Teaching

Teaching

Teaching

Introduction

The teaching of reading raises significant inquiries and trials, with specific significances for Early Years practitioners. Despite the introduction in 1998 of the National Literacy Strategy (now part of the National Primary Strategy), and the improvements in children's reading attainment, the government is worried that, utilising their firmly age-related assesses, there are still numerous young children 'lagging behind' or 'failing' to discover to read by the age of eleven, and 'not gathering expectations' at seven.

Much study has taken location to set up how best to teach reading and in 2005 the government inquired Jim Rose, both a previous headteacher and head of OFSTED, to make a report with recommendations. He heard to numerous representatives encompassing mighty lobbyists for an set about called 'Synthetic Phonics'. Their promotion, and the newspapers treatment has inferred that he was swayed by their contentions and that his recommendations were acknowledged by Ruth Kelly, the then Education Minister, and will soon be made compulsory for schools.

Teaching reading since the beginning of the 20th century

The teaching of reading is a complicated and vastly researched subject. As Pearson suggests, in his article, 'Reading in the twentieth century', (2000: 1) in order to compare different approaches, it is useful to have a set of criteria by which to assess them. He suggests 'dominant materials', and 'dominant pedagogical practices' as two which are easiest to 'see': he goes on to suggest that 'role of teacher and learner' and beliefs about 'the nature of reading' and 'learning to read' will be more difficult to identify but also useful forms of comparison.

Pearson (2000: 1) suggests that, at the beginning of the 20th century the main teaching method was 'synthetic phonics'. This entailed children undertaking exercises to learn letter names, letter sounds and then 'blending'. To apply his other criteria, the child's role was to receive curriculum from the teacher and to practise skills, the teacher's role to provide appropriate exercises. This approach to teaching reading takes what is known as a 'simple' view of reading: i.e. that it consists of two processes, 'decoding' and 'comprehending': the reader 'listens' to what s/he is decoding and thus understands it.

Pearson goes on to describe innovations in the first third of the 20th century (1900-1935). These can broadly be divided into three categories (different only in 'dominant materials'). The first, 'snalytic phonics' is an approach (sometimes called 'words to letters') in which the child encounters a whole word, and is asked to 'analyse' the sounds within it. The second innovation came to be known as 'look and say': a number of words were learnt as sight vocabulary before any analysis of their letter sounds took place: Pearson strongly argues that, 'contrary to popular opinion…..some form of analytic phonics usually kicked in after ..a hundred or so sight words had been memorized.' (2000: 2). The third approach used an invented alphabet as temporary measure, as in the 'Initial Teaching Alphabet', popular in the 1960s (http://www.itafoundation.org).

Other important developments in this period are described by ...