So if phonics doesn't work...what then?
With a quarter of ten and eleven year-olds in England unable to read to the expected standard (DfE, 2018), and with the majority of those...
All phonics instruction is not the same.
‘The question for teachers is no longer “look and say” or phonics. Instead, the question is which phonics programmes are most effective…’...
Bad science = the end of phonics.
Although educational research was in its infancy in the early decades of the twentieth century there was sufficient concern and curiosity...
Rudolph Flesch points out the elephant in the room...
By 1955, the American academic elite had come to an almost universal conclusion: phonics was dangerous. In that year the most eminent...
Virtual insanity in reading instruction - teaching reading without words.
Huey’s (1908) ‘scientific’ proof that phonic instruction was a superfluous, torpid stage of reading development resulted in a revival of...
How assessment and inspections ruined reading - England 1870.
However, confused and ineffective the teaching of reading had become in the United States in the nineteenth century, at least there was...
Short-term gains, long-term pain: 'The Word Method' starts to take hold...
‘It is not perhaps, very important that a child know the letters before he begins to read. It may learn first to read words by seeing...
How America helped ruin English reading instruction...with some help from the Germans.
If in England, the development of a system of teaching reading to the masses was a historic catalogue of failure then in America, the...
Universal literacy...not in England - the historical roots of a divided education system.
The worrying levels of illiteracy in England has its roots in a system of teaching reading that was heavily biased against the masses; a...
Reading Comprehension - let's talk about it.
Pressley and Afflerbach’s (1995) assertion that comprehension was a moment by moment process affected by complex interactions influenced...