This blog post by Prof. Greg Brooks has appeared on the website of the Australian Association for Research in Education: http://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=2577 Below are some extracts with my comments in bold: So who needs to be taught phonics and when? Some children are enabled to bridge that gulf by ...

Just out:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... ssible.pdf

Jenny C.

It's excellent that Anne got such full coverage. Just a couple of small quibbles about the way certain things are stated by the writer of the article: 'All alphabetic languages are built of phonemes – the smallest units of sound in speech .....' It's not just alphabetic languages but ALL languages, ...

You can watch this morning's proceedings here:

https://www.scottishparliament.tv/meeti ... ber-9-2017

You need to fast-forward to about 10.17.

Well done to Anne and her team.

Jenny C.

Thanks for this, Jim Here's a link to the full report: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/public/files/Review_of_SES_and_Science_Learning_in_Formal_Educational_Settings.pdf I've read only the executive summary so far, and found this on p. 10: 'Literacy: in correlational studies of science l...

I’m a bit uneasy about the A Level English Language/Literature analogy. The point of early phonics teaching (the ‘language’ side of things) is to equip children for ‘real reading’ (the ‘literature’ side of things), so we may have a problem if it’s really true that substantial numbers are good at pho...

Did you mean 23 September, Elizabeth? Some of Rosen’s ‘intertextual, intratextual...etc.’ points strike me as covering the same sort of ground as is covered in the National Curriculum – e.g. ‘interrogative’ (the NC mentions ‘asking questions’), ‘semantic’ (the NC has points about understanding meani...

A mum recently showed me some spellings that her twins, now in Year 2, had been given to learn when they were still in Year 1. I could see that some of the words were from the National Curriculum (NC) list for Years 3/4. The twins are very young for their year-group (late July birthday), but have ob...

I can't remember if this has ever been flagged up on the RRF forum, but I think it's relevant: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/22234/1/Reading_the_next_steps.pdf It makes the point that a good phonics start needs to be followed by bulk reading. With both reading and spelling, I would always want to stress tha...

The Project X books need to be distinguished fro the Project X Phonics books. The latter introduce grapheme-phoneme correspondences in the same order as Letters and Sounds . There is some text for an adult to read, which means that the story can be more complex than a story which has to e read entir...

I understood Geraldine's point to be that the RRF should emphasise the importance of sustained reading once early SSP has ensured that children can decode well, rather than that sustained reading should be the main emphasis from the start. Re. SSP and spelling: I used SSP with all my children and ha...

There's always an exception to complicate things! Yesterday I gave the BAS word-reading test (original version) to a Y1 boy whom I regard as a very good reader. Sure enough, his reading age came out at 9 years 7 months, and this was probably an under-estimate as he was called away to go swimming whe...

I’ve just got round to reading the May magazine from ATL. It includes a letter about Key Stage 2 assessment from someone (presumably a teacher) who writes this about spelling in particular: ‘To be deemed to be working at the expected level, children are expected to know ‘most’ of the random list (ba...

Thanks for the link, Jim. I had seen something about this survey, but your link give more info. about dates and statistics: 'While enjoyment levels had been rather stable between 2005 and 2012, they have been rising steadily since 2013, and in 2016 we recorded the highest percentage of reading enjoy...

I last taught GCSE in 2000, but things must have changed since then, as we certainly read whole books with students in those days, not just extracts. 'Secret teacher' writes 'Even in my own English literature degree, we were often only given a booklet of chapters and extracts'. I find that quite sho...