Nursery World - To the Point

I often get into heated discussions with people about reading. I find that one of the reasons for the heat is that, as we get deep into the discussion, I discover that we are using the word 'read' in different ways.

For many years, people working in education have taken it for granted that a child reading words, sentences or passages in a book out loud was 'reading'. However, it isn't what most of us do when we read. Most of the time we read silently and we read for meaning. That's to say, we read to find out things or to be entertained.

As long as most children who read out loud successfully also learn to read for meaning more or less at the same time, we don't need to take much notice of these differences. The problem crops up if we invent a teaching-to-read system that is based entirely on getting children to read out loud. That's what 'first, fast and only' synthetic phonics teaching is. It teaches children how to read out loud. On its own, with no other input, no other teaching, it cannot do anything else. It is simply, and only, a system for matching the sounds we make ('phonemes') with the letters and combinations of letters we make ('graphemes').

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