An excerpt from
'Reading Through Tears' 
THE FAILING READER.
Our team’s experience is that by the time a child reaches 9 years of age, habits both good and bad, tend to become cemented in. These infant years, between the ages of 6 and 9, are therefore the critical period during which basic skills must be taught.
It was therefore alarming to find that at the age of 9, after 4 years of formal teaching:
42% of failing children still made more than 5 errors when asked the 26 most common sounds of the alphabet (e.g. many failing readers thought that the letter ‘y’ makes a 'wuh' sound, that 'u' makes a 'yuh' sound etc).
68% of failing readers misread simple 3 letter words (e.g. ‘bog' was misread as ‘big' or 'dog’).
54% of the children couldn’t blend 3 sounds together (e.g. the sounds y+e+m were misblended as ‘weem’).
48% of these failing readers couldn’t read simple 2 syllable words (e.g. ‘ransom’ was misread as ‘rainstorm’).
94% couldn’t blend 3 syllables together (e.g. couldn't read the word 'con-son-ant').
56% of them couldn’t detect (proof-read) the correct spelling in a 4 letter word display (e.g. they couldn't detect that 'laid' was the correct word out of 'laod, laed, liud, laid, laed, leod').
85% showed evidence of inaccurate whole word guessing (e.g. ‘picnic’ was misguessed as ‘picture’).
If, after at least 4 years of compulsory schooling, children still don't know the sounds of the alphabet, cannot blend 3 letter sounds and cannot blend syllables together, this is clear evidence that these failing children lack the most basic phonic skills. The 85% of children who misread words due to inaccurate guessing betray the fact that word-guessing had been taught and that it had failed.
However we have no doubt that every one of the schools attended by these children will claim that they DO teach phonics. Therefore, before we examine how schools that claim to teach phonics can end up producing students with massive phonic deficits, we first need to understand two more terms: Click each link below.
1. Whole Language
Do
some students succeed despite a lack of direct
phonic teaching?
2. Phonics
THE AVERAGE READER.
The data on the previous page gives teachers and parents a sense of what appears to be happening to middle-of-the-road children in many of our classrooms.
The first aspects of reading that we should examine are the 'average' student’s basic phonic skills, specifically their capacity to blend sounds and syllables together.
Column 3 is headed ‘Tot%' and indicates the number of students who, when asked for the sound of the letters of the alphabet, made more than 5 errors. The table shows for example that 44% percentage of 9 year olds average readers made more than 5 errors. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde “to make one error is a misfortune; to make six errors sounds like carelessness’. In fact making six errors strongly suggests a failure to effectively teach sounds at all in the infant grades.
But don’t rely solely on this isolated piece of evidence. We next direct your attention to column 6, headed ‘N/S’, which records the percentage of these average readers who repeatedly confused letter names and sounds. This data shows the level of name/sound confusions repeatedly displayed by children, this time when reading simple three-letter words like ‘net’. If a child had name/sound confusions on the 'e' in the middle of the word, 'net’ gets misread as ‘n-ee-t’).
You can see that, at the age of nine, after four years of compulsory education, 29% of average readers made this kind of error. What is even more alarming is that, if you trace this column down, you will see that the problem significantly persists, with 19% of fourteen year-old, 'average' readers continuing to display these same name/sound errors.
We should not lose sight of the fact that these fourteen year-old 'average' readers had been making these errors throughout their years of compulsory education, apparently without effective detection or remediation.
The take-home message seems to be that if you fail to teach the sounds of letters properly in infant grades, then many children will experience on-going name/sound confusions throughout their schooling.
We next ask ourselves ‘Did these children have problems in blending 3 sounds into a syllable?’
If you now turn to column 11, headed ‘Blending 3 sounds’, you will see that, after three years of schooling, about 44% of nine-year-old average readers exhibited repeated errors when trying to blend three sounds together; e.g. blending the sounds of y+e+m into ‘yem’. (N.B. This test deliberately features those letters most prone to name/sound errors: c, g, y, a, w, e, i, o, u). The evidence suggests that our failure to eliminate name/sound confusions in infant school is undermining all efforts to teach the blending of sounds into a simple syllable.
If children cannot efficiently blend letter sounds into syllables, then it is inevitable that they will also experience difficulties in blending syllables together. In fact in a paper we wrote back in 1988 paper, we predicted that if teachers encourage whole word guessing during the infant years when basic skills were being established, we should expect about 75% of such children to enter high school still unable to read many long words, particular if unfamiliar. (See page 96 for the explanation why long and unfamiliar words should theoretically be difficult for guess-dependent children).
In fact these data on 'average' children show that our original prediction, made at a time when Whole Language was in its ascendancy, was very close to the mark. The current study finds that 71% of 'average' readers struggled to read simple three syllable words like ‘consonant’ or ‘Eromanga’ (an Australian town). We point out that these long words would present few problems to a child with properly developed phonic skills.
The root cause of these error patterns is revealed when we look at the column headed “GUESS”. This column shows the percentage of children at each age level who repeatedly show signs of inaccurate guessing (e.g. ‘cut’ misguessed as cat or cot, ‘house’ as horse or hearse, ‘consonant’ as computer or constant etc). At the end of infant grades, over 70% of average readers showed evidence of guessing inaccuracy and over 40% of average readers still exhibited this style of error on entry into high school.
Whole Language advocates will doubtless try to attack these findings on the grounds that the words were presented in isolation. They need to merely answer two questions.
Which is the handicapped reader: the child who can read words regardless of whether the words are in isolation or within sentences or the child who can only read words within sentences?
When did the public give permission for their children to be made dependent on guessing and context?
Finally turn your attention to the last column headed ‘Proof Reading’. This test displayed six nonsense and one real 4 letter word. The words all had the same two end letters, only the middle letters were different. e.g. loed, lued, liad, laid, leid, laed. The child merely has to point to the real word.
Again VAS Theory predicted that this kind of proof reading should be difficult for guess-dependent children. Remember that whole word guessing relies on end-letter dependence and that reliance then generates inattention to mid-word letters. (See the chapter on Spelling & Proof Reading on page 153).
Obviously before children can correct their spelling errors they must first be able to DETECT them and yet here we see that at the end of primary school 50% of 11 year-olds were unable to detect which four-letter word spelling ‘looked right’. If children can't even detect mid-word spelling errors, how are they expected to correct such errors when proof-reading their 'drafts'?
THE SUPERIOR READER.
The data on the previous table relates to our best students, the students most likely to proceed to tertiary education, the pick of the bunch, our future leaders and perhaps most worrying of all, our future teachers.
Whole Language advocates promised that children would grow out of any initial inaccuracies. If any group was destined to fulfil this prophesy, it should be these superior readers.
These then are the children to whom Whole Language advocates should be pointing as proof that their philosophy works. And yet we find that at the age of 14, after nine years of education, almost three out of ten of these superior readers still struggled to read simple long words.
The major difference between average and superior readers is that the latter had higher VAS levels and are therefore better at whole word guessing.
But remember that VAS Theory predicted that if any child is over-exposed to whole word guessing strategies in infant grades, word guessing should become unstable at about the seven-letter word level unless they also acquire phonic skills.
These then are the students heading towards tertiary training. It is no wonder that employers are complaining of poor spelling in otherwise bright students and that some universities have begun to provide Remedial English classes!
We conclude that teachers who encourage whole word guessing in infants without first measuring their VAS level, are playing Russian Roulette with our children.
Both the poor readers and the superior readers suffer; they merely pay different penalties.
________________________________
Byron
I was working late as usual. Only my
manager and I were still in the building.
He knocked on my door and entered with a bunch of
papers ‘I have to dash off to a meeting but promised
to get this advertising script into the radio station
tonight. Can you check it out and fax it on for me’?
‘No problem. Leave it on my desk. Good luck with the
meeting. See you in the morning’.
The door slammed shut as he hurried off and I was
left alone. I finished the report I was dictating,
made a coffee and picked up my manager’s handwritten
notes. I started to read and the coffee stopped
halfway to my lips.
There were basic spelling mistakes literally on every
line. He clearly didn’t know the difference between
‘were’ and ‘where’, ‘their’ and ‘there', errors on
every line, sometimes more than one.
And this in a bright personable young man, who can
read adequately, is brilliant at computer work, is
half way through first year Economics at university,
manages the staff brilliantly, in charge of all my
banking, tax and legal documentation... And yet
obviously can’t spell to save his life!
Suddenly I understood why he drives us all mad with
his lost messages. If anybody calls or phones he
never writes it down, he tells us personally. Of
course inevitably he sometimes forgets and there is a
blow-up, promises are made to write down messages but
then it happens again the very next week. I had
eventually given up and just concentrated on
appreciating his many other talents.
P.S. He never finished that first year at University
and I strongly suspect that he gave it up, not
because he couldn’t do the work but because he was
embarrassed by his spelling. It has now all but
destroyed his initial desire to undertake tertiary
training and that is an absolute tragedy because he
has all the other attributes necessary to climb to
the very top of the tree and that climb will be
harder without formal qualifications.