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