c. Word identification
Student teachers need to be helped to develop a principled combination of approaches to word recognition that will enable the children they teach to identify words with effortless fluency. This is a tall order, but nothing else will really do.
This means that as well as learning to teach phonics, student teachers also need to teach children to recognise on sight the very many irregularly spelled words – such as ‘one’ and ‘was’ – that are among the commonest words in all but the most artificial texts.
They also need to learn to help children use context cues, together with phonics, to identify words in running text.
The work of Uta Frith can be very helpful (Frith,1985). Her extensive studies of children learning to identify and spell written words have led her to see three major phases in each side of the process.
- In the ‘logographic phase’, the first phase of learning to read, children look at words as wholes. They need to be told every new word, as they are unable to work these out for themselves.
- In the ‘alphabetic phase’, the second phase, there is a qualitative change as children tackle new words by working out (at first rather laboriously) what the letters tell them. (However, not all words they encounter are amenable to this treatment.)
- In the ‘orthographic phase’, the third phase, readers have internalised the spelling patterns of English and can recognise new words without having to ‘work them out’.
In preparing to teach children in the Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1, our student teachers need to focus on helping children enter the first phase and move through the second, towards the goal of fluent, orthographic reading. The Primary Framework details the content and order of a systematic approach to progress through the second phase, in exhaustive detail, but restricts this to synthetic phonics. Following the evidence (e.g. Pressley 1998), we suggest complementing this with carefully chosen and ordered analytic content and activities. See also 6d. Phonics – developing a sense of progression in children’s phonic learning and 6e. Phonics – planning to use resources for phonics
Student teachers will also need to be aware of the close relationship between reading, writing, speaking and listening, and how this affects their planning for early years’ literacy activities. For example, much useful phonic learning can be developed and consolidated through early writing activities, which in their turn will depend upon the learners’ spoken language.
See also 7a. Developmental writing and creating a writing environment
 
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