Thanks for your repy, elsiep. Can I ask, have you read Diane McGuinness's more recent books, Language Development and Learning to Read (2005) and Early Literacy Instruction (2004)? What I meant about how the brain works is explanations such as Diane McGuinness’s in “Why Children Can’t Read” about th...

Thanks for your interesting reply, volunteer. What I would really like to know from elsiep is what, specifically, she has a problem with. I know we have disagreeed over the history of reading instruction, the research base of Smith & Goodman's theories of reading, the possible constituentsof good re...

Debbie Hepplewhite wrote:I compiled a chart (or list) going from print-to-sound in contrast to sound-to-print and the result proved to be very complicated and not really comprehensive.

I had a go at doing that, too. It is fiendishly difficult.

Elsiep, alias Logical Incrementalism, wrote this in response to an education blogger: http://improvingteaching.co.uk/2015/05/10/five-psychological-findings-every-history-teacher-should-know/ I’ve seen several examples in relation to synthetic phonics of teachers essentially making up explanations of...

And Anne Glennie has posted an excellent blog on the same topic:

http://www.thelearningzoo.co.uk/2015/05 ... ll-i-know/

Reading for pleasure is what makes the difference, researchers believe.

This thread might be relevant...

http://www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/view ... f=1&t=6032

It's here, G.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl ... ne.0089900

Active Literacy Kit Teaches letter/sound correspondence through to automatic CVC reading and spelling. Well, that doesn't take them as far as the PSC, which has some multisyllable words.. And I would like something rather more ambitious than CVC words for KS3 & 4. Interesting that thay are selling i...

Languages need to cope with new concepts, and adding to the meanings of a familiar word is sometimes better than inventing a new one, but replacling a satisfactory word with one that is alredy overloaded is disruptive. I entirely agree with you, Ken, but as I understand it, we are just resisting ch...

Love @ReadOnGetOn campaign! but fanatical obsession with phonics by Tories has done much damage to reading!

Noticeably Sheerman didn't attempt to respond to tweets from the 'fanatics' about this completely unevidenced assertion.

Lesley might know what I think if she saw any of my tweets on the subject yesterday, but, for what it's worth, I think it's a bad idea. In my. limited maybe, experience, a good Secondary school will be aware of these children before they even reach them and will be prepared to intervene as soon as t...

Thanks Jennie, Alison is always worth a read.

Everyone is welcome to add to this thread; there is lots of interesting stuff out there.

Those of us on Twitter tend to forget that twitter is not the centre of the social media universe. Consequently, we get to see all sorts of good things about phonics (and an incredible number of bad things) without passing on what we've seen. Every so often there is a good old row/debate about Synth...

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ ... of-phonics


Quite a lively debate about funding followed this!

JAC wrote:Even the sandwiches were great

They were, weren't they Pam

Lovely day and lovely to put faces to names!

I'm hoping to get many of the talks up on the website ASAP in pdf form. The films will take a little longer...