Systematic Synthetic Phonics and Word-Callers

 

Here is a tweet by LondonJohn on 10.8.2023 and a tweet in reply by Dr. Sam Bommarito

 

@londonjohn9

I'm working with a parent whose child has had a year's systematic synthetic phonics teaching, can't read and doesn't want to go to school, especially as she failed the dreaded 'Phonics Screening Check'.

 

Dr. Sam Bommarito @DoctorSam7

There are many children exactly like that. Very often they are word callers. Word callers make up significant numbers of the kids doing poorly on tests. Glad there are folks like @londonjohn9 who provide kids who have needs like that with what they need.

 

Why is Dr. Sam Bommarito doing this to himself? Surely he should understand the meaning of word-callers after reading my post here. Why is he still referring to struggling kids as word-callers?

Kathy Rastle's Logical Fallacy

 

@Kathy_Rastle’s Twitter profile says:

Professor of Psychology, Language & Reading Research, Editor J. Memory & Language, President, Experimental Psychology Society

And she has 4,615 Followers

Kathy Rastle and londonjohn tweeted the following:

Londonjohn @londonjohn9 Apr 23 @Kathy_Rastle

 From my experience of teaching hundreds of struggling pupils to read, I've seen they can deal with whole words in sentences as, or even before they receive phonics. Why do you say phonics is the starter motor for reading?

Do we need to teach vowel blend ai

 

Do we have to teach the vowel blend ai to read the word rain? I believe it is not necessary. Here are a few Tweets and my response.

Jeffrey Bowers @jeffrey_bowers Mar 15 Replying to @mazst  @Spell2Read,   @ManYanaEd, @jeffrey_bowers, @ReadingShanahan, and a few others.

 Most of the kids in that video could not.  A few kids could.  But the lesson is useful for all.  How does a child get to the point of recognising "rain" in an analytic phonics context?  The child knows rain before lesson, and learns its spelling, GPCs, and related words in lesson

Londonjohn @londonjohn9

But have these pupils reached the extended code of /ai/? If they haven't, they'll dissolve when they meet rain.

Orthographic Mapping by Stephen Parker (Part 1)

 

Here are extracts of an article by Stephen Parker and my comments. You may read the article here.

I have decided to break this up into bite sized posts.

Stephen Parker:

Orthographic mapping is the connection-making process that automatically creates sight words – words that are simply recognized at a glance, with decoding no longer necessary.

The connections that need to be made, according to Ehri, are between the letters seen in a word’s spelling and the sounds (phonemes) heard in that word’s pronunciation. This is precisely what decoding (sounding out) a word accomplishes. For most students, decoding a word successfully 2-5 times creates a new sight word.

Phonics and Whole Language - Tweets by Londonjohn vs. Dr. Michael Paff

 

The following tweets were exchanged on Twitter. I followed it without commenting as it sounded like kids fighting with one another. It reminded me of the Indian prince who caught a three legged rabbit and insisted that all rabbits are 3 legged.

Here are the tweets and my comments.

When phonics doesn't work?

 

On 18.8.2020 I chanced upon a tweet by londonjohn @londonjohn9 dated Aug 2, 2020.

Replying to @Suchmo83

I'm given pupils who have had up to 2 years of phonics instruction and can barely read a word. I never use a decodable book to get them reading.

The above is nothing new to me as all my past students also had phonics instructions and were unable to read when they came to me for tuition.