It seems to me that Bowers and Bowers don’t reckon with the fact that real beginners know few if any letters, and recognise few if any words in their written form. Children really do need to start at the very beginning, and the examples that B. and B. give (‘do’- ’does’, ‘act’- ’action’- ’react’, ‘s...

Here are two new articles on morphology: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1747021818759477 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1747021818775053 I wrote to Jeff Bowers (Bristol) just over a year ago after reading another Bowers and Bowers article. I said that although I was very ...

I don't think it's a matter of children ALWAYS being dependent on a third party if they are taught analytic phonics - they obviously do need to get to the point of being able to work words out independently in due course. It's just that it's not clear how they manage it if they are not taught that w...

I, too, have always been in favour of incidental phonics teaching as well as planned systematic teaching. The drip-feeding of high-frequency ‘tricky’ words can lend itself to this, particularly if the teaching stresses the parts of these words which do and do not fit in with the phonics taught to da...

Here’s another chapter from the recent Clark book which has been made available for free: http://backseatlinguist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/McQuillan-Synthetic-Phonics-2018a.pdf ...and a press release about it: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3735767 I made some comments about the McQuill...

Just to clarify: what I wrote was ‘I agree, in principle, that “we should stick to research evidence”’. I also accept, though, that other considerations come into it in practice . I myself can’t ignore the fact that my contemporaries and I were taught good phonics as young children, with no guessing...

Thanks, Maizie. Three comments: 1. I agree about the teaching of blends (e.g. ‘br’, ‘bl’). The Clark books have been produced in the context of synthetic phonics (s.p.) developments in Scotland and England. Krashen and others need to look at relevant s.p. programmes rather than making assumptions ba...

Thanks, Elizabeth. It’s great that Krashen has made it possible for people to read his chapter without needing to buy the book. If any others have the time to read Becoming a Nation of Readers , I would be interested to hear whether they think, as I do, that taken as a whole it does not support the ...

Still more thoughts.... Stephen Krashen’s chapter in the new Clark book distinguishes between ‘intensive phonics’ and ‘basic phonics’. He says that ‘Basic phonics appears to have some use, but there are good reasons why intensive phonics is not the way to improve reading’. He illustrates ‘basic phon...

My last post was mainly about the problems that the Machin et al. study has caused by classifying something as synthetic phonics (s.p.) which was not Clackmannanshire-style s.p. I want to make it clear that in spite of those problems, I don’t regard Machin et al. as ‘phonics detractors’. In fact, th...

More thoughts.... The fact that neither Glazzard nor Krashen mentioned the 2018 Torgerson et al. tertiary review made me wonder if any contributor other than Clark mentioned it. I found that only Jeff McQuillan did, but rather in passing, as his main focus is the 2016 Machin et al. study. I commente...

This thread has apparently been at least partly responsible for the appearance of another book edited by Margaret Clark. In Chapter 1 she writes that ‘A negative tone is now appearing in a few reviews in England and being widely circulated on the Reading Reform Foundation Discussion Forum stimulated...

Warwick Mansell is just one of many people who are very critical of Nick Gibb. They could do with realising that what Gibb and the Conservatives have done is to put some extra weight behind initiatives originally introduced by a Labour government – e.g. the Rose review (2006) and Letters and Sounds ...

A fellow RRFer has alerted me to this: https://www.teachers.org.uk/education-policies/research/synthetic-phonics Oh dear.... It gives a link to the abstract of the Torgerson, Brooks, Gascoine and Higgins tertiary review, published in January 2018. I have the full article, and one thing that worried ...

Sad news - thanks for letting us know.

Jenny C.