Chris Jolly – May 2013

Arguably the most surprising and welcome part of the new National Curriculum for England is its brevity.  At just 43 pages for the teaching of English (albeit with another 36 pages of appendices) it matches the 43 pages of the original National Curriculum of 1990. 

Over the years the government’s advice on teaching English had grown like Topsy.  By the last year of the Labour government on 2010 there were four major documents for the early teaching of English (the Early Years Foundation Stage, Letters and Sounds, the Primary National Strategy and the National Curriculum).  Together they totalled 682 pages, before counting all their CDs, charts and online materials.

Along being shorter, the new Document has a marked change in direction.  This is important not just in England but as part of the trends in education considered around the world.  While the emphasis on phonics was to be expected, it has been the emphasis on grammar that is most notable.

This emphasis has been broad and yet specific.  It requires the teaching of punctuation, sentences, tenses and clauses as well as a strong emphasis on spelling.  Interestingly it does not state that ‘parts of speech’ or ‘parsing’ should be taught, though the individual parts of speech, such as nouns and conjunctions, are mentioned.  Indeed it does not mention ‘synthetic phonics’ either, instead referring to the need for teaching through a ‘rigorous and systematic phonics programme’.

By contrast the original National Curriculum has none of this.  It made no mention of phonics, and effectively none of grammar either.  It had vague references to children needing to ‘write fluently and legibly’ which did not give much guidance, or lend itself to assessment.  While the new National Curriculum is to be applauded for its clarity and focus, is there the evidence to support its recommendations?

For the phonics recommendations the evidence is clear.  The research by Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson in Clackmannanshire has been the most influential study on the teaching of reading.  Also very influential was the study by Morag Stuart in London’s Docklands, both studies incidentally using Jolly Phonics.  They showed that children taught systematically with phonics would learn around twice as fast.  The children would have a reading age 12 months ahead of their actual age after one year.  Along with other research they showed that such teaching benefits the most vulnerable most of all.  Boys do as well as girls (instead of worse), while children from poorer socio-economic backgrounds, and those who do not have English as their first language, keep up just fine.  Opponents of phonics fear that such teaching may detract from the meaning of text and the enjoyment of reading but the research evidence is not there to support this.

By contrast the teaching of grammar has few detractors.  Yet the evidence to support the teaching of grammar is not strong.  Back in 1998 the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority published ‘The grammar papers’ with an excellent summary of the sparse research available then.  It pointed to studies that showed little or no benefit from teaching grammar.  However the studies reflected the thinking of the time, and differed from the recommendations in the new National Curriculum in two ways.

Firstly the studies were overly centred on parts of speech.  Teaching the wider structure of English seems to have been ignored.

And secondly, these studies were on children in secondary school.  In practice however, children are learning the structure of the language mostly in primary school, so that is where grammar should be taught.  For our part, we published the first part of Jolly Grammar in 2000, so many years ago, and specifically for this wider teaching of grammar, and in the primary years.

Nonetheless, the evidence in support of early grammar teaching is still too sparse.  I would welcome and encourage such research.  We need it not just to validate the new direction but so we can quantify the gains to be achieved, and to see if some children benefit more than others.

Chris Jolly – May 2013

For more information on any of the products, please view them through our online shop.

Grammar 1

Grammar 2

Grammar 3

Dictionary

For use across all levels of Grammar.

Click here for lots of FREE resources for phonics, grammar, spelling and punctuation.

Alison Lunn, Music Teacher, Lady St. Mary CE VC First School, Wareham, Dorset. Ali has been using Jolly Music since January 2012 when she started her Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 classes on Beginner’s Level.

Christopher Woolmer  - Director of Music Oakwood School, Purley. Christopher uses Jolly Music with his pupils from Reception to Year 2.

Karen Marshall  - Music Educator (SpLD Specialist Music Teacher). Karen specialises in teaching music in a multi-sensory way to students with special educational needs.

Martin Lijinsky  - Music Teacher, Cheam School, Newbury. Martin has been using Jolly Music for five years with his pupils from Reception to Year 2.

Will Green, Music Teacher at Newington Green Primary School, London. Will uses Jolly Music (from Beginners to Level 3) with the younger children in the school (i.e. from Reception to Year 3).

Products

All products in the Jolly Phonics programme are eligible for up to £3,000 match funding from the UK Department for Education!

Until March 2013, match funding for synthetic phonics materials is available to state-funded schools with KS1 pupils in England, including academies and Free Schools.

Schools must order products through the government-approved ESPO catalogue in order to received match-funding. To view the catalogue and learn more click here

Training

Jolly Phonics training in England is eligible for match-funding:

• Book a place on a scheduled Jolly Phonics Training Course - New courses to be announced for Autumn 2012
• Book a custom-made Jolly Phonics training course for your school with Elizabeth Nonweiler of Teach to Read
• Book a Jolly Phonics training session for your school with Ann Foster of Foster Literacy
• Book a place on the Jolly Phonics Online Training Course with CPD college

Book your place directly, then complete the form at the back of the ESPO catalogue and send to your Pro5 organization with your training invoice to reclaim 50% of the cost.

Join our international network of Jolly Trainers, and you will be accredited by Jolly Learning, listed on our website to be approached directly for training, and given support for projects and initiatives aimed at helping children achieve.

For more information please click here.

If you are interested, please email us with a short description of how you have helped your classes achieve great results with the Jolly programme(s) you use, and how you could help others do the same. Please include information about length of experience in both teaching and using the programme(s).

Please email this information to:
Androula Stratton, Jolly Learning, Tailours House, High Road, Chigwell, Essex IG7 6DL
androula@jollylearning.co.uk

We look forward to hearing from you!

Marketing Coordinator

We are looking for a full time Marketing Coordinator to implement and co-ordinate a wide range of marking activities to include direct mail, organisation of training days, PR, responding to customer requests and database maintenance.

The successful candidate will have:
- an excellent degree
- previous marketing communications experience
- good communication and organisational skills
- an eye for attention to detail

Location: Jolly Learning Ltd, Tailours House, High Road, Chigwell, Essex. IG7 6DL

To apply send your CV and a covering letter to Androula Stratton, Marketing Manager: androula@jollylearning.co.uk

Junior Software Developer 

We are looking for a Junior Software Developer to join our digital development team.

The job role would involve working on educational software products for school and home use (including mobile) and providing technical support to customers.

Jolly Phonics has been hugely instrumental in helping children learn to read and write. Our software is used in schools and homes extensively around the world on a daily basis.

The successful candidate will provide a valuable development support role and will assist in answering technical support queries. We can offer a stimulating and friendly environment in which to work on some exciting products. Competitive salary is offered depending on experience.

This is a full-time position based in Chigwell in Essex (40 mins from London on the Central line).

To apply, please email your CV and cover letter to alex@jollylearning.com

Required skills:

• Mac and PC literate

• Adobe Flash and Actionscript 3 (using external class files)

• XML and how to use with Actionscript.

• An understanding of OOP and programming concepts

Desirable skills:

• Knowledge of and experience using Adobe AIR.

• Knowledge of and experience using Zinc.

• Knowledge of packaging Flash files and building installers

• Knowledge and experience using mobile software technologies, e.g Android OS, Apple iOS (Objective-C and Xcode)

• Knowledge of cross-platform development frameworks for mobile.

• Knowledge of JAVA

• Knowledge of HTML5, Javascript and CSS

• Photoshop experience

• Knowledge of synthetic phonics is desirable

We would expect candidates to have at least an understanding of synthetic phonics prior to interview. Useful information can be found on our website (www.jollylearning.co.uk).

Some commercial experience preferred but not essential.

What sort of phonics?

Systematic Phonics: the latest research

Dr Rhona S. Johnston and Joyce Watson are researchers at the School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland. The teaching of phonics is now a prescribed element of the Government’s strategy for raising literacy standards. But how should phonics be taught and when? Dr Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson report on the findings of a five-year study into the teaching of phonics in Scottish schools.

Since the publication of Adams’ (1990) book, there has been a growing consensus that phonics teaching should form a part of the reading curriculum. Phonics is taught in most schools in Scotland as part of an eclectic approach which includes using reading scheme books, and which has a significant emphasis on reading for meaning. Five years ago we started a study to examine just how phonics is taught in Scotland, and what practices seemed to be particularly beneficial.

In a study of 10 schools in Scotland, we found that phonics teaching followed a systematic programme which expended over the first three years at school. Up until Easter of the first year, the letter sounds were taught at the speed of one letter per week. Children were introduced to these letters in the context of words which started with that initial sound, e.g. ‘bat, bull, bin’ etc. That is, they were introduced to the alphabet by means of alliterative groups of words. After Easter, the classes were introduced to three letter consonant-vowel-consonant (C-V-C) words, e.g. ‘pat’ . This was mainly by means of work book exercises and teacher devised work sheets. Words were presented with a missing letter and the child had to complete the word, having worked out what it was from picture cues. At this stage, therefore, they were alerted to letters in the middle and final position of words instead of just the initial position. However, few classes were explicitly taught to sound out the letters individually and blend them together in a systematic way.

Reading Spurt

One school introduced the children to C-V-C words earlier than the others, encouraging sounding and blending, and we found that this led to a spurt in reading attainment on the British Ability Scales Word Reading Test (Elliott et al, 1977). The other classes showed a spurt later on when they started to study C-V-C words. In Years 2 and 3, the children were systematically introduced to word families, based on consonant blends and digraphs, and vowel digraphs. Rules such as the silent ‘e’ were also taught. This work was carried out alongside the use of a reading scheme, but was not integrated with it. This is probably due to a decrease in the use of phonic readers, which used to make a natural link with the study of word families in the phonics programme.

This study led us to look closely at the value of teaching children early on in the reading curriculum to sound and blend letters to pronounce unfamiliar words. We decided to investigate whether a ‘synthetic’ phonics approach, whereby children are taught groups of letter sounds and then shown words made up of those letters, is more effective than getting them to break whole words down into their letter sounds (i.e. analytic phonics). We became interested in Jolly Phonics (Lloyd, The Phonics Handbook, 1992), which Sue Lloyd developed at Woods Loke School in Lowestoft. This is a synthetic phonics approach which is introduced soon after school entry. It lasts eight weeks, and is carried out before the children are given reading scheme books. The children are taught six letters of the alphabet per week, and shown how the letters combine to form words, e.g. in week one they learn s, a, t, i, p, n, and in week two they learn c(k), e, h, r, m, d. They are shown these letters in all positions of words, ‘s’ occurs in spots, sand and nest. Books are provided with pictures of the words containing the target letter, the words being presented elsewhere on the page. There is a great emphasis on blending, both as an oral exercise and with printed words. Additionally, a set of irregular words are taught as sight words.

We assessed the Reception class at Woods Loke School on a wide battery of tasks, including letter knowledge (names and sounds), ability to give the sounds in spoken words (e.g. c-a-t ), rhyme skills, vocabulary knowledge, and emergent reading skills. We matched them on these measures with a group of Primary 1 children in Scotland whose reading programme included an analytic approach to phonics. It should be particularly noted that the two groups were equivalent in their ability to read items on the Clay ‘Ready to Read’ Word Test (Clay, 1979), which is a test specifically designed to measure word recognition skills at this very early age.

Synthetic phonics

We then retested the children at the end of the first term at school. The 25 synthetic phonics children had been taught 40+ sounds, including digraphs such as ch, sh, th. However, they were not taught consonant blends as it is believed they will work these out for themselves. The 29 analytic phonics children had be then been taught 8/9 letter sounds in the initial position of words.

At this stage all of the children were given the British Ability Scales Word Reading Test (Elliott, 1977). We found that the synthetic phonics taught children were 11 months ahead of the analytic phonics group on this test; their mean reading age was 5 years 11 months, mean chronological age being 5 years. The analytic taught phonics children had a mean reading age of 5 years, and a mean chronological age of 5 years 2 months. The synthetic phonics group were also ahead on the emergent reading, letter knowledge and phonemic awareness tests, but not the rhyme task. The synthetic phonics programme was now complete, whereas the analytic phonics programme continued with letter sound teaching. In March, when the sounds of the 26 letters of the alphabet had been taught to the analytic phonics sample, we compared the two groups again. It was found that the synthetic phonics group now had a reading age of 6 years 8 months on the BAS Word Reading Test, being 16 months in advance of chronological age. They were also ahead in emergent reading, letter sound knowledge, and phonemic awareness, but not rhyme ability. The mean reading age for the analytic phonics group was 5 years 4 months, chronological age being 5 years 6 months.

Ability to read single words is only a part of reading skill, ultimately what is important is that children can comprehend what they read. In a further study we compared a synthetic phonics taught group of children at the end of their third year at school with a group who had learnt by an analytic phonics approach who were also at he end of their third year. They were the same age (7 years and 7 months) and had the same vocabulary knowledge on the English Picture Vocabulary Test (Brimer and Dunn, 1968). Reading was measured using the Primary Reading Test (France, 1981), which uses a cloze procedure to measure comprehension. It was found that the synthetic phonics taught children were nine months ahead of the analytic group in reading on this test. Further more, only 9 per cent of them had reading ages more than 12 months behind chronological age, compared with 31.5 per cent of the analytic phonics taught children. This good performance on a comprehension task may be directly due to the rapid start the synthetic phonics taught children had in learning to recognise words. However, it is also the case that having established a procedure in the children that enabled them to read independently, the teachers could then have more time available in the curriculum for developing their ability to comprehend text.

Conclusions

Prior to doing this research we had believed that it was good to use an eclectic approach to teaching reading from the earliest stages. So we thought that on school entry it was effective to teach children some phonics and some sight words, but also that it was necessary to introduce them to reading books very early on so that they learn that reading is a pleasurable and meaningful activity. What we have learnt is that a ‘phonics first’ approach, whereby children are taught right from the start that letter sounds can be blended together to pronounce words, gives them an excellent start, and the basic elements can be completed in the first term of school if intensive teaching is given. Of course this phonics teaching can alternatively be carried out in the context of reading attractive books from a reading scheme.

However, we have established that it is not necessary to take three years to teach phonics, slowly working through word families and rhyming words, if the children have been shown how to sound and blend letters in order to pronounce words at the start of reading tuition.

References
Adams, M. J. (1990) Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Brimer, M. A. and Dunn, L. M. (1968) English Picture and Vocabulary Test, Educational Evaluation Enterprises: Newnham, UK
Clay, M. M. (1979) The early detection of reading difficulties. London: Heinemann.
Elliott, C. D., Murray, D. J. and Pearson, L. S. (1977) The British Ability Scales. Windsor: NFER-Nelson.
France, N. (1981) Primary Reading Test : Windsor: NFER-Nelson.
Lloyd, S. (1992) The Phonics Handbook . Jolly Learning: Chigwell, UK.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the teachers and pupils at the Scottish schools for taking part in our study and are particularly grateful for the assistance of Sue Lloyd in testing the children at Woods Loke School in Lowestoft.

Synthetic Phonics* The Scientific Research Evidence
* Jolly Phonics uses the synthetic phonics method

Dr Bonnie Macmillan B.Ed., M.A., Ph.D. (University of British Columbia)
Department of Psychology at the University of Hull, UK

Since writing my book Why Schoolchildren Can’t Read (Macmillan, 1997), the results of three important scientific investigations using synthetic phonics have become available – one conducted in Canada, one in England, and one in Scotland. The first two used the Jolly Phonics reading programme. A ‘synthetic phonic method’ is defined here as one that emphasises both the teaching of letter-sounds in isolation (not in whole words) and synthesis skills (how to blend letter-sounds together to read a word).

As experimental studies, all three meet very high standards methodologically. It is difficult to conduct reliable research in a classroom environment, but these particular studies do stand out for a number of reasons. All were large-scale classroom studies with non-reading children, a feature which makes the findings highly applicable to the normal classroom setting, as well as to beginning reading instruction. All three studies involved large sample sizes, a factor that enhances the validity and reliability of any conclusions drawn. Further, in all three studies, procedures ensured that instructional time and conditions were equivalent between comparison groups, and that assessment of treatment effects was made through the use of reliable standardised test measures.

Most importantly, in each of these studies, care was taken to ensure that comparison groups were equivalent from the start in terms of influential factors such as age, IQ, social status, and various pre-reading abilities, especially knowledge of letter-sounds. This strategy helps to ensure that any subsequent performance differences can more confidently be attributed to the method of instruction, rather than to pre-existing group differences. Anyone evaluating reading research studies should keep in mind that findings may carry little meaning if steps were not taken to ensure that groups being compared were equivalent at the start of an experiment. The National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) researchers were careful to note which studies among those that they analysed met this criterion.

CANADA

The study in Canada (Sumbler and Willows, 1996) compared the effects of Jolly Phonics , a synthetic method, with the effects of a whole language/eclectic method among 265 children attending kindergarten classes in working class neighbourhoods. This study was the first of its kind to adopt an innovative time sampling technique. Over a period of six months, observers closely monitored the amount of time individual pupils in both kinds of classroom spent on ten different activities. Thus, this study not only assessed achievement differences produced by different methods of instruction at the end of this time, but also, exactly what aspects of training led to those differences.

It was found that only two activities, both of which comprised explicit letter-sound instruction, were significantly related to subsequent reading and spelling success. The two activities were: ‘phonics’ (which included all phonics activities involving print), and ‘letter formation’ (which involved pronouncing letter-sounds while writing the letter shapes). Surprisingly, these two activities were the only ones that mattered in terms of reading and spelling achievement, and intriguingly, by far the most important activity within the phonics category was the Jolly Phonics sound actions.

Beyond the correlational data, it was found that the different emphases the synthetic and whole language classes gave to each of these various activities over 6 months added up to produce some startling differences in achievement. The most important difference between the two methods of instruction was the amount of time devoted to ‘phonics’ activities. Over the six-month period, the synthetic classes received five times as much ‘phonics’ instruction as the eclectic classes (30 hours versus 6 hours). The instructional differences led to the synthetic phonics classes significantly outperforming the eclectic classes on 16 out of 19 reading and spelling measures. On standardised tests of word reading, spelling and nonword reading, the synthetic classes were performing at levels either substantially ahead of, or the same as their chronological age (above by 8 months, above by 5 months, and at age level, for these tests, respectively). In contrast, the eclectic classes, were the same as, 16 months behind, and 2 months behind their chronological age on these tests. Considering the results from these three standardised tests alone, effect sizes were large (ranging from .43 to .64). (An effect size is simply the difference between two group’s mean performances, taking the average spread of scores (the standard deviations) into account. The bigger the number, the greater is the difference between the groups).

In discussing the studies here, the focus is on standardised test results, as these kinds of scores not only furnish more detailed information about age-related performance, but they can also be used to calculate a more stringent, and reliable effect size.

To return to the Canadian study, the results are valuable for two reasons in particular. They show that rather than a type of reading instruction per se, it is the differences in time allocation to various activities that really count. Furthermore, the findings from the time sampling part of the study are powerful in confirming that a child’s level of letter-sound knowledge plays a key role in learning to read. They underline the necessity in reading experiments to make sure that two pre-reading or beginner reading groups are equal at the start of an experiment in terms of their letter-sound knowledge.

ENGLAND

The second study was conducted in England. This study also compared the effects of two methods of beginning reading instruction: a synthetic phonics method ( Jolly Phonics ) and a whole language method (Big Books) (Stuart, 1999). Before instruction began, children were measured on a wide range of abilities, including letter-sound knowledge, so that any pre-existing differences between groups receiving the different forms of instruction could later be taken into account. Children were tested after 12 weeks of instruction, and then tested again, one year later.

The results of this study confirmed the findings of the former study, but there were two further important findings. The majority of the children in this study (86%) were foreign language speakers, learning English as their second language. This study showed that the Jolly Phonics instruction was very effective with such children. Additionally, the results from the delayed tests demonstrated that Jolly Phonics instruction produced effects that were long-lasting. One year later, the greater allocation of time to phonics type activities, during the 12 weeks of Jolly Phonics instruction, resulted in these classes continuing to be significantly ahead of the other classes in phoneme awareness and phonics knowledge, as well as on standardised tests of reading. Even though the teachers using the Big Book method did include some letter-sound instruction along with shared reading activities, the amount of phonics emphasis required to accelerate initial reading progress was simply not sufficient. The Big Books taught children, for example, took a year longer to make the same gains in phoneme segmentation and phoneme identity ability that the synthetic phonics children had made during the first 12 weeks of instruction, one year earlier.

A year after training, these Big Book children were reading words at a level that was about 2 months above their chronological age, in contrast to the Jolly Phonics children whose reading skills were 11 months above the level expected for their age (based on raw score data; a printing error occurred in reporting reading ages). And they were 11 months behind their age in their ability to spell, in contrast to the Jolly Phonics children whose spelling ability was on average one month in advance of their chronological age. (The effect sizes between groups were very large: for word reading, .65 and for spelling, .87.)

Another valuable contribution made by this study was in showing that the superior word reading and spelling skills of the children taught by Jolly Phonics did have an effect on reading comprehension ability as well. When both the reading comprehension and reading accuracy scores were combined (producing a more reliable overall comprehension score), the phonics-taught children’s comprehension was significantly better than that of the whole language/ Big Books-taught children (with an effect size of .47.)

SCOTLAND

Finally, a third study conducted in Scotland (Johnston & Watson, 1998; also Watson, 1999), involved examining the effects of three different methods of phonics-type instruction. The results from this study were invaluable in answering more detailed questions: What kinds of phonics instruction work best? How useful are different kinds of phonological instruction? How rapid should be the rate of letter-sound teaching? What is the optimal age for phonics instruction to begin? And, what kind of phonics instruction works best for children who are at-risk of reading problems?

The study involved 304 five-year-old children, who were taught in whole classes for 16 weeks, 20 minutes per day, by one of three different methods of phonic-oriented instruction. The three methods were: 1) ‘Analytic phonics’ (letter-sounds taught by analysing the initial sounds heard and seen in whole words), 2) ‘Phonological awareness plus analytic phonics’ (oral training in phoneme and rhyme skills for first 10 minutes, followed by letter-sound teaching identical to ‘Analytic phonics’ for final 10 minutes), and 3) ‘Synthetic phonics’ (introduced to letters and their sounds in isolation, taught how to sound and blend all the letters in a printed word, and taught how to segment oral words into sounds in order to spell using letters; the pace of letter-sound instruction for the synthetic method was far more rapid with six letter-sounds taught every eight days, versus one, every week as in the other two groups.

The results of this study demonstrated that, after 16 weeks, the first two methods led to similar progress in reading (both groups reading at age level) and spelling (two months and one month below age level). The children taught with the third method, however, were significantly ahead of the other two groups. Their average reading, and spelling ages were far in advance of the average chronological age (7, and 9 months above). Effect sizes between this third group and the other two groups were dramatic: 1.1 and 1.0 in reading, and 1.8 and 1.5 in spelling.

The results showed that even though training in phoneme and rhyme skills, in the absence of print (method 2), did improve phoneme skills (at least compared to those taught by method 1), it did not translate to improved reading or spelling. However, the third group (taught how to segment spoken words into phonemes in combination with the use of letters ) not only outperformed the other two groups in reading and spelling, but also in the phoneme measure.

But, was it the faster pace of letter-sound teaching of method three that contributed to producing these differences? The authors investigated this question in a separate study with a sample of 92 children. It was found that faster paced analytic teaching of letters-sounds (attending to initial letters in words only) led to less success on all measures than a similarly paced synthetic approach (attending to all the letters in words). Indeed, there was a surprising finding. It was found that the analytic-taught children’s letter-sound knowledge had not advanced from the start of the experiment. The authors therefore concluded that it was not the pace , but the method of letter-sound teaching that was the crucial factor.

Does it make any difference when synthetic phonics is taught? The fact that the three groups were tested again 15 months after the initial instruction helps to answer this question. By this time, for ethical reasons, the first two groups had additionally received the same instruction as the synthetic classes; and, no differences were found between groups in their word reading (overall, all children were now 9 to 11 months ahead of their age) or reading comprehension ability (all children, 4 to 7 months ahead of their age). But, interestingly, the earlier timing of the synthetic phonics teaching experienced by the third group, did make one difference. Although the spelling achievement of all three groups was well above age level, the children who were taught synthetic phonics right from the start were spelling at a level 12 months above their chronological age, a level that was significantly superior to the other two, relatively well-performing groups.

Moreover, when an examination was made of the proportion of poor readers in each group after the initial 16 weeks of instruction, a further difference resulting from the early teaching of synthetic phonics was discovered. No children in this group were more than a year below their chronological age in reading. Whereas a number of children in the other two groups did require extra reading tuition in addition to the subsequent synthetic phonics teaching, none of the children in the early synthetic group required special help subsequently. Thus, this study showed that when this synthetic phonics programme was given early , it not only led to better spelling ability, but, importantly, it also avoided the need for expensive remediation.

In conclusion, these three, well-conducted studies constitute a very solid and impressive research base in support of synthetic phonics.

References

Johnston, R. and Watson, J. (1998). Accelerating Reading Attainment: The Effectiveness
of Synthetic Phonics. Interchange 57.
For further information, see www.phonicsteaching.com/

Macmillan, B. (1997). Why Schoolchildren Can’t Read. London: The Institute of Economic Affairs.

NRP (National Reading Panel) (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based
assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: NICHD.

Stuart, M. (1999). Getting ready for reading: early phoneme awareness and phonics
teaching improves reading and spelling in inner-city second language learners. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 69, 587-605.

Sumbler, K. and Willows, D. (1996). Phonological awareness and alphabetic coding
instruction within balanced senior kindergartens. Paper presented as part of the
symposium Systematic Phonics within a Balanced Literacy Program. National Reading Conference, Charleston, SC, December.

Watson, J. (1999). An investigation of the effects of phonics teaching on children’s progress in reading and spelling. Ph.D. thesis, University of St Andrews, Scotland.