I see Masha the Menace has left a comment on the graun website !

I'm not sure you understand the significance of the allegory. The windmills are imaginary enemies of one's own making (and Quijote was a charming and romantic but misguided fool; so I'm not sure I'd identify with him too strongly). What the windmills aren't are the respondents to your postings. At 3...

I don't call Sounds-Write a synthetic phonics programme. It's called a linguistic phonics programme and I certainly won't quibble with my SP colleagues over the term. We call it that because the sounds in our speech are represented by little squiggles on the page we call spellings. These spellings c...

First, the shortcomings of SP when it comes to the complexities of the English language. Of course these have always existed. It is this complexity which makes English more difficult to read and spell than some other languages. I don't think there is any way round this difficulty, and I don't think...

I think you might be confusing clarity with validity. Yes, SP is seductively straightforward. Unfortunately, the written language is not straightforward. The SP approach does not cover all the complexities of the language. I can describe this lack of coverage in a very clear way: there are phonemes...

I agree that coding can occur at different levels of abstraction. Coding at the phonic level is more versatile than coding at the word level, but it's still coding. Ships signalling using flags code at the phrase level. But we're not discussing ships' flags, are we? Of course there are a variety of...

JAC, yes, the recognition of a whole word is decoding. It is 'translating' the written code into spoken language. That’s just where I think you’re wrong, Toots. Words as wholes are not pictographs or logographs. In fact, the expression ‘whole word’ is truly a misnomer. Early would-be inventors of w...

Just for people's information, a few years ago Diane McGuinness wrote about a book she thought is the 'gold standard' on teaching comprehension: Block, C.C, Gambrell, L.B. and Pressley, M. (eds), Improving Comprehension Instruction , San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. When I saw what Diane had to say, I im...

Jenny said: I would never have supported synthetic phonics or the screening check as staunchly as I have done if I had not honestly believed, on the basis of the evidence I know about, that more early emphasis on decoding would result in better national standards of comprehension (and spelling) and ...

You're absolutely right, Volunteer, to draw the distinction between receptive and productive language. Receptive language always proceeeds at a faster pace than productive language. In fact, David Crystal points out in a number of his books that a well educated person's receptive vocabulary (the wor...

Very interesting programme, Susan! One thing I'd never thought about was that it is often believed that the advent of print made the copying process more reliable. Not so, we heard from one of the contributors, and for the rather obvious reason that print is set back-to-front and upside-down, making...

It is not as simple as you claim. In some cases, in order to decode a word you need to understand it and the context; and in every case, in order to read the words you have decoded you need to understand them. This, Toots, is where we definitely do part company. In my humble opinion, you've got the...

In response to Toots: Of course I agree that teachers teach to tests. What I'm objecting to in the SATs tests is that some schools seem hardly to anything other than prepare for the SATs, to the exclusion of all else. And, I'm not against SATs. I remember very well what happened when the 11+ was pha...

This is a very interesting posting, Jim, and thanks for flagging it up. The extended piece, written by Hensher, in the Observer last Sunday had particular resonance for me. About two years ago I began writing a daily page or two in a notebook every morning. One reason for this was that I'd decided t...

OK. I am opposed to the phonics screening check for the following reasons: 1. It encourages teaching to the test with children learning to decode lists of nonwords using time when children should be learning to decode real words, from which they can move onto reading real words in quality texts in ...