Stephen Rickard on making phonics work for struggling readers.
We’ve come a long way since phonics was made compulsory for teaching literacy in England. Early phonics teaching was often beset by a phonics-only approach, without enough attention on the wider aspects of reading (developing comprehension, building fluency, understanding narrative and plain old enjoyment). A lot of those shortcomings have been addressed—partly by experience (that is, by teachers working out what helps and what doesn’t) and partly by the whole SSP process which, for all its shortcomings, has certainly made most phonics teaching more robust and better suited to improving reading skills. Hopefully children are no longer being required just to bark at print.
Teaching phonics using a systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme is a high-pressure process. Teachers need to deliver quality teaching at pace, spotting those at risk of falling behind, keeping the more able readers suitably challenged, while maintaining fidelity to the SSP, keeping up the breakneck pace (another day, another phoneme), all the while ensuring that targets are hit and critical DfE guidance is followed. For the children, it’s like running across a log over a stream—fine as long as you keep going, but one slip and you’re desperately struggling to get going again.
So here are some tips to help make the system work for you:
First, the bit we know. Put processes in place to identify those children at risk of falling behind. Monitor the children’s progress regularly to check that they are on top of things. If you are introducing a new phoneme every day, you cannot afford to wait a couple of weeks before finding out that a particular child has been in freefall since a week last Tuesday. The phonics juggernaut cannot slow down, so if they are beginning to fall behind, catch it immediately and offer additional, appropriate support. Assessment is important but remember, as Ian Hislop once said, you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it a lot.
Try to identify the problem. Is it the child’s knowledge of phonemes or graphemes that they are struggling with? Or are they struggling with the grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs)? Or is it blending? All SSPs are required to include strategies to support these children, but sometimes broader support is required. Children with mild visual impairments or deafness, or with dyslexia, autism, or ADHD will need particular help. There is plenty of knowledge and experience in the SEN community about how to support such children, so make sure you draw on that.
Don’t forget Phase One (as we used to call it). Most SSP schemes now skip this introductory element altogether, moving straight to teaching GPCs, but some children will start at school with limited experience of the kinds of listening skills necessary to discriminate phonemes in spoken words. And, at risk of stating the obvious, children with mild hearing impairments may well need additional support in learning to discriminate sounds. This is what that early phase (with all the resources that come with it) is designed to do.
In terms of the phonics big picture, try to understand clearly where you are with the children, in the scheme of things. Teaching phonics is all about delivering lots of little trees—phonemes, common exceptions words—and it’s difficult sometimes to step back and look at the shape of the wood. For example, what is the broad learning outcome that Phase 2 (using Letters and Sounds terminology) is seeking to achieve? It’s about teaching children about graphemes, phonemes and GPCs and it’s about teaching them how to blend. Those are the big lessons. Learning the individual letters and sounds is almost subordinate to this. Are the children reading at this stage? I would say no, they are not really reading. There’s a lot of sounding out, mind, which is fine. Then, if we jump to Phase 4, what are we teaching here? Well, consonant blends of course. In my view, we’re building reading fluency, in preparation for the deluge of complexity that Phase 5 will bring. If children aren’t secure, and haven’t achieved a certain degree of fluency going into Phase 5, they will quickly get lost.
Are you giving additional help to children who are at risk of falling behind? Or are you supporting KS2 (or even KS3) children who have fallen way behind and need to “catch up”. These are very different problems, requiring different interventions. For children who are years behind where they should be, for example, it’s often about unlearning bad habits first.
Never forget the old tricks. Strugglers will have low self esteem, they will be embarrassed and their motivation will be at rock bottom. They may be angry and resentful. (“Don’t do books, miss.”) So don’t do books. Don’t call it “reading”. Present it as something else (that just happens to involve reading.) That’s more than half the battle won already. I remember a teacher at one school setting up a car club in his school. A few car tyres stacked in the corner to make seats, some car parts on a shelf, Haynes manuals and decodable low level books on and about cars—and some children quickly started hanging out there in break time. Thank goodness it wasn’t a library—they wouldn’t have been seen dead in there.
What are the barriers to reading for this child? How will you overcome them? I’ve written elsewhere about how you can use force-field analysis to think about solutions. Sometimes reducing a child’s resistance to reading is easier than increasing the size of the carrot or stick.
Do use age-appropriate books. There’s nothing worse for older readers than reading about party balloons and my first day at school. Age-appropriate fully-decodable books—that are genuinely interesting—do exist. Use them. They’ll help overcome resistance. They are also routes in, if the subject matter is genuinely of interest.
Can I give a plug to running reading records? Ransom has developed some that use the traditional methods of capturing reading, but also take account of the child’s understanding of phonics. Reading Records seem to have fallen from favour in recent years, but they are powerful tools to capture where children are making mistakes. They can also help you find the Goldilocks book for each child—not too easy, not too hard.
Strugglers may be poor at reading, but they are often intelligent and in particular have strong visual literacy skills (I mean here “reading” pictures). Use this to advantage.
The elephant in the room phonics-wise is developing a sight vocabulary. It’s no longer described in those terms, as that feels too much like old ways of teaching reading, and we’re not allowed to go there any more. But when the reading Framework talks about “reading at a glance”, that’s what they mean. By the time children are reading decodable texts at Phase 5 level, for example, they need strategies to be able to read words such as covered or covid without having to try every way of sounding the grapheme o to know whether to use /o/ as in hot or /u/ as in some.
Author: Stephen Rickard
Stephen Rickard
Stephen Rickard is Creative Director at literacy specialist Ransom Publishing and editor of Reading Stars Achieve Phonics, a structured programme of age-appropriate fully-decodable reading books for KS2 and KS3 students who are still on their phonics journey.
Website: ransom.co.uk
X: @ransombooks
Facebook: @RansomPublishing
