Bullock (1975)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Foreword, Membership, Contents, Introduction

Part 1 Attitudes and standards
Chapter 1 Attitudes to the teaching of English
Chapter 2 Standards of reading
Chapter 3 Monitoring

Part 2 Language in the early years
Chapter 4 Language and learning
Chapter 5 Language in the early years

Part 3 Reading
Chapter 6 The reading process
Chapter 7 Reading in the early years
Chapter 8 Reading: the later stages
Chapter 9 Literature

Part 4 Language in the middle and secondary years
Chapter 10 Oral language
Chapter 11 Written language
Chapter 12 Language across the curriculum

Part 5 Organisation
Chapter 13 The primary and middle years
Chapter 14 Continuity between schools
Chapter 15 The secondary school
Chapter 16 LEA advisory services

Part 6 Reading and language difficulties
Chapter 17 Screening, diagnosis and recording
Chapter 18 Children with reading difficulties
Chapter 19 Adult literacy
Chapter 20 Children from families of overseas origin

Part 7 Resources
Chapter 21 Books
Chapter 22 Technological aids and broadcasting

Part 8 Teacher education and training
Chapter 23 Initial training
Chapter 24 In-service education

Part 9 The survey
Chapter 25: I Introduction
Chapter 25: II Primary commentary
Chapter 25: III Secondary commentary
Chapter 25: IV The questionnaire forms (not online)
Chapter 25: V Technical notes (not online)

Part 10 Sumary of conclusions and recommendations
Chapter 26 Conclusions and recommendations

Appendix A Witnesses and sources of evidence
Appendix B Visits made
Glossary
Index

Report of the Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1975
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Chapter 7 Reading in the early years
[pages 97 - 114]

7.1 A recurring topic of discussion, and one which often arouses much feeling, is the age at which children should actually begin the process of learning to read. Understandably, the question is one of particular concern to parents, not least because they are uncertain of their own role in the matter. Should they give any kind of reading instruction before the child starts school? If not, how far should they be involved once the child has started school, and in what ways? Should it all be left to the teacher, with no home involvement beyond general encouragement? We have suggested in the previous chapter that the early stages of reading consist of various kinds of learning experience and that there is no one point to which the term 'reading readiness' can reasonably be applied. Decisions on the age at which preparatory reading activities should be introduced must be finely judged. If the process is unduly delayed the child is denied access to the many valuable opportunities that early reading opens up to him. If he makes too early a start the burden of learning may retard his reading development and make reading a chore rather than an enjoyable experience. There are many well attested cases of parents who have been highly successful in helping their children to learn to read. What is not known is the number whose efforts have been unsuccessful, or positively harmful. It would be instructive to know, for example, how many children with severe reading disability received misguided teaching from over-anxious parents in the pre-school years. Let us make it clear at once that we believe parents have an extremely important part to play. All we have said in Chapter 5 about the language climate of the home has a critical bearing on preparation for reading. There is, then, no doubt whatever of the value of parents' involvement in the early stages of reading. What needs careful thought is the nature of that involvement and the attitude they bring to it.

7.2 It has been said (1) that the best way to prepare the very young child for reading is to hold him on your lap and read aloud to him stories he likes, over and over again. The printed page, the physical comfort and security, the reassuring voice, the fascination of the story: all these combine in the child's mind to identify books as something which hold great pleasure. This is the most valuable piece of advice that a parent can be given, and we want to outline some of its implications before considering in greater detail the question of reading readiness. Before the child arrives at school he should have learned to look upon books as a source of absorbing pleasure. There are some households in which this is a virtual certainty from the beginning; there are very many more where there are few books of any kind and certainly none the child grows up with as his own. We believe that a priority need is to introduce children to books in their pre-school years and to help parents recognise the value of sharing the experience of them with their children. In this connection we have been impressed by the enterprise of such bodies as the Federation of Children's Book Groups in their aim to make books a part of the child's life from the outset. Many of the 90 or so groups in this organisation visit hospitals to read stories to young patients. Some take round book trolleys or tape record stories and leave the cassettes for the children to play back. At least one group sells books for children at local factories where their parents work. Another encouraging development is the time allowed by some local radio stations for talks about children's books. We have already advocated the broadcasting of radio and television programmes directed to parents, and these should include guidance on how and what to read to children of different ages.

7.3 Potentially, the most important source of help is the Children's Librarian. One from whom we heard lends collections of books to the borough's hundred or so pre-school organisations, which include day nurseries, playgroups, and private nurseries. She and her colleagues visit as many of them as possible at fortnightly intervals to tell the children stories from picture books, and to get to know the supervisors and staff and the children's mothers. A travelling exhibition has been assembled, containing books for children up to the age of seven, and this visits health centres, teachers' centres, colleges of education, and community associations. Another proposal is to take a double decker bus to the areas of greatest need, determined by consultation with local community workers, health visitors, and social workers. The lower deck will be equipped with books for young children and their mothers, and the upper deck fitted out for story telling and audio-visual programmes. This is similar in principle to the system in operation in a large county, where the same facilities are taken to the villages by touring vans. There are, however, some Authorities where no such pre-school activities have been considered, or where Children's Librarians are not empowered to lend books to playgroups and other voluntary organisations. We recommend that all Authorities should make possible and encourage enterprises of this kind.

7.4 Infant schools should be fully informed of pre-school activities of these and similar kinds so that they can take advantage of them. It is helpful, for example, if some of the books are familiar to the child in the midst of all the new material he meets. Where parents have been able to borrow books from the playgroup or nursery class it would obviously be a contraction of opportunity if the infant school did not continue the practice. Children should become accustomed as early as possible to easy access to books and a ready supply of them. There is evidence from our survey that schools are very much alive to this fact; 80 per cent of the six year olds in our sample were allowed to take books home at some time, though it is not possible to say on how regular a basis. There is inevitably a degree of risk when books are taken home by young children, but this has to be accepted. Parents should certainly not feel inhibited about borrowing them and should be reassured that the school takes a realistic attitude about the occasional book that has been torn or marked. Such a tolerance is unlikely to be abused, but in exercising it schools need to know they have the security of financial support and that replacements will be readily available. We should like to see more enterprises of the kind financed by one local Authority at the instigation of its English Adviser. Eight infant schools, most of them in areas of disadvantage, were each given a sum of money with which to set up libraries for parents. The intention was to encourage parents to choose books with the guidance of the teachers and to read aloud to their children both at home and at school. In their visits parents brought along their pre-school children and were also allowed to take books for them. The response from the home was extremely encouraging - as high as 60 per cent of the families at its best - and the Authority was encouraged to extend the scheme. The schools turned it to excellent advantage, the teachers exchanging ideas among themselves and bringing parents into the life of the school in a very practical way. As the adviser expressed it: 'It has alerted many parents to the educational importance of reading and has perhaps brought a first book into some homes where reading has not hitherto formed part of the life pattern'. Or in the words of one of the parents: 'I bring my little ones into school when I come for books for our lad, and I can see them learning from the older children'.

7.5 This is not the only example of its kind, and a few schools in various parts of the country have attempted similar schemes on their own initiative. Such enterprises are still comparatively rare, and we feel they deserve wider currency, but it is encouraging to see that more infant schools are devising ways of introducing parents to good quality books. Their methods include displays in entrance halls, Christmas present collections, and discussion sessions at parents' evenings. A number give parents the opportunity to buy books within the school, but it was evident from our survey that this is still a relatively uncommon facility, since it was available to only 16 per cent of the six year olds and 27 per cent of the nine year olds. (The practice was only marginally more common in secondary schools at 32 per cent). In many areas there are no bookshops; in others the provision is extremely unsatisfactory, affording little choice. It therefore increasingly becomes the responsibility of the school to make it possible for children and parents together to see and select books which can be bought and taken home. Where there is a local bookshop with suitable books available it is possible for a parent or teacher to make a selection and sell the books at the school on a sale or return basis. This is particularly useful before Christmas and the long summer holidays. Some schools have obtained licences under the Publishers' Book Agency Scheme, which enables them to receive some of the discount given to the bookseller from which they buy them. An alternative is for the school to sell books through one of the various children's book clubs which operate through the post. All these suggestions for extension into the home are designed to erode the notion that 'real' books are of a lower order of importance for children who are only on the threshold of reading. Indeed it is at this critical stage of his development that the child is at his most responsive to influences which may form his future attitudes. This fact should be brought home to parents in every way possible. In our view, activity of this kind and on this scale is essential if parents are to be helped to play their part in preparing the child for the process of learning to read.

7.6 Every time a parent reads aloud to a child the child is learning that by some curious means the lines of print can be converted into stories which he can enjoy. When children are 'helping' with cooking and their mother reads aloud the directions from the cookery book they can see that this absorbing and enjoyable activity draws upon print. Letters, advertisements, labels, traffic signs are just a few examples of opportunities for parents to help children understand the purpose of reading and, on some occasions, to identify common words. The opportunities should be natural and not forced, and the outcomes of reading should be rewarding. In this way the parent can bring the child up with the right attitude towards the printed word, for it is by no means automatic that this will develop of itself. As Vygotsky (2) put it: 'it is the abstract quality of written language that is the stumbling block'. The child has 'little motivation to learn writing when we begin to teach it. He feels no need for it and has only a vague idea of its usefulness'. In a study of five year old children Reid (3) found that they had a 'general lack of any specific expectancies of what reading was going to be like, of what the activity consisted, of the purpose and use of it'. Thus it is important that before the child begins to read for himself he must come to look upon reading as an activity with a purpose. From the beginning it should be established as a thinking process, not simply as an exercise in identifying shapes and sounds.

7.7 A number of studies have suggested that a mental age of about six is necessary before reading instruction can be effective. These are mostly American studies, however, and in the American context, 'readiness' usually means that the child is ready to enter the first stage of a highly structured reading programme in classroom conditions different from our own. In any case, as long ago as 1937 a series of studies (4) showed that group size and flexibility make a very appreciable difference. Children with a mental age of four and a half to five can quite happily learn to read if they are given learning experiences which match their individual needs. There is ample evidence of children learning to read at home well before reaching even this kind of mental age. There is no virtue in denying a child access to early experience of reading, provided that it carries meaning and satisfaction for him. By one if not both of these criteria the use of drills is ruled out. It would be chilling to contemplate an image of earnest young parents holding up successions of flash cards and waiting with growing anxiety for their child to call the 'right' response. We are in no doubt that the help of parents - of the kind we advocate here and elsewhere in the Report - is of great value. But we are equally in no doubt that to communicate anxiety to the young child by driving him is a harmful practice. Let a child be put in situations which stimulate him, with materials that fascinate him, and there is no need to fret about the right mental age to start reading. It becomes almost an irrelevance.

7.8 Very high intelligence on the one hand and very low intelligence on the other certainly have a significant bearing on readiness. But apart from these extremes early reading success is not closely associated with intelligence test measures. A high score on an intelligence test may supply useful information to a teacher who has underestimated a child's potential capacity. A low score, however, is not in itself a dependable indicator that the child's capacity is limited. There is some evidence that when a teacher's expectations are based on intelligence test scores the pupil's achievements are affected accordingly. On the whole, therefore, it is reasonable to discount intelligence scores when considering reading readiness, except when the scores are high. A far better course is to judge the child's readiness for a particular step by the quality of his performance on the one that preceded it. There should always be a variety of challenging opportunities for a child to choose from, and if he is encouraged to experiment he may make those sudden forward leaps which occur when they are least expected.

7.9 The ability to read depends upon adequate vision, particularly at near point. If a child tends to grimace, to rub his eyes, to thrust his head forward in close work, or to avoid close work, he may well need to have his eyesight thoroughly tested. This should certainly be done before any conclusions are drawn about his readiness for a learning task that calls for careful visual discrimination. Even if a child's vision is satisfactory his visual perception will depend very much for its development on the experience he gets in exploring, identifying, and manipulating a wide variety of objects and shapes. Much has been written about the advisability of providing specific training in visual perception as part of a pre-reading programme. The evidence is inconclusive, but on balance such training seems only to be of value for children who have had a rather limited range of perceptual experience. Once a child has achieved a degree of proficiency there seems to be little gain in spending time on general perceptual learning. If such training is thought to be necessary it should consist of activities which will help the child to respond to form, orientation, and directionality and give him practice in systematic visual tracking. These activities need include nothing more dramatic than drawing, tracing, copying, matching, sequencing, tessellating, constructing etc, which are the normal stock in trade of the nursery and infant school. In short, we feel that no child should be forced to follow a rigid programme of training in visual perception. The raw materials for its general development should be readily available in the home and in the classroom in the form of games and activities, and the way the child uses these provides the informed teacher with a useful diagnostic indicator.

7.10 The child's hearing is another important factor in readiness to begin reading, for impaired hearing can affect his ability to acquire phonic insight. If he has difficulty with high tones he is at a particular disadvantage. Hearing loss of this kind affects his capacity to hear such sounds as p, b, s, t, k, r, sh, th, and such blends as cl, tr, and sp. Thus, the child may not be able to distinguish between p and b, s, and z, m and n, or other sounds which are similar to one another in frequency, though most of the vowel sounds tend to be unaffected. Because the child can hear so many sounds with no difficulty this particular form of hearing loss is often overlooked in the critical early years. Children with suspected hearing loss should obviously be referred for appropriate medical treatment. However, poor auditory perception is a different kind of problem. There are children who have no significant hearing loss but seem unable to hear small differences between words or to appreciate rhymes. They may mispronounce words, substituting or transposing syllables, and they show related errors when they come to write. Some of these difficulties are to be found in many normal children and they tend to disappear of their own accord during the primary school years. In the early stages of reading these difficulties are a particular handicap where there is a marked emphasis on phonics. Poor auditory perception can therefore be taken as an indication that a child is not ready for reading experience, in which phonics are explicitly emphasised. However, this need not prevent him from making progress by concentrating on the visual discrimination of words, or from acquiring phonic insights inductively, as described earlier. In addition to this kind of activity there is everything to be said for games which give children pleasure in distinguishing between sounds, but we do not believe that a formal programme of training in auditory discrimination as such will significantly advance reading readiness.

7.11 It will be noted from what has been said here and in Chapter 6 that we have isolated no single point as the one at which learning to read begins. Instead, we regard the process as one of gradual evolution. A variety of pre-reading activities merges imperceptibly with activities that may only at some later stage be unhesitatingly described as reading. When children arrive at school they will be at different stages on a continuum. At one end some will already be reading; at the other there will be children who have had none of the preliminary experience we have described and will have little conception of what reading is. In her assessment the teacher will be guided by such points as the following:

the general confidence with which the child settles into school, his interest in trying new things, and his ability to concentrate on what he is doing at any moment in time;

his use of words and his ability to understand what is said to him;

his interest in attempting to read the various notices that appear in the classroom and about the school;

the amount of time he spends in the book corner, looking at books and trying to read;

the persistence with which he asks for help in reading: the early reader is often to be seen book in hand tracking down any adult who will listen to him read.

7.12 In the early stages of reading the child should become familiar with individual letters, individual sounds, and at least some of the relationships between letters and sounds. This is rather like letting someone play with a ball and a bat, before he makes his first rudimentary attempts to play cricket. In reading, as in cricket, it is obviously helpful to introduce gradually the language of the game. Thus, there is no reason why children should not acquire the actual names of letters, and such terms as 'letter', and 'word'. These should be introduced quite unselfconsciously at appropriate moments, just as words like 'table' and 'chair' are learned without any fuss through normal use in the home. Of course, one of the early problems with reading is to find a suitable equivalent to playground cricket, i.e. to make reading itself an obviously worthwhile and interesting activity, even when the level of proficiency is still very low indeed. We have already indicated, however, that children may learn how enjoyable and useful reading can be, even before they can read for themselves, and the emphasis on purpose, meaning, and pleasure should be continued as the child begins to read independently.

7.13 The major difficulty in maintaining this interest when they do come to read for themselves is that of building up, at a reasonable rate, the number of words they can recognise on sight. The preparatory teaching of individual words from a reading scheme can be a rather barren exercise, divorced from the child's interest, and it does not develop a sufficient incentive for the child to build up an adequate sight vocabulary. The alternatives, however, seem equally unsatisfactory. If children are faced with texts containing more than a very small proportion of unfamiliar words they will spend far too much time struggling at frustration level and will derive neither meaning nor enjoyment. On the other hand, if a printed text contains only the small number of words they can instantly identify it is likely to be boring, if not downright banal. In either case, the children will not be able to make full use of their intermediate skills, so their already well developed linguistic abilities cannot be brought into action to make light work of what is otherwise a heavy burden. A sensible way out of this dilemma is to develop the child's interest in writing and reading his own work, and in reading the work of other children. This interaction can begin in the home, with the parent writing the child's name on labels on his clothing, on picture books or presents, on his drawings, or on any other items in which ownership or origin is of interest or importance. The child can then begin to write his own name, and odd words with which his parents help him. For instance, he can be helped to write the names of the dishes he likes best, perhaps against the days of the week when he has been promised them. He can add his name to letters to relatives, and his drawings can be decorated with one- or two-word captions in lower case letters his parents have shown him how to write. If he is given opportunities such as these, written words become a source of meaning and interest from the outset, and are thus so much more easily learned.

7.14 We described in paragraphs 5.22 and 5.23 how the good infant school develops the child's writing activities from small beginnings, and they should be read in close association with the argument presented here. Work of the kind discussed in those paragraphs is essential to the language experience approach to reading we are advocating. Each piece of writing by the children becomes part of the reading resources of the classroom. The advantage of this interaction between the child's writing and reading is that both are rooted in purpose and meaning. The vocabulary is familiar to the children, the sentence structures are those which they themselves use, and the discussions before and after every piece of writing and reading are excellent occasions for language development. It has been argued that handwriting is such a laborious process for young children that other means should be used to help them construct their own sentences. Breakthrough to Literacy (5) takes account of this by providing ready-made sets of carefully chosen words for teacher and children on printed cards. This has been of value in providing a stimulus to teachers to adopt the language experience approach and in offering them practical help. Whether or not the knowledgeable teacher needs this particular material once the approach is well established is open to question. And, of course, some teachers may prefer from the outset to use materials they have produced themselves for the same purpose. These decisions must be a matter for individual judgement and preference.

7.15 Of course, even where the climate of learning and the motivation are excellent, it does not follow that all children will build up a sight vocabulary at an adequate rate. Some have a remarkable facility for remembering a word and its spelling with little or no repetition, but it is obviously unreasonable to expect this of all children. It is a useful practice, therefore, to develop a word bank for storing words which have been used in talking and writing, so that these can be drawn upon and copied on later occasions. In our view there is a good case for beginning to draw the children's attention, even at this early stage, to the fact that there are different classes of words, and this may be achieved simply by the way the teacher organises the words in the different parts of the bank. Words might also be collected in their inflected forms, for the reasons given in paragraphs 6.24 and 6.38.

7.16 We have suggested that there is great value in using as reading material the children's own writing derived from their school experience and their life outside school. This is not to imply that commercially produced material becomes less important, and we believe that the teacher should be skilled in assessing its value and judging when and how to use it. The reading scheme is at the centre of this material in most young children's early experience of reading. We have argued for the parent to introduce the child to books before he starts school, but we do not include reading schemes among them. Once a child begins to read the first book of a graded series there is a great temptation for the parent to think in terms of rate of progress. When this happens, parent and child begin to lose the excitement and sheer pleasure that the first contact with books should provide. These qualities are replaced by a concern for measurable endeavour, and the desire to read may become secondary to a desire to perform to please the parent by progressing through the scheme. Much the same might be said of the use of reading schemes in the classroom, but the teacher is faced with an obvious problem of logistics. If she never had to cope with more than a few children she might well manage without a reading scheme, and indeed some teachers do so with great success, however large the class. Nevertheless, many more find it an invaluable resource. Unfortunately, all schemes have their shortcomings and the teacher often has too little time to compensate for them by giving additional attention to individual needs. This has two implications. The first of these need be mentioned only briefly here, since it is taken up in Chapter 13. The staffing of infant schools should be such as to allow a teacher to work with individuals and small groups as and when she believes it necessary. All too often at present she cannot do this without constant distraction. The second implication is that since reading schemes are a key resource in schools they need to be examined with a very critical eye, first in terms of their construction and then of the ways in which they can be put to the best use. Because of the importance of developing a sight vocabulary there was a strong tendency until recent years to design reading schemes in which the teaching of word recognition was the first consideration. There is no doubt of the great importance of this objective, but in pursuing it many reading schemes have failed to bring into play the intermediate skills and the comprehension skills. Thus, the debate about 'whole words versus phonics' has been conducted at the wrong level. As we pointed out in the last chapter, this is far too simplistic a formulation of the problem.

7.17 It should go without saying that all early reading material should be attractive not only in presentation but in content. From a study of a wide range of currently available materials our general impression is that they are becoming increasingly colourful and well illustrated. To improve the content is a more difficult matter, since the author has to work within the confines of a very limited vocabulary. A great deal of ingenuity has gone into the task, and content continues to improve, but there is still much to be done. All too often there is too little incentive to read the words rather than look at the pictures. The words and pictures should complement each other in such a way that the child needs to examine both with equal care. The printed word must be critical for any understanding of the action. Another important aspect of content is the effect upon children's attitudes, to which far too little attention has been given in the past. Any reading scheme should stand up to questions about how parental roles, sex roles, attitudes to authority, etc, are represented. Comparisons of primers in use in various countries show that there are marked and systematic differences in their content in this respect. Researchers (6) have also reported that the contents of primers display 'a striking divergence from the realities of community, family, and child life, and from what is known about child development'. We do not suggest that reading schemes should be passed through a kind of ideological or ethical scanner. But we do believe that children's experience should not be confined to a restricted range of reading matter presenting a narrow range of attitudes. It is particularly important to avoid this in these impressionable early years, for it is never too soon to start thinking about the ways in which attitudes may be influenced by reading.

7.18 The next feature to be examined in evaluating early reading materials is the extent to which the syntactic structures relate to the pattern of spoken language familiar to the child. This is an issue which was discussed in paragraph 6.34, and it is one to which we attach great importance. The significance of the relationship between the two kinds of language has been recognised fully only in the last decade, following a good deal of research. Unless there is a close match between the syntactic features of the text and the syntactic expectancies of the reader there will be a brake on the development of word identification. Certain reading schemes which have recently made their appearance have been expressly designed to take account of this. But it hardly needs to be added that there are schemes in widespread use whose language is stilted and unnatural, and far removed from anything the child ever hears in real life or uses himself. Children bring to school a spoken language far more complex than anything they encounter in these early readers. They use and can appreciate a wide range of sentence structures. Reading schemes which present highly contrived or artificial structures therefore lack predictability. They prevent children from developing the capacity to detect the sequential probability in linguistic structure.

7.19 This takes us to the question of the vocabulary used in the schemes. Traditionally, there have been two emphases in vocabulary control. One has been to select a very limited number of words which the child can learn as whole words. The other has been to select a larger number in which the spelling patterns are relatively simple. The first is usually associated with global approaches, such as the look and say sentence or look and say word method. The traditional look and say reading scheme assumes that there will be a major emphasis on teaching the recognition of whole words prior to any examination of letters and sounds. The principle is that the child will learn to recognise a word by associating it with a picture or by hearing it, and that each important word will be associated with various interesting activities before it is first encountered in the reading scheme. Word shape and length are regarded as useful cues for helping with word recognition in the early stages. There may be some structural analysis, i.e. examination of word parts, but the learning of letter sounds and attempts at synthesis come appreciably later. Since each word is to be presented as an undifferentiated whole the rate at which new words are introduced must be severely restricted. There must also be a high rate of repetition, so that the child 'over-learns' and is not confused by trying to cope with an ever increasing number of half learned words. Unfortunately, the authors of the older reading schemes, which are still widely in use, sacrificed other important considerations in restricting the vocabulary and repeating words frequently. Above all, they produced prose so unrealistic that it can no longer be regarded as an effective basis for reading instruction (see paragraph 6.34). In saying this we acknowledge that a great deal of research went into the selection of vocabulary for such schemes and into their general construction. If we now reject them we must at the same time record that the new schemes still owe them a great debt. The second of the two emphases we have mentioned is associated with an explicitly phonic approach. The traditional phonic scheme assumes that the child will learn letter sounds in the early stages. The principle is that if he is systematically taught how to synthesise sounds he will achieve independence in tackling unfamiliar words. Thus the vocabulary control will be governed by the rate at which new phonic combinations are to be introduced. Needless to say, such a principle will have its own restricting effect on the range of words that can be used. As with the older look and say schemes, the prose in the early phonic readers cannot be regarded as acceptable for modem requirements (see paragraph 6.34).

7.20 In practice, it would be difficult for an observer to state with confidence whether any particular teacher was an advocate of phonics or look and say without examining the reading schemes she was using. And even that would not imply an exclusive commitment to one or the other method. When a child is trying to read an unfamiliar word, a teacher will draw his attention to any clue she thinks may help at that particular moment - context, initial letter sound, initial blends, word length, outline, and so on. In addition, most teachers who adopt a look and say reading scheme will use supplementary material of the kind normally provided in a phonic scheme. Conversely, most teachers using a phonic scheme will encourage children to use a variety of supplementary readers in which the vocabulary is not strictly controlled according to phonic principles. Both groups will also have in common a variety of classroom activities related to reading. The great majority of teachers are in fact eclectic in their approach, and this came out very clearly in our survey. The major difference between teachers lies not in their allegiance to a method, but in the quality of their relationships with children, their degree of expert knowledge, and their sensitivity in matching what they do to each child's current learning needs. It must also be remembered that the child, too, is eclectic. He will have a certain amount of experience of looking at whole words that matter to him - on sweet cartons, food packs, television captions, and so on. And whether he is taught to or not he will develop a tendency to respond to letter sounds as part of his attack on new words. When a teacher is selecting reading schemes, then, she need not accept any limiting assumption the author may have had in mind when constructing it. What matters is the way in which the schemes can be used to the best advantage as part of the total 'mix' of reading and reading-related activities in the curriculum. This is a matter to which we now turn.

7.21 In what follows, we shall assume that before they start on a reading scheme children will have had a variety of pre-reading experiences of the kind described earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 6 and that they are able to read a few words they or other children have written. We shall also assume that language experience activities will continue as an essential part of their daily school life. A child who is ready to make a start on a reading scheme will have acquired the general ability to respond to:

shape and orientation in discriminating between letters

letter sequence in terms of left to right directionality

letters and groups of letters as symbols that can represent sounds

letter sequences as orderly groups of symbols that can represent a temporal sequence of sounds

whole words as units of meaning, not primarily as symbols representing sounds

groups of words in terms of meaning, not as isolated words to be pronounced.

7.22 If a child has had a satisfactory preparation before tackling a reading scheme we believe that the choice of scheme matters less than the teacher's knowledge of what a given scheme can and cannot do, and her ability to supplement it in any way she may feel to be necessary. In the light of this principle we can examine the features of contemporary variations on the traditional themes, beginning with schemes based essentially on a look and say approach. The look and say scheme prompts three vital questions. How can a useful sight vocabulary be developed and enlarged? How are difficulties with phonic irregularity to be overcome? How can the child be helped to achieve independence in tackling unfamiliar words? When we come to phonic schemes there are questions of equal importance. How are children to be weaned from an early tendency to look for fairly simple relationships between letters and sounds? How can they be led to a greater dependence on context cues in handling unfamiliar words?

7.23 Broadly speaking, the vocabulary of a look and say reading scheme is selected on the principle that the words are easy to learn or are of high utility, that is to say frequently encountered. Words tend to be very easy to learn when they are of high interest value, e.g. rocket, doll, engine, rabbit, and such words have the additional advantage that they can be readily illustrated. They may also be easy to discriminate between because they vary in length and in the pattern in which the more conspicuous letters are arranged, i.e. those with ascenders and descenders such as k, t, g. Words of high utility, on the other hand, are inclined to have none of these properties. The words that occur most frequently in speech and writing are words such as the, he, to, was, all, are, one, said, etc. They tend to be of low interest value, are not so easily illustrated, and are less easily discriminated between in terms of length and configuration. Nevertheless, a dozen or so such words account for about a quarter of the words on a typical page of print, and a hundred or so account for about half the words on the page. It might therefore be thought that if these words are well and truly learned at an early stage a great deal has been achieved. This is to a large extent true, but it must be remembered that these utility words carry less information than the 'content' words, and the effect upon the reading performance is not so powerful as the numerical weight would imply. These high utility words are by their very nature the ones most likely to be used by children in their early attempts at writing. The high interest words they meet in their reading scheme can be added to the word bank so that they too can be brought into play in associated language experience activities. This kind of reinforcement can reduce the need for excessive repetition of words in a look and say reading scheme, a possibility which is being taken into account in some recently published schemes. The treatment of phonics in a look and say scheme presents a problem. Children will tend to be confused by the complexity of the spelling patterns they encounter in the early stages of the scheme. From their knowledge of certain patterns they can generalise effectively to cope with words of similar pattern, but this does not help them when they meet irregularities. For example, a child is likely to be misled into pronouncing bear as beer by analogy with hear, and beard as bird by analogy with heard. This is where the ability to predict from context becomes so important. From the surrounding words (as, for instance, in the sentence 'In the woods he met a big brown bear') the child must be able to derive enough information to help him recall the pronunciation and meaning of a word he has met in the word bank or used in his own writing. This implies that the teacher must be immediately at hand to help the child with the context where necessary and with the words that are altogether new to him. And this in turn implies that the teacher must have a well organised system that allows her to give a carefully judged amount of time to each child. Where this is not to be found the child working from a look and say scheme can experience difficulties. Most look and say schemes currently available do provide phonic activities, but usually as supplementary material. They do not help a child who has difficulty when attempting to cope with the complexities of any unfamiliar words he encounters in the actual text. We regard this as a disabling limitation of many otherwise very satisfactory look and say reading schemes. They do not afford direct assistance with phonics, and they provide little compensation for any lack of individual help the child may be receiving in the use of context cues.

7.24 We have already outlined the inadequacies of phonic reading schemes when they are made to carry the major burden of the instruction. However, when they are used within a general learning context of the kind we have advocated they become a quite different instrument. In the context of a language experience approach the use of texts in which the complexity of spelling patterns is reduced can help children to overcome some of their confusion about phonics. What we criticise is the unsubtle practice of encouraging children to build up words by 'sounding' letters as a routine practice. If the scheme is well designed, the phoneme-grapheme relationships should be self evident, and readily acquired by inductive learning with the absolute minimum of formal instruction. We have already stated our belief, however, that there should be an early switch from an emphasis on phonics to an emphasis on morphemic structure. Words in which the spellings do not coincide with patterns the child has met earlier in the scheme should be particularly well cued by context. There is a growing knowledge of ways in which words can be powerfully cued, but in our view this has not yet been applied with sufficient rigour in the preparation of phonic reading schemes. For the most part, they concentrate upon lower order decoding processes. Where phonic schemes are not designed on narrowly conceived principles they are a valuable element in the reading curriculum.

7.25 We can sum up our view of the value of reading schemes in the reading curriculum by saying that we would welcome the further development of the kind of scheme to which it is as difficult to apply such simplistic labels as 'phonic', 'look and say', 'linguistic', etc as it is to attach such labels to the methods of competent teachers. A good reading scheme is one which provides a sound basis for the development of all the reading skills in an integrated way. Performance on the scheme itself should provide the teacher with diagnostic information, and there should be a wide variety of supplementary materials for her to use with individual children who need extra practice or help of a particular kind. In saying this we must emphasise that we regard the reading scheme as an ancillary part of a school's reading programme, and nothing more. We are certainly not advocating that the school should necessarily use one, and we welcome the enterprise of those schools which have successfully planned the teaching of reading without the use of a graded series. Nor are we suggesting that if a school does decide to use a scheme it should confine itself to any particular one. Indeed, where a school has chosen to work in this way there should be books from several reading series available. Some schools draw from as many as twelve different schemes, not necessarily including all the books in any one of them. All this material, however, should form merely a part of the learning resources. The children's own writing should provide an ever-developing resource, and every infant class needs a wide range of books and other printed matter on the scale recommended in Chapter 21.

7.26 In paragraphs 6.21 and 6.22 we referred to cueing techniques and spelling modifications as a means of making the early stages of learning to read more manageable. We can now review these in the light of our comments on the value of reading schemes. There are two principal ways of providing additional cues to the value or function of letters: the use of colour, and the use of diacritical marks. In our survey one of the questions was designed to discover how widely these were employed in schools. Only 6 per cent of the classes were using colour and 2 per cent diacritical marks, which indicates that they are very much a minority practice in the country at large. At its simplest level, colour may be used in a fairly minimal way, for example to signal digraphs (ch, ea), silent letters (the 'k' in 'knife'), or a spelling pattern (a-e, i-e, o-e). At the other extreme there may be an attempt to use a very complex colour system so that every phoneme is unambiguously represented. The evidence for the value of colour systems is inconclusive. The more elaborate schemes may be said to exact too high a price in terms of the amount of attention they demand and the consequent distraction from meaning. Simpler schemes which signal more general functions (e.g. silent letters, the grouping of letters), rather than specific sound values may well have something to offer, though this has yet to be convincingly demonstrated. Diacritical marking is the application of marks of various kinds to signal letter function or value. As long ago as Elizabethan times a book of Aesop's fables was printed with such marks. Edgeworth and his daughter devised a diacritical system in 1798, and it was 'reinvented' by Shearer in 1894. The most complete system and the one most commonly in use today is that devised by Fry. In an investigation (7) of its effectiveness he compared results from the use of an unmarked basal reading scheme, the same scheme adapted to his system, and an American i.t.a. scheme. His own system was not found to be superior. On the other hand, results which favoured the use of diacritical marking have been reported by Brimer (8) and Johnson (9). It is fair to add that the first of these focused only on decoding skills, and the teaching was limited to programmed learning techniques. In the second, the teacher variable was not controlled, and a word recognition test was the sole criterion of reading improvement. In the circumstances we do not feel there is sufficient evidence to enable us to recommend diacritics. We can sum up by saying that although there is no substantial evidence to support the use of cueing techniques of one kind or another they are certainly not discredited by research. Whether or not to adopt them is a decision for the school. We would add, however, that where schemes embodying cueing techniques are adopted, there is no need for the teacher to accept the limiting assumptions of authors about how they should be used.

7 27 The general reaction of many teachers to i.t.a. (the initial teaching alphabet) has been rather negative, and only 10 per cent of our sample schools containing infants were using the medium. Some of the more pressing advocacy of i.t.a. is likely to have been counter-productive. The experienced infant teacher can only be irritated by the suggestion that all that is needed to bring about general improvement in reading is the introduction of a simplified code. On the other hand, we have already noted the bewildering complexities of the English spelling system, and it is self-evident that a simplification of the relationship between sound and spellings must make it much easier for a child to make progress in the early stages. If there are fewer items to be learned this alone must reduce the time required, and if there are fewer ambiguities there will be less confusion. All this is amply confirmed by research. Following a careful review of the evidence the authors of the Schools Council Report (10) on i.t.a. came to this conclusion:

'There is no evidence whatsoever for the belief that the best way to learn to read in traditional orthography is to learn to read in traditional orthography. It would appear that the best way to learn to read in traditional orthography is to learn to read in the initial teaching alphabet.'

7.28 As children become more fluent in reading they depend much less on a close scrutiny of every word, and their use of context comes to play an increasing part in identifying words. Individual spellings then become much less of a hindrance, a fact illustrated by the following sentence, which includes the word examined in paragraph 6.20.

Similarly, though some of the characters in the following passage of i.t.a. are unfamiliar, one has little difficulty in reading it:

After one or two more paragraphs of the same kind the reader would be handling the text with scarcely any hesitation. By the same token, it is argued that the child who develops fluency in i.t.a. can transfer readily enough to t.o. [traditional orthography] The authors of the Schools Council report say that a head deciding to use i.t.a. as an initial medium can be confident that at the very least the children are unlikely to suffer, provided she has the support of the staff and can guarantee continuity of approach* when the children go on to junior school. Indeed, they go on to affirm that there is 'a substantial body of evidence which indicates that most children will benefit in a variety of ways'.

*See paragraph 14.2 for a discussion of this very important aspect of cooperation between schools.

7.30 References occur in subsequent chapters to various organisational aspects of the teaching of reading, but we must introduce the main theme at this point. It is one thing to have an array of materials and techniques of the kind we have been discussing; it is quite another to be able to put these together coherently to provide an appropriate reading curriculum for each individual child as well as for the class as a whole. This calls for clear thinking about sequence and structure. The teacher has to decide whether a given objective is likely to be achieved most effectively by the child's independent effort, by work in small groups, or by direct class teaching. In planning her work she is faced with a number of decisions, each of which bears upon the organisation of the reading programme. For example, how much time should she spend on a particular reading activity in relation to other competing claims on her time? How should she evaluate the results of her own efforts as well as monitor the progress of each child? How can she make the best use of the assistance of additional adults, such as parents, aides, specialist or relief teachers, students and, indeed, older children? The ability to pose and answer such questions, and to organise accordingly, is the most important factor for success in the teaching of reading.

7.31 In our view every child should spend part of each day in reading or pre-reading activities, with the teacher keeping a meticulous check on progress. She will need to make qualitative observations by listening to every child read several times a week and by asking questions designed to develop the various kinds of comprehension. This will allow her to structure successive learning experiences for each child in such a way as to ensure a steady sequence of development through the various reading skills. Everyone would agree that additional attention should be given to children whose progress is unsatisfactory, but we would strongly emphasise the need to stimulate average and above average children to greater achievement. This means that the teacher should spend time with them individually, for it is not only the poor readers who warrant attention of this kind. A good deal of incentive can be provided by well organised small group work, where the interaction draws upon shared experiences in reading. (See Chapter 13 for a general discussion of group organisation). The children can be encouraged to discuss what they are reading, to ask questions and offer answers, and to compare their ideas of what the book said. They should become accustomed quite early to going back to the printed word and looking more carefully at something on which their talk has focused. Cooperative reading of this kind can begin even in the earliest stages, when children can help one another in word recognition as well as interpretation. The teacher's own intervention in group work is of considerable importance, for as opportunities present themselves she can develop particular skills in a context in which the children are highly motivated and able to apply their learning with immediacy and purpose. There may be occasions where she wants to teach the whole class if this is the most effective and economical way of dealing with a specific reading skill, and the range of reading ability is not so wide as to make it impracticable. Indeed, the value of the collective class experience needs to be reaffirmed, and it is exemplified at its best when all the children are sharing the enjoyment of teacher's reading to them.

7.32 We therefore consider the best method of organising reading to be one where the teacher varies the experience between individual, group and class situations according to the purpose in hand. Fundamental to it all is a precise knowledge of the progress and needs of each individual child, and we consider this of such importance that it has been made the subject of a separate chapter (Chapter 17). We can anticipate it here by saying that a particularly important teaching skill is that of assessing the level of difficulty of books by applying measures of readability. The teacher who can do this is in a better position to match children to reading materials that answer their needs. In our visits to schools we came across many children who were not allowed to read 'real books' until they had completed the scheme. This is an artificial distinction and an unnatural restriction of reading experience. We also came across children who had made good progress through a scheme and were now struggling at frustration level in other kinds of reading, while others were bored by material that was making too few demands upon them. The effective teacher is one who has under her conscious control all the resources that can fulfil her purpose. By carefully assessing levels of difficulty she can draw from a variety of sources.

References

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2. Vygotsky LS Thought and Language Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press: 1962.

3. Reid JT Learning to think about Reading Educational Research, 9: 1966.

4. Gates AL The Necessary Mental Age for Beginning Reading Elementary School Journal, 37: 1937.

5. Mackay D, Thompson B and Schaub P Breakthrough to Literacy: Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching Schools Council/Longman: 1970.

6. Blom GE, Waite RR, Zimet SG and Edge S What the Story World is Like in What Children Read in School Grune and Stratton (editor SG Zimet) New York: 1972.

7. Fry E A diacritical marking system to aid beginning reading instruction Elementary English, 41: pp. 526-9.

8. Brimer MA An experimental evaluation of coded scripts in initial reading New Research in Education: 1967.

9. Johnson H, Jones DR, Cole AC and Walters MB The use of diacritical marks in teaching beginners to read The British Journal of. Educational Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 42: 1972.

10. Warburton FW and Southgate V i.t.a.: An Independent Evaluation Murray and Chambers: 1969.

11. Downing JA The i.t.a. Symposium NFER: 1967.

12. Downing JA and Latham W A follow-up of children in the first i.t.a. experiment British Journal of Educational Psychology, 39: 1969.