It clearly is still a controversial opinion to hold that phonics is not the "end all be all" it has been made out to be.

Despite challenging the statistics in the original paper, it doesn't provide evidence that phonics actually is better than the teaching techniques prior to that.

Is "synthetic phonics" not a rather narrow subset of "phonics-centric reading"?

In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or to justify Departmental failures.

The unstated goal of the phonics test with the nonsense words is to make it impossible for teachers to cheat by having students rote-learn a bunch of high-frequency words. They can only pass by actually learning the grapheme-phoneme correspondances. It's a good thing.

But there is no sense in which that's a skill required for effective reading. English spelling and pronunciation have too many random corners for it to be anything other than a distracting academic exercise.

Recognising a bunch of high-frequency words is very much the foundation of reading.

Historically reading was taught by learning words with some very basic rules for pronunciation. It worked pretty well for a long time. But the pronunciation of non-trivial words - and some trivial words - has to be heard to be learned.

For example: it's not unusual for bookish people to mispronounce obscure words because they've never heard them. They know what the words mean, but the correct pronunciation just can't be worked out from the spelling.

The only way to learn it is to hear someone saying it.

Except that's wrong - there are rules to English pronunciation that work like 99% of the time. It's why most people would pronounce "ghoti" something like "go tee" or "go tie" instead of "fish".

Just because there are exceptions doesn't mean the rules are nonexistent. We're just rarely or never explicitly taught these rules.

As a parent with kids who struggled (actually, performed average) on these nonsense word tests, I do think that is bullshit. If you somehow manage to cheat and get your kids to recognize all the high frequency words they need to be fluent, congratulations, you have taught them to read.

Let's keep kids' achievement measures out of the cynical distrust of our teaching staff.

Edit: Yes, I am biased. And, TheOtherHobbes made better and clearer points than me in my sister comment.

No way. That is absolute bullshit. You can tell, because they cite exactly zero studies showing some other way is better. They are looking at scores over time with no control, which can be decreasing for any other reason.

Phonics based reading instruction is response to the massive scandal that already happened in the US where they tried the whole language approach, balanced instruction, three cueing, and the like with no evidence of positive impacts on literacy. Even the founder of the three cueing method accepted it is a failure. Teachers and education researchers with new books to sell don't want to accept that the boring way works better, especially for students with less support at home (where parents often use phonics to teach kids at age 2 or 3). Someone like Lucy Calkins is potentially responsible for 25% of the illiteracy in the US.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-of-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/school...

https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/03/13/richmond-school-find...

The UCL researchers are among 250 signatories to a letter which has been sent to education secretary Nadhim Zahawi, calling on the government to allow for a wider range of approaches to teaching reading, which would allow teachers to use their own judgment about which is best for their pupils.

It doesn't say phonics doesn't work, it suggests phonics is only effective for a subgroup of pupils. Everyone has their own learning strategy and phonics doesn't appear to work for everyone.

There is pretty strong evidence[0] [1] [2] that phonics is a critical part of learning to read for everyone no matter who they are or what their personality is. It's not the only piece of the puzzle but if you leave it out you will handicap the student intended to or not. Without phonics when you encounter a new word you can't pronounce it. If you can't pronounce it you can't use it in conversation. You can't use it in your mental processing. If you aren't taught it you may pick up the rules of thumb eventually but you'll have done so the long hard way.

You might be justifiably angry that no one showed you or your child the easy way.

1: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Advantages-of-the-...

2: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ameliorating-Early-Rea...

3: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-effect-of-phonics-...

You and op are both correct. The problems are teaching only phonics (which a lot of SOR advocates want) and not teaching phonics at all (which happens in a fair number of classrooms).

Exactly. You also need to learn word definitions as well as grammar and sentence structure. Leave out any of the pieces of the puzzle and you are handicapping the student.

I can't find anyone out there that advocates teaching only phonics. It's a step in the process of learning to read that, if left to teachers that were taught under a non-evidence based approach, many try to skip.

They don't say "only teach phonics", they say "always teach phonics no matter what even if it fails a significant number of students". It's an issue of forcing teachers to do things they know won't work or aren't working.

I'm not saying there aren't bad teachers, and I agree that's a problem and that the solution (get good people to be teachers and give them the autonomy to be good) depends on addressing it. But using bad teachers as a reason to strip all teachers of their autonomy is a huge step back.

> It's an issue of forcing teachers to do things they know won't work or aren't working.

So many teachers at this point have been falsely taught that phonics doesn't work, that many skip thinking they are doing the right thing. We need them to try to teach phonics. Yes, there are some students it won't work for, such as those with hearing problems. However, those students should be in specialized programs already. For everyone without hearing problems, we need them to try.

> So many teachers at this point have been falsely taught that phonics doesn't work, that many skip thinking they are doing the right thing.

Maybe. There's a lot of guessing about what teachers are doing in this thread; I'd be interested in a survey of what they're actually doing.

> For everyone without hearing problems, we need them to try.

Maybe. The UK has been going hard on phonics and while scores went way up for the next couple years, the effects on the years afterwards were real bad.

The trouble is that there's a strong tendency in UK journalism these days to treat anything the UK is doing as obviously wrong and any alternative as obviously better and ignore evidence that contradicts this, and the Guardian is one of the worst offenders. (This doesn't just apply to education; for example, the British press like to blame our energy woes on the government focusing on offshore wind and push onshore wind and solar as magical solutions, even though the offshore wind push was a roaring success that other countries want to copy and onshore wind and solar were already struggling even before the shift in focus.)

> it suggests phonics is only effective for a subgroup of pupils

If that subgroup is 90+%, is it worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater? (I don't know the % here, I'm making one up as a thought experiment.)

As the petition calls for, it should be left to the teachers to decide. Even if the succes rate is 90%, are you happy to throw the remaining 10% under the reading bus ?

But so many teachers have been miseducated and they try to leave it out. Wyse and Bradbury at UCL are pushing non-evidence based approaches on the false authority of Margaret Meek Spencer [1] by making up a strawman of teaching only phonics, as if people that advocate teaching phonics claimed that were the only step in learning to read.

[1] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152356/1/Wyse_The%20...

I'm not sure why you think this is a one or the other solution.

I am shocked this comment exists, when the counter-example is literally written into it. English uses the latin alphabet which is a phonetic alphabet. It's why english readers can also 'read' Spanish without understanding any of the words. Anyone who says otherwise should be promptly ignored.

To be fair, English pronunciation is not as regular as Spanish. Spanish is a purely phonetic language, while English is phonetic but irregular.

People keep saying this, and I agree english is more complicated, but it is otherwise regular. The vast majority of English words are regular, and for those that are not regular, sounding them out incorrectly in context with the other words quickly disabuses you of any incorrect reading.

My mom was a public school teacher in a poor district, and the main problem with her kids learning to read is that they did not actually know English. This would make it much more difficult to figure out how to read properly, since they'd never be able to correct 'wrong' pronunciations. I believe a lot of focus on reading is mis-placed when the children cannot speak English properly. Better to focus on diction and vocabulary.

English is context-sensitive phonetic, Spanish and other Latin languages are regular phonetic. Just look at "are"; its pronunciation of "a" depends on a following consonant and following vowel. Otherwise the "a" would be pronounced like "add". There are over a dozen context-sensitive rules like that, and thousands of common words that are purely exceptions, e.g. "read" and "learning" having different pronunciations of "ea", and hence are not phonetic. They are whole-word pronunciations learned by rote or immersion.

You're probably right that for pedagogical purposes, English reading can be taught the same way as Spanish because they are both based on phonetic alphabets. I don't disagree that knowing English (and knowing things in general, along with vocabulary) are essential to learning to read.

Big picture, irregular pronunciation in English might encourage educators to use different strategies for learning the outlier words or for reinforcement. It could still be optimal to learn with this additional instruction, even if it's a secondary concern for rudimentary learners.

It's been successful in Scotland: https://www.pearson.com/uk/educators/schools/making-an-impac...

This article compares Scotland with England: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jan/19/phonics-ch...

One thing I've never seen addressed is the difference in accents between Scotland on the one hand, and England and Wales on the other. Scottish pronunciation of Standard English is in general closer to English spelling (e.g. "good" and "food" rhyme, and "r" is always pronounced).