the children are taught to memorise the onset and the rime parts of the word. The
onset is the consonant, or consonants, at the beginning of a word and the rime is the rest of the word/syllable. For instance, in the word
street, the str is the onset and the eet is the rime.
Onset and rime

Analytic phonics reading books

The books that the children are expected to read are either non-structured reading books, graded reading books that introduce
new words gradually, or Book Band books that, initially, use repeated sentences, which include a new word on each page. The
children can then deduce the new word by looking at the picture.

The following is an example of a typical Book Band book:

The man is not looking.

The woman is not looking.

The boy is not looking.

The girl is not looking.

The donkey is not looking.

The cat is not looking.

The mouse is not looking.

Crash. They all wish they had looked.

The illustrations in these books are usually very humorous, ostensibly to make up for the repetitive story.

Many children will simply memorise these books and use the pictures as a reminder. The easiest way to find whether a child is
reading a book or merely reciting it is to print out some of the words that appear in the book and ask the child to read them, this
time without the accompanying pictures. Very often, the child will not be able to do this. This indicates that the child was guessing
the words and not actually reading them.

Analytic-phonics based teaching is sometimes known as 'mixed methods' teaching. The mixed methods include balanced literacy,
the apprenticeship approach and whole-language approaches. The main thing that all these approaches have in common is that
they teach phonics incidentally and start with whole words and reading books.
Typical Book Band books tend to have very repetitive text

Click to download information on Book Bands

Synthetic phonics can make the difference between a good reader and a poor one

When children do not learn to read, the reason for their lack of success can almost always be attributed to the method of teaching
used. By starting with whole-word memorising and not with the alphabetic code, the children who have poor visual memories feel
that reading is hard and that they cannot do it. Even with a little phonic knowledge, for example knowing only the alphabet
sounds, they stumble along guessing and hoping that they have said the right words. Good readers use their code knowledge
including knowledge of the digraphs for reading. Good readers do not look at the picture, or the initial letter, neither do they guess
from the context for word identification, but poor readers do, and it lets them down all the time. Any method of teaching that starts
with whole words, uses incidental phonics and expects the children to read books that are not decodable, is an inefficient method
of teaching for all children, especially those children with poor visual memories and/or difficulties hearing the sounds in words.

Teaching with synthetic phonics from the beginning is best for all children, even for the children who might manage without it.
This latter group of children will simply learn to read much faster than they would have done without synthetic phonics. A
synthetic-phonics approach also ensures that a child with a good visual memory, but poor ear for the sounds in words, learns in
the correct way: by synthesizing sounds and not by memorising words. Memorising words might be relatively easy in the early
stages for certain children, but at some point their memories will run out. If the skill of decoding words has not been taught by
then, these children will develop reading problems. This is particularly distressing for the children affected, because they may
have been considered good readers in the early stages, but now that the books have longer words and more text, they suddenly
find that they cannot cope.

'Illiterate Boys' by Bonnie Macmillan

How easy is it to learn words as wholes?

People who are fluent readers tend to be of the opinion that it is easy to learn words; they find it hard to understand why some children
cannot learn them. It is often very difficult for a fluent reader to put themselves in the position of a struggling child. The only way to put
oneself into the shoes of a struggling child and to understand what it is like is to memorise words, is to change the script.

Look at the twelve Korean words, printed opposite, and try to learn them.

This may seem daunting and, for most non-Korean speakers, memorising these unfamiliar symbols will prove to be frustratingly difficult. A
number of you may even find that, despite your best efforts, you are unable to learn these words.

Yet this is what we expect children to do when we ask them to memorise words without first teaching them how the sounds relate to the
letters. The letters of our alphabet look like mere squiggles to young children, just as these Korean symbols look like squiggles to us.
Unless you learn Korean and learn to understand what the symbols represent, you will find it very difficult to remember these words.
However, the task is not nearly so stressful when you understand how to work out the words.

This word means 'Korea' and is pronounced 'HanGuk'.

h a n = han

g u k = guk

It is relatively easy to learn the individual symbols that make up the word HanGuk, especially if you try writing out the word. It is much easier
to learn these words when you have learnt the sound each symbol makes and can blend the sounds together to pronounce the word.

Try learning these Korean words

5. TEACHERS' EXPERIENCES

Christine Love's teaching experiences

Christine Love

In this short video clip, Christine Love, a teacher at Woods Loke Primary School in England, discusses her experiences of
teaching phonics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqdG6T30On0

O'Sullivan Beach Primary School - Making News

Discover how one school transformed its literacy standards with Jolly Phonics. This story made the national news media in Australia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIdQMVcc94M

Teachers' experiences at Torrens Primary School in Australia

In this short video clip, teachers at Torrens Primary School in Australia, talk about their experiences of teaching phonics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUdCOCiO7Gk

6. READING AND WRITING

The skills needed for reading

There are only two skills needed for reading. The first is being able to decode the text on the page, and the second is being able
to understand the meaning of that text (comprehension). Both skills are essential.

Sometimes a child is excellent at decoding and is able to read a book easily, but has poor comprehension. When this happens
there is a simple solution: give the child an easier book to read and discuss the story. This type of child finds reading (decoding)
easy and has been given books that are intellectually too hard. The vocabulary and subject matter are too advanced. Adult
readers have this problem too; most of us would be able to read a book on molecular physics, but few of us would understand it!
Great care should be taken when choosing reading books for children. Reading books must be appropriate for the child’s reading
abilities, but must also be at a level that the child can comprehend.

However, the reading problem in primary schools is usually the children’s poor ability to decode words, rather than their poor
comprehension. An inability to read often causes frustration. The children have the ability to understand spoken words and have a
desire to read, but they are unable do so because they have not been taught how to decode written words.

Sue Lloyd

In this video Sue discusses the skills that children must learn to be able to read.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNw9OGj8yw

How do we read words?

As literate adults, we are rarely aware of how we go about reading and writing. We have been doing it for so long that it has
become an automatic process. It is only necessary to think carefully about the precise processes we go through for reading or
writing a word when we come to teach these skills to children.

The following three words have been made up, so it is impossible for you to have learnt them, but they can still be read. As you
read the words, think carefully of each part of the reading process. Try to write down the precise steps you go through when
reading the words.

1. Kangbool

2. Philibrosna

3. Barrasade

Once you have read all three words, click on the player on the right-hand-side to hear the words being spoken.

Kangbool
Philibrosna
Barrasade

The processes involved in reading

How did you do with the reading activity?*
Did you pronounce the words in exactly the same way as in the recordings?
What steps did you go through to read the words in this exercise?

You may have concluded something like the following:

1. I started at the left of the word

2. From left to right, I converted the letters into sounds
3. I blended those sounds together
4. I came up with the pronunciation of the word

This is how the alphabetic code works for reading English. These are the skills we want to give the children right from the
beginning in Jolly Phonics.

* If, by any chance, you were unable to read the words, then you have not cracked the alphabetic code and have relied upon your
good visual memory for your literacy skills (see Sara’s experience in Module 1).

Once you have read all three words, click on the player on the right-hand-side to hear the words being spoken.

Kangbool
Philibrosna
Barrasade

How do we write words?

Now that you understand the processes we go through for reading, it is useful to think about how we go about writing words.

Click on the words on the right-hand-side and listen to the three ‘nonsense’ words provided. Try to write down the words and then,
in the same way as you did for the reading activity, write down the processes you went through when writing the words.

Sue Lloyd

In this video Sue explains the skill of segmenting, which is needed for writing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hzzjM6Ssxk

The processes involved in writing

How well did you do with the writing activity?

Were the processes you went through to write the words similar to the following steps?

1. I listened to the spoken word

2. I identified the sounds from beginning to end
3. As I identified each sound, I wrote letter(s) for the sound from left to right

When attempting to write the words, you may have found that you could confidently identify a number of the letters, but were
unsure of the rest. You may have noticed that the consonants were much easier to identify than the vowel sounds.

Click the player on the right to hear the words again.

Word 1 was Gardnossy.

When writing the word 'Gardnossy', you probably wrote gardnos accurately, but struggled with the /ee/ sound at the end. You
could have written ‹ee›, ‹ea›, ‹y›, ‹ie› or ‹ey› for the /ee/ sound. It might have crossed your mind that a ‹u› could come after the
‹g›, as in the word guard, or that the /s/ sound should be spelt with a double ‹s›.

Word 2 was Strammurby.

When writing the word 'Strammurby', you could have written ‹er›,‹ir›,or ‹ur›for the /er/ sound in the middle. You may even have
thought the /er/ sound was actually a swallowed short vowel. Similarly, you may have struggled with the /m/ sound, not knowing
whether it was spelt with one ‹m› or two. As in the word 'Gardnossy', the /ee/ at the end of 'Strammurby' could be spelt ‹ee›, ‹ea›,
‹y›, ‹ie› or ‹ey›.

Word 3 was Warmora.

When writing this word, you probably found that you could only be confident about the consonants. In many spoken English
words, the vowel sounds are swallowed and pronounced like a schwa and this makes them difficult to write from dictation.

Word 1
Word 2
Word 3

Uncommon letter-sound spellings

The aim of the nonsense word activities was to remind you how to work out words using the English alphabetic code. For reading
the nonsense words, you used your letter-sound knowledge and blending skills, and for the writing, you used your ability to write
letters for the sounds you identified. With Jolly Phonics, these skills are taught to children as early as possible so that they too can
work out words for themselves.

Naturally, children start by learning the simple alphabetic code and then gradually learn about the more complex sound-symbol
relationships. The English alphabetic code is very complex; some sound-symbol relationships only occur in a few words. It can be
simpler to learn the sound-symbol relationships in these words as a word pattern. For example, the digraph ‹ea› representing an
/ai/ sound is a pattern that only occurs in the following three words: great, break and steak. It is easier to learn how to spell these
three words than it is to learn ‹ea› as another way of representing the /ai/ sound.

Sue Lloyd

In this video, Sue describes the complex nature of the alphabetic code, the reason for the early introduction of digraphs and some
of the uncommon letter-sound spellings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AFKnh8B75Q

7. THE ENGLISH ALPHABETIC CODE

The complicated alphabetic code

The main reason for the reading and writing problems, which are so commonly found in English-speaking countries, is the
complex nature of written English. English has a very complicated alphabetic code, so complicated in fact, that it is often referred
to as having an ‘opaque’ code. Alphabetic languages, such as German, Spanish, Italian and Finnish, have very simple alphabetic
codes. The sound-symbol relationship in these languages is easy and reliable, which is why they are known as ‘transparent’
alphabetic codes. Learning to read (decode) and write (encode) in these languages is not a problem, especially when a synthetic-
phonics method is used.

As the English alphabetic code is a complicated one, many scientists think that it is even more important to teach the code
carefully and thoroughly, for the simple reason that it is not so easy to deduce.

Many problems with the English alphabetic code have originated from the influence of other languages. For example, the digraph
‹ch› has three sounds in English: the /ch/ sound as in church, chops, rich; the /k/ sound as in Christmas, chemist, architect (Greek
influence) and the /sh/ sound as in champagne, chef, machine (French influence).

English spellings can also be problematic. One factor related to the unpredictability of English spellings is that the first English
dictionary was printed a long time ago. Since then, the spelling of English words has remained much the same, even though the
pronunciation of many of these words has changed over the years.

Sue Lloyd

In this video Sue discusses the reasons for the complex nature of the English alphabetic code.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syFPuQ7FEGk

Digraphs cause added complexity

Another reason why the spelling of English words can prove problematic is that the English language has more sounds
(phonemes) than there are letters to represent those sounds. The accepted number of sounds in English is 44, and yet there are
only 26 letters. This means that some sounds have to be represented by two letters, which are called digraphs, such as, /ai/ rain,
/ou/ loud, /sh/ ship etc. Sometimes, more than two letters are used to represent one sound; for example, the /igh/ innight or the
/eigh/ in eight.

Digraphs representing sounds would not be a serious problem if there were just one digraph for each sound. Unfortunately, there
can be many ways of representing a single sound. For example, look at the following nine alternative ways of representing the
long /a/ sound. (Even this long list is not comprehensive; there are more spellings of the long /a/, but fortunately these are very
rare!)
 1. ai .... rain, frail, daily

2. ay .... say, play, crayon

3. a-e .... date, name, lemonade

4. a .... apron, angel, change

5. ei .... feint, vein, veil

6. ey .... they, grey, obey

7. eigh .. eight, neigh, sleigh

8. et .... ballet, sorbet, buffet

9. ea .... great, break, steak

All this means that, instead of having 44 letters and letter combinations to represent the 44 sounds of English, there are roughly
170+ alternative ways of representing the sounds. For some children, this amount of learning is easy, but for others it is quite a
challenge. Consequently, the alphabetic code needs to be introduced very carefully.

Although the complicated English alphabetic code has many spellings for each of the sounds, it is much more regular than many
people think. It just needs to be taught with greater care; teachers should progress from the simple to the more complex skills,
ensuring that all children master enough of the code to enable them to read and write fluently by the time they are about eight
years old.

Sue Lloyd

In this video discusses the additional complexity of digraphs in the English language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E53qbDg5Xzg

Phonics and linguistics

It is important to understand that there is a big difference between phonics and linguistics. Unlike phonics, linguistics is concerned
primarily with phonetics, which is the study of speech sounds, and is an exceedingly detailed and complex subject. For instance,
we may take it for granted that the /r/ sounds in ray and in tray are the same sound and, in Jolly Phonics, they are treated as
such. However, for a phonetician, the two sounds are rather different; the phonetician would point out that the /r/ sound in ray is
voiced and non-fricative, while the /r/ sound in tray is voiceless and fricative. Phoneticians are also concerned with accents; they
would, for example, distinguish between the /a/ sound made by British English speaker, and the /a/ sound made by an American
English speaker. The extra distinctions made in linguistics are definitely not what is needed when teaching young children.

Phonics, on the other hand, is intended to help young children learn to read and write in the simplest way possible. It achieves this
by giving them enough basic understanding of the sound-symbol relationships (phoneme-grapheme correspondences) that will
enable them to work out most unknown words for themselves. This is why Jolly Phonics advocates using only the simplest
terminology and phonic knowledge with the children. For example, rather than using the linguistic terms ‘phoneme’ and
‘grapheme’, we tend to keep to the simpler terminology of letter sounds. Similarly, although we write in Jolly Phonics about the
first 42 letter sounds, the reality is that, technically, we cover only 39 letter sounds. The sounds in /qu/ are actually a /k/ and /w/;
the sounds in /x/ are really a /k/ and /s/ and the sounds in /ue/ are a /y/ and an /oo/. Essentially, /qu/, /x/ and /ue/ are blends of
letter sounds that have already been covered, but explaining them as such to the children would not make it easier for them to
read words with a /qu/, a /x/ or a /ue/ in them.
The /qu/ page from the Jolly Phonics Workbooks

Additional sounds

Jolly Phonics teaches the main sounds of the English language. However, a small number of less common sounds are omitted
from the first stage of Jolly Phonics teaching. Even though teachers will not teach these additional sounds initially, it can be
helpful if they are able recognise the sounds.

The five phonemes not included in the 42 letter sounds are:

1. The /zh/ sound: this is found in the words television and measure.
2. The /air/ sound: this is found in the words chair and stare.
3. The schwa: this is a ‘swallowed vowel’, roughly equating to an /uh/ sound, which occurs in certain words. The sound
represented by the ‹e› in the words the and children is a schwa. A schwa can be written like this: . More details about this
sound can be found in the Glossary, in Module 5.
4. The /ear/ sound: this is found in the words fear and beer.
5. The /oo / sound: this is found in the words tour and sure.

It is useful if teachers are aware of these sounds, but the added complexity is more of a hindrance than a help for very young
children. Gradually, as children get older and more confident in their reading and writing, they are able to take on the extra phonic
knowledge. For this reason, the /zh/ and /air/ sounds are introduced in The Grammar Handbook 2. The schwa is not covered
specifically in Jolly Phonics because children realise very quickly that vowel sounds are sometimes ‘swallowed’ in spoken words.
Similarly, the /ear/ sound is not taught specifically because children can often read words containing the /ear/ by blending the /ea/
and /r/ sounds together. The /oo / sound is not covered because it occurs so rarely in spoken English.

The /air/ sound page from

The Grammar Handbook 2

The letter sounds

Another reason for not getting too bogged down in linguistic details is that English is a ‘living’ language; pronunciation and accents
vary enormously around the world and constantly evolve over time. For instance, there is only one sound for ‹oo› in some
Scottish accents, which is /oo/ as in moon. Many Irish accents have a /t/ sound for the /th/. American speakers tend to pronounce
the letter ‹o› as /ah/, that is, in the same way that British speakers say the /ar/ sound. There are hundreds more examples. The
interesting thing is that children are incredibly good at adjusting the code to the way that they pronounce the words.

For reading, it is not necessary to know all 170+ different ways of representing the sounds. In fact, just knowing the first 42 letter
sounds and the alternative spellings for those sounds (opposite) is usually sufficient.

What is essential is that the children are able to blend words that use these common letter sounds fluently. Blending needs to
become the automatic response to all words that have not been read before.

With this ability, the children are then frequently able to deduce words that contain an unknown letter sound by adjusting
(tweaking) the pronunciation. Most words will contain some regular letter sounds that the children know. With a bit of adjustment
of the vowel pronunciations and some consideration of the context, the children are able to read most words. The wider
knowledge of the 170+ different ways of representing the sounds is needed far more for spelling than for reading. Much of this is
covered in The Grammar Handbook 2.

8. HISTORY

An introduction to the teaching of reading

In English-speaking countries, reading instruction has involved swings between methods emphasising phonics (the way that
written symbols represent speech sounds) and methods emphasising the recognition of words as wholes, with little or no attention
to the letter-sound correspondences in them.

Whole-word methods can be further subdivided into the look-and-say type and the whole-language type. Look-and-say
approaches teach individual words explicitly, for example by using flashcards or reading schemes based on the repetition of high-
frequency words, whilst whole-language type, which expect children to identify printed words by using cues from context and
pictures. Phonics methods, in turn, can be subdivided into analytic phonics and synthetic phonics. Analytic phonics is often
combined with the teaching of sight words; children first learn the words as unanalysed wholes and only later learn to break them
down (analyse them) in order to understand the relationship between the written symbols and the sounds. Synthetic phonics
starts by teaching letters and sounds and then, after just a few have been learnt, teaches children to sound out the letters in
simple words from left to right and then blend (synthesise) the sounds.

Jenny Chew

The teaching of reading in the 1960s

By 1960, look-and-say methods were widespread in most English-speaking countries, though not in South Africa. Rudolph Flesch’s best-
selling book, Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955) had provided evidence of the prevalence of look-and-say in the USA and of the resulting
increase in reading problems. Romalda Spalding’s phonics-based programme The Writing Road to Reading had been published in the
USA in 1957 and produced good results where it was used, but it was not used widely enough to counteract the effects of look-and-say.

The popularity of look-and-say was probably based partly on the fact that it seemed to enable children to make good initial progress and
partly on the fact that English has a very complicated spelling system, which was thought to make phonics methods less appropriate than
for other languages.

Why Johnny Can't Read by Rudolph Flesch

James Pitman's Initial Teaching Alphabet

In England, Sir James Pitman had seen that phonics was important, and he devised the Initial Teaching Alphabet (i. t. a.) in an attempt to
provide a system which made reading as simple for English beginners as for beginners in languages with much simpler spelling systems,
though children were expected to switch over to reading conventionally spelt texts by the age of 7. In the i. t. a., there was a one-to-one
correspondence between written symbols and sounds (phonemes). Many of the symbols were conventional letters, but special symbols
were devised for the sounds that are represented by letter-combinations such as ‘sh’, ‘th’, ‘ee’ and ‘oa’ in conventional spelling. The i. t. a.
was introduced into some schools in England in 1961: some teachers used it phonically, as Pitman intended, but others used it in a look-
and-say way. This meant that the results were mixed, and this, together with its odd appearance in the eyes of most adults, meant that it
fell out of favour.

In 1967, there were three important publications relevant to the teaching of reading, one in England (the Plowden Report) and two in the
USA (Jean Chall’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate and Bond and Dykstra’s article ‘The co-operative research programme in first-
grade reading instruction’, published in Reading Research Quarterly). The Plowden Report dealt with education generally, rather than
specifically with the teaching of reading, but was widely interpreted as recommending that children should learn by discovering things for
themselves rather than by being explicitly taught. Jean Chall’s book, by contrast, recognised the importance of phonics, as too (to some
extent) did the Bond and Dykstra study.

Pitman's i. t. a.

The teaching of reading in the 1970s

The popularity of look-and-say continued and by the early 1970s a new dimension had been added in the form of the influence of
the whole-language approach. Key authors were Kenneth and Yetta Goodman, based in the USA, and Frank Smith, who had
studied in the USA and, after living abroad, had moved to Canada. These authors, still active in the early 21st century, believe that
phonics plays a very small part in reading; the term ‘whole language’ arises from the belief that language should be kept whole
and meaningful, not broken up into small units (for example, letters and sounds), which are meaningless in isolation.

However, their understanding of phonics sometimes appears limited; for example, Frank Smith seems to regard phonics as an
approach dealing only with the sounds represented by the individual letters of the alphabet and not with sounds represented by
letter combinations. In his 1978 book Reading, for instance, he lists ‘eleven common words in each of which the ho- has a
different pronunciation: hop, hope, hook, hoot, house, hoist, horse, horizon, honey, hour, honest’, and asks, ‘Can anyone really
believe that a child could learn to identify these words by sounding out the letters?’ (pp. 54-55). Children who have been taught
about graphemes beyond the single-letter level can, of course, identify words such as those cited by Smith ‘by sounding out the
letters’.

Whole-language advocates believe not only that phonics is unreliable but also that look-and-say is far too restricting. They argue
that instead of sounding words out or memorising them as wholes, children should be encouraged to guess at them from pictures
and context; in fact Kenneth Goodman has called reading ‘a psycholinguistic guessing game’.

Kenneth and Yeta Goodman

Language in action
In the 1970s, however, some authors were writing eloquently in defence of phonics. In England, one such author was Dr Joyce Morris,
who produced not only research papers but also a reading programme for children, Language in Action, which was based on good
linguistic principles.

At the time, the teaching of English in England was being investigated by the Bullock committee, and Dr Morris’s work was quoted by Prof.
Brian Cox in his evidence to this committee, of which he was a member. Yet in spite of this, and in spite of a ‘Note of Dissent’ by Stuart
Froome, another committee member, the committee’s report, published in 1975, concluded that there was no single way of teaching
reading which was clearly better than any other. In the USA, Siegfried Engelmann and others were also advocating phonics and
developing very successful phonics programmes.

Language in Action by Dr. Joyce Morris

The teaching of reading in the 1980s

By the early 1980s, the whole-language approach, which had originated in the USA was spreading to other English-speaking
countries. In England, books by Goodman and Smith featured prominently on reading lists for trainee teachers, as also did books
by British and other authors who held similar views. One such British author, Margaret Meek, implies, like Frank Smith, that
phonics is only about single letters: her 1982 book Learning to Read, for example, contains the comment that even words such as
‘cream’, ‘sea’ and ‘road’ ‘will not yield to phonic decoding’ (p. 75). Another book by a British author which began to feature
prominently on reading lists after its publication in 1985 was by Liz Waterland: this book, Read with Me, advocates what is called
an ‘apprenticeship approach’ to early reading, which is very similar to the USA whole-language approach.

In the 1980s, too, the work of Marie Clay in New Zealand (deviser of Reading Recovery) and Don Holdaway in Australia also
played down phonics, promoted whole language, and became influential far beyond the countries where it originated.

The 1980s was also the decade in which the Letterland books were first published. The Letterland programme was primarily
concerned with teaching children to recognise the alphabet letters. It introduced each letter as a character, an inhabitant of
fictional world called 'Letterland'. Characters included 'Annie Apple', 'Clever Cat' and 'Dippy Duck'. All the letters were first shown
to children as part of a pictogram. For example, the letter <c> was introduced as 'Clever Cat', and was shown as a cat's head with
a <c> shape superimposed onto it. The Letterland programme did mention blending; however the programme's main focus was
the introduction of the alphabet letters.

Throughout the English-speaking world, therefore, theories about the teaching of reading were dominated by the influence of
whole language, and phonics was regarded as playing at best a very minor role. This was in spite of updated versions of the work
of Jeanne Chall and Rudolph Flesch which appeared in the 1980s, and also, in England, in spite of a 1989 report by Dr Tom
Gorman, of the National Foundation for Educational Research, in which the author demonstrated, from reading lists for trainee
teachers, that too little attention was being given to phonics.

Learning to Read Jeanne Chall

The 'Oxford group'

One strand of thinking, which first emerged in England during the 1980s and also became influential in other countries, did appear
to recognise the need for more attention to the relationship between written symbols and the sounds of spoken words. This
thinking originated with a group sometimes called the ‘Oxford group’, who had done research into children’s ability to identify
onsets (initial consonants) and rhyming units (vowel sound and any following consonants) in spoken words.

The theory was that children would be able to see the similarity between the onset and rhyme units of unfamiliar printed words
and the same units in words which they knew as sight words, and would be able to read the unfamiliar words by making
analogies: for example, if they knew ‘beak’ as a sight word and then encountered ‘peak or ‘weak’, they would see the ‘eak’ as
familiar and would simply have to exchange the /b/ sound before it to a /p/ or /w/. This approach still has some influence, but it
should be noted that it depends on the learning of sight words as a first step, so it is really an offshoot of look-and-say.

In England, the first National Curriculum English Order was published in 1989 and the guidance for the teaching of early reading
reflected whole language thinking, though this approach was usually called the ‘real books’ approach in England because ordinary
storybooks were used instead of instructional reading schemes based on the look-and-say approach.

The National Curriculum

The teaching of reading in the 1990s

In England, perhaps more than in other English-speaking countries, there was some official concern about reading standards by 1990. The
1989 report by Gorman has been mentioned above. Another contributory factor was some evidence released in 1990 by a group of
educational psychologists, led by Martin Turner. This evidence charted a decline in reading standards among hundreds of thousands of
children in several local education authorities from 1985 onwards. Turner put this down to the growing influence of the ‘real books’
movement.

At first, his findings were treated with great scepticism by many people in the world of education, but independent checks by the National
Foundation for Educational Research soon confirmed the scale of the decline, although it attributed this decline to the economic recession
of the time rather than to the ‘real books’ movement and many people accepted this explanation.

Sponsored Reading Failure by Martin Turner

The National Literacy Strategy

Several revisions of the National Curriculum English Order took place during the first half of the 1990s, and phonics received a
little more emphasis, but not nearly enough. There was little change until 1998, when the newly-elected Labour government
introduced the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) in England. This gave more emphasis to phonics than any previous official
guidance had given, but much more from a spelling perspective than a reading perspective. Many of the spelling activities
suggested by the NLS required children to segment spoken words into their constituent sounds and choose letters to represent
the sounds. Reading, however, was presented as an activity for which phonics was only one of four ‘searchlights’, with
‘grammatical knowledge’, ‘knowledge of context’ and ‘word recognition and graphic knowledge’ regarded as throwing just as much
light on the text.

The authors of the NLS may not have intended to suggest that teachers should continue to use an approach to early reading
which combined ‘real books’ and look-and-say, but this was how the ‘searchlights’ model was widely interpreted in practice: the
‘real books’ or whole-language element was assumed to be implied by ‘grammatical knowledge’ and ‘knowledge of context’, and
the look-and-say or whole-word element was assumed to be implied by ‘word recognition and graphic knowledge’. The impression
that look-and-say was recommended was further strengthened by a list which was headed ‘High frequency words to be taught as
“sight recognition” words through YR to Y2’, that is, in Reception (Year R: the first year of school) and the next two years.

All in all, the phonics in the National Literacy Strategy was much more of the analytic type than of the synthetic type. It was more
to do with the analysis of the letters and sounds in written words after those words had been identified in some other way than
with the use of letter-sound knowledge, as a means of identifying written words. Unfortunately, this can lead to a mindset where
teachers go on teaching whole words as a first step and children go on thinking that they can read only words which they have
been taught or can guess from context. The habit of working words out by applying letter-sound knowledge is easy to establish at
the beginning of reading instruction but may be much harder to establish if other habits have been established first.

The NLS 'Searchlights'

'Why Children Can't Read'

1998 was also the year in which the British edition of Diane McGuinness’s book Why Children Can’t Read was published. The book
probably had a greater impact in Britain than in the USA, where it had been published in 1997. It was taken seriously by those producing
supplementary National Literacy Strategy materials, though not so seriously that it caused them to abandon the ‘searchlights’ model.

From 1998 onwards, a series of reports on the use of synthetic phonics in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, started to influence developments.

Why Children Can't Read by Diane McGuinness

The teaching of reading from 2000 onwards

In the USA, concern about literacy standards led to the publication, in 2000, of the Report of the National Reading Panel. This
concluded that teaching approaches which emphasised phonics were more effective than those which did not.

A House of Commons Education and Skills Committee inquiry into the teaching of reading ran from November 2004 to February
2005. As the series of hearings was coming to an end, the seven-year Clackmannanshire follow-up report was published,
showing remarkable reading and spelling results for children who had been taught synthetic phonics in their first year of school
and were now reaching the end of primary school. This was taken seriously by the Education and Skills Committee. Jim Rose
was then asked to carry out a review of the teaching of early reading. His interim report, published in December 2005, in effect
rejected the whole language-based ‘searchlights’ approach by pointing out that it could be ‘daunting and confusing’ for beginners
to be taught by methods which assumed that ‘all the strategies of skilled reading need to be covered from children’s first steps of
learning to read’ (Paragraph 34).

An Australian report published in the same month was also critical of whole language. The final Rose report, published in March
2006, recommended that the ‘searchlights’ model for early reading should be replaced by the ‘simple view of reading’. This meant
that children should no longer be taught to regard context and grammar as having equal status with phonic knowledge for the
purpose of identifying written words; rather, they should use phonics as their prime approach to identifying words, and should use
context and grammar to assist with their understanding of the text only after the words are identified.

A new national curriculum for English KS1 & KS2 was introduced in the UK in 2014. The curriculum aims to ensure that all
children:

Read easily, fluently and with good understanding

Develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
Acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and
spoken language
Appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
Write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and
audiences
Use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
Are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating
in debate

The English curriculum at KS1 and KS2 provides schools with a programme of study (it does not provide lesson plans) that they should
follow and it is split into tow distinct areas.

The programme of study includes a continued emphasis on systematic synthetic phonics, including a progression in teaching. At all levels,
there is an emphasis on spelling, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation that should be included in the teaching. This structure and
emphasis would be typical of the English curricular in most English speaking countries.
The 'simple view of reading'

Letters and Sounds

A government programme, Letters and Sounds, which was based on the ‘simple view’, was published in 2007, but it was stated,
both in this publication and elsewhere, that schools were quite free to use other programmes following the same principles if they
wished. Thus England became the first English-speaking country in modern times in which there was clear government backing
for teaching based on the ‘simple view of reading’, where phonics is the prime means of identifying written words, rather than on
look-and-say and other whole-language approaches.

Does Letters and Sounds link with the National Curriculum? Letters and Sounds was archived in 2012, ahead of the publication
of the new national curriculum, which came into effect in 2014. This means that, although curriculum remains true to the principles
of Letters and Sounds, it does not follow the same structure and allows schools more flexibility in choosing a strong synthetic
phonics programme.

What about the Statutory Framework for the EYFS? The curriculum starts in Year 1. Before this, the Statutory Framework for the
Early Years Foundation Stage required that children were taught to read and write using phonics. The expectation is that schools
will use government-approved schemes and resources, and most schools will use a programme that matches the required
teaching for KS1.

What are the similarities and differences? Both Letters and Sounds and the national curriculum place a strong emphasis on
phonics, and both require the development language skills through reading and spoken language. The national curriculum,
however, is more flexible and only requires that the statutory skills and knowledge are taught by the end of the Key Stage, rather
than in phases. The curriculum also requires the explicit teaching of spelling, grammar and punctuation as part of the wider
literacy curriculum and places a lot of emphasis on reading for pleasure.

Should I stop using Letters and Sounds? The most important thing when teaching synthetic phonics is to pick a really strong
synthetic phonics scheme and teach it faithfully throughout the whole school, supporting it with quality training. If you have been
using Letters and Sounds successfully, then you can carry on teaching using it. However, you will have to buy additional
resources for teaching spelling, grammar and punctuation and you will have to select these carefully in order to provide continuity
through the school.

The following document provides a good comparison between the Jolly Phonics programme and the Letters and Sounds
programme.
Click to download the document

Letters and Sounds document

10. DOWNLOADS

Introduction to Downloads section

This is the Downloads section of the module. From this section, you may download the course notes en bloc. Some modules may also
have additional elements for download such as interactive resources, professional development readings, general resources etc.

PLEASE NOTE CAREFULLY THAT YOU CAN SAVE THE COURSE NOTES AS A PDF DOCUMENT AND ALL LINKS TO WEBSITES
AND VIDEO CLIPS IN THE MODULE WILL ALSO BE SAVED IN THIS DOCUMENT.

11. END OF MODULE

End of module

You have reached the end of this module. Please ensure that you do the following:

1. Go to "Module Assignment" section above and complete the module assignment requirements
2. Update your time record from your participant block on the right-hand side of the course page - if you have offline time to add

For instructions on how to complete your assignment and how to update your time record please refer to the participant guide and to the
video guides.