Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
15 NOVEMBER 2004
DR MORAG
STUART AND
MRS DEBBIE
HEPPLEWHITE
Q1 Valerie Davey: May I welcome Dr Stuart
and Debbie Hepplewhite to this, our first session? We have given
ourselves the title of Teaching Children to Read which, as you
both well know, has been the subject of debate for ever, it would
seem, for those of us who have been involved in teaching at any
time. It is something we want to look at specifically, following
the Government's new approach, given the literacy hour, given
all the work they have done. Why we are having a debate now? That
is the first question and it would be an opportunity that I should
like to give both of you to say a few words, before we start the
general questioning, as to why you think there is a debate now.
Looking at the achievements or not, as you may see it, of the
Government's approach, what are the standards that you would expect
young people to reach at the end of their Key Stage 2. I do not
know who would like to go first, but we will give you each five
or 10 minutes, depending on what you would like to say to the
Committee. Would that be helpful?
Mrs Hepplewhite: Good afternoon
everybody. Thank you for holding this inquiry; I think it is much
appreciated. I should like to say from the outset, that I am absolutely
not an academic and I come to the Committee today very much a
working teacher. This means that I have a really good understanding
of the kind of training that teachers have had, perhaps at teacher
training college and certainly since the National Literacy Strategy
and whether that has equipped them to understand about the teaching
of reading, also writing, spelling and handwriting. So I come
originally from the point of view of the quality of the training
and the content of the training. I should also like to include
that I am alarmed by the climate for teachers, specifically with
National Literacy Strategy training, which has differed from national
numeracy strategy training in that if teachers raise questions
during National Literacy Strategy training, these questions are
not addressed and teachers are actually made to feel uncomfortable.
There has been a much more open approach to the numeracy strategy,
so there is literally a different climate in those two subject
areas. I maintain that teachers do not have a common understanding
of how to teach reading, or how best to teach reading and they
do not understand that this is one subject area where it is not
just about what you do, do with children, but there is an area
of what you should not do with children, which can be very damaging
to children. I hope that perhaps we can address these things this
afternoon.
Dr Stuart: Good afternoon. I am
an academic now. I was also a Key Stage 1 teacher for a large
number of years, so I also have experience of teaching children
to read and write. I became an academic by accident, because when
I studied psychology I studied under Professor Max Coltheart who
was doing really fascinating work about reading and I became interested.
When he suggested I did my PhD, I knew at once what I wanted to
do because I had taught children to read for about 16 years and
I had absolutely no idea how they learned. When I train teachers
now, this is still a common experience. When I tell that anecdote
to teachers, they immediately smile and nod and they know too,
that although they teach children to read, they do not know how
children learn. It is quite mysterious because you just breathe
on some children and they learn to read. Other children you teach
and teach and teach and teach and they do not learn to read. I
wanted to know why and when I started my PhD I did a longitudinal
study starting with children in their last term in the nursery
and I followed those children up, having predicted how they would
fare in learning to read, until they were 11. At the age of 11,
my predictions held good and the gap between the children that
I predicted would find it easy and the children I predicted would
not had grown so that there was about a four-year difference in
reading age by the time they were 11. I have been doing research
into early reading development now for the past 20 years more
of less. One of the reasons we are having the debate still is
to do with Ofsted's continuing disquiet about the teaching of
phonics in schools. In all the reports I have read, this is one
issue which Ofsted raises. Ofsted's disquiet is also raised in
a report of 1996-98 about what teachers in initial teacher training
were being taught about reading and goodness knows why else. There
is a paradox in that recent international comparisons such as
the PIRLS study show English children doing very well comparatively
by the age of 11, but we do need to look at whom they have been
compared with. The international comparisons include children
from countries where most of the teachers are not trained or are
certainly not trained as much as teachers here are trained, where
the countries are poor and therefore there are poor school libraries
and poor text books in schools. We are thus not really comparing
like with like. When we compare like with like, we see some rather
dispiriting things about English schoolchildren which show that
although our best children do extremely well, there is a larger
range between our best children and our worst children at the
age of 11, than in almost any other country. We are clearly not
doing as well as we should by the children at the bottom, the
children who are always there in classes, whom you taught and
taught and taught. So we still do not know how to do it.
Q2 Valerie Davey: You indicated that
in the research you have done, you had predicted. Could you tell
us very briefly what the factors were?
Dr Stuart: Yes. When the children
were in the nursery, I tested their phonological awareness. When
I use terms that you do not understand, please let me know.
Q3 Jonathan Shaw: Give us the Beano version.
Dr Stuart: If I say to you "What
rhymes with cat?" what would you say?
Q4 Jonathan Shaw: I would say hat.
Dr Stuart: You would say "hat".
Well lots of four-year-olds would say dog, because they deal with
words in terms of their meanings and not their sounds.
Q5 Mr Pollard: I said dog.
Dr Stuart: Might you have reading
problems? I looked at their ability to recognise whether words
rhymed or not and to tell me words that did rhyme with each other,
asked them to tell me what words began with in terms of their
sounds. Already in the early 1980s those were known predictors
of the successful reading development. Children who, when they
went into school, understood that words were composed of sounds
had a head start in learning to read and that is largely because
alphabetical orthographies, alphabetic writing systems, map onto
speech sounds. If you know about speech sounds, you are prepared
for the fact that letters will map on to them.
Valerie Davey: Thank you very much. I
could go on, but I have promised my colleagues that I will not
abuse the chair this afternoon. Nick, it is over to you.
Q6 Mr Gibb: Thank you very much. I got
into this subject because when I first became the MP for Bognor
and Littlehampton, I was discussing with the heads of my three
different comprehensives why the results were as they were for
those schools. They said "We have a problem with the intake".
One particular school said. "60% of my intake had a reading
age below the chronological age and 30% had a reading age two
years below the chronological age". Why do you think this
might be in an area like mine? It does have areas of deprivation
but it is not totally deprived and there are prosperous areas.
Why do you think there would be these problems?
Dr Stuart: What year were these
children entering secondary school?
Q7 Mr Gibb: They were going in to Year
7, so they were eleven-year-olds.
Dr Stuart: In which year?
Q8 Mr Gibb: In 1997, 1998 and 1999.
Dr Stuart: So they had been through
school prior to the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy.
Q9 Mr Gibb: Yes.
Dr Stuart: Well, I am not surprised
then, because the National Literacy Strategy has made a difference,
there is absolutely no doubt about that. Whether it has made as
much difference as it could, or whether we could make more difference
is really what we are here to discuss today. There is absolutely
no doubt that the National Literacy Strategy has a major effect
on the teaching of reading. Prior to the introduction of the National
Literacy Strategy in many schools reading was not systematically
taught at all.
Q10 Mr Gibb: So, what has the NLS brought
in? I am a great supporter of the NLS.
Dr Stuart: The NLS has produced
a framework for teaching which tells teachers that reading has
to be taught and the prevailing ideology before the introduction
of the NLS was that reading did not have to be taught, that reading
was a natural human activity just like walking and talking. We
do not teach children to talk, we do not need to teach children
to read. In fact some authors in the early 1970s were absolutely
against the idea that you should try to teach children to read
and saw teaching children to read as counter-productive in terms
of their learning.
Q11 Mr Gibb: Are you not exaggerating?
If I were to ask primary teachers in my constituency if that was
what they were doing prior to 1997, I do not think they would
say that, would they? "We don't teach children to read here."
Dr Stuart: No, I do not think
they would.
Q12 Mr Gibb: So in real terms, what does
what you are saying mean?
Mrs Hepplewhite: May I speak from
the point of view of the teacher? The National Literacy Strategy
brought a huge impetus to the teaching of reading: massive influx
of reading material in the form of big books and sets of reading
books. A bit of a rod for teachers, saying "You need to teach
literacy. You have to make it very high profile in your schools.
You have to plan it very thoroughly. There is such a thing as
word level, sentence level, text level and you must account for
all these areas". The difference it made was that the middle
to above-average children have absolutely flown on that extra
impetus. In my opinion, what it did not do was still train the
teachers how to teach reading in the most effective way and this
is where the sort of, say, bottom third are still failed, because
there is still a lot of grey area about how to do it. The very
fact that you were making it so high profile and it was a case
of Ofsted was looking for this and we must do this and we must
account for it, was enough to have got the teaching profession
into gear with the whole area of teaching of reading and a lot
of teachers were learning as well, myself included. I know more
about the genre now than I ever did as an adult before and I am
still learning and these are all the pluses for the National Literacy
Strategy. Unfortunately, in terms of the specific teaching of
reading, the advice was not as it should have been, it was not
scientifically tested, it was not compared to other leading programmes
at the time. Because therefore the advice was not the best, admittedly,
the actual government teaching material was not the best, but
teachers were actually expected to use those materials, is why
we have got this difference now between the bottom struggling
children and children with English as an additional language,
children from poor backgrounds, compared with the rest of the
children. We have to be very careful that we do not therefore
conclude, if we look at the improvement in this area, that it
must therefore be the children's problem, it must be innate to
the children, it must just be the backgrounds because there are
programmes out there where children, despite those difficulties,
are making some extraordinary strides. Their level of comprehension
may well be limited by their oral comprehension and the limit
of their vocabulary, but in terms of the decoding of the words
on the page, with certain programmes they really are now at an
advantage and hopefully will be able to read more within their
schools. That in itself will improve their vocabulary and their
confidence and have a really good knock-on effect.
Q13 Mr Gibb: There have been huge improvements
under the NLS, going from 56% reaching Level 4 to 75%; in fact
last year it was 77%. But you are both critical in your written
submissions of the NLS. We are kind of skirting around what the
debate is. What is the debate that is going on? Why are you still
critical of the NLS, given the gains that have been made?
Dr Stuart: I am critical because
I am actually worried, at the time when the NLS and the NNS have
been subsumed into the primary strategy and there is talk about
devolving responsibility to local authorities rather than central
authorities, that we have not won the hearts and minds of teachers
about how reading ought to be taught. That is partly because,
as I said in my paper, the National Literacy Strategy represents
this uneasy compromise between two completely opposing philosophies
about the teaching of reading: on the one hand, the idea that
reading is a natural human activity and, given time and exposure
to books, all children will learn to do it and the idea that actually,
from psychological research, we know an awful lot about how children
learn to read and we know an awful lot about reading and we know
about the cognitive processes that children need to develop and
we know about ways of teaching them that will facilitate the development
of those processes.
Q14 Mr Gibb: Can you, for the benefit
of the Committee, just summarise how reading should be taught?
We are talking about phonics, are we not?
Dr Stuart: Yes, we are talking
about phonics basically. Children need to understand the alphabetic
principle and children need to know three things. They need to
know the correspondences between letters and their sounds and
that goes beyond the single 26 letters of the alphabet to all
the vowel digraphs and consonant digraphs, two vowels together;
"ai" is digraph "ch" is a digraph. They need
to be able to blend sounds that they recover from translating
letters into sounds in order to form words for reading and they
need to be able to segment spoken words into their sounds in order
to translate them into letters for spelling. So once they have
mastered the alphabetic principle, they become self-teaching because
they can work out new words that they encounter in texts for themselves
and the words that they encounter in texts are likely to be words
that are already in their spoken vocabulary. They can therefore
form sight vocabulary representations for those words.
Q15 Mr Turner: What does "sight
vocabulary" mean?
Dr Stuart: The evidence about
skilled reading is that we have two procedures for recognising
words, which happen every time we look at a word in print. You
would be amazed at what your brain is doing every time you see
a word in print. Your brain is automatically translating it from
letters to sounds and automatically looking it up in your internal
dictionary of the spellings of all the words that you know. Okay?
The self-teaching device is that if you know letter-sounds and
you can work out unfamiliar words, once you have worked them out,
you can pop them into sight vocabulary and they are available
for subsequent instant recognition. Skilled readers largely rely
on this instant recognition because they have this stored vocabulary.
Q16 Valerie Davey: Can we ask Debbie
to answer the same question? Would you agree with that as the
best way of teaching or would you like to add something?
Mrs Hepplewhite: Do not be cross
with me. One thing, certainly from the point of the Reading Reform
Foundation, is that we are absolutely not a philosophy; we are
not promoting any philosophy. The beauty of the Reading Reform
Foundation is that the stereotype of the sort of phonics proponents
as being very sort of right-wing elderly ladies or whatever has
gone. The Reading Reform Foundation is supported by an enormous
variety of people, actually from across the world, who have the
same debate in other English-speaking countries. The teaching
of reading is a very emotional thing and we have tried to be very
unemotional about it, although we are passionate about children
failing, so emotion is definitely there. Basically we do everything
by evidence and the Reading Reform Foundation's governing principles
are that we promote evidence-based teaching of reading. At the
moment, that evidence is pointing very clearly to something called
synthetic phonics. It could be standing on your head and turning
round three times and we would promote that. I should like to
make it very, very clear from the outset that we are talking about
a very scientific, objective approach to the teaching of reading,
as opposed to a belief system. This is not a belief system. What
is missing from the National Literacy Strategy is that same objective
approach to what is being promoted. In the past, I have corresponded
quite a lot with people quite high up in Ofsted and one letter
to me was very much saying "Debbie, you need to be patient,
things cannot be changed over night. We have politics and diplomacy
to consider". Well, in my opinion, children's welfare has
nothing to do with adult politics and diplomacy and it has everything
to do with what works the best in the classrooms. If you would
bear with me, I should like you all to imagine that you are four
years old and I should like to take you through two different
scenarios. Let me take you through one scenario. You are four
years old and you go into an environment where you are surrounded
by lots of passionate caring people, people who love literature
and who are very keen to steep you in lots of stories and want
you to play in the role play corner, reading and writing, wanting
you to have all these experiences to enrich your life. Of course
that is really important. One of the things that they do is actually
show you cards with whole words on; this is the principle of sight
vocabulary. They say to you "That word says" whatever
it says, they might show you a picture with it. So your first
experience might be looking at words which are just black squiggles
on the page at the age that you are at and you might have an elephant
up there and that word says elephant and you are taught that says
elephant. In actual fact, a lot of the words you will be exposed
to are the kind of words which you will need for the reading of
real text. So it will be "the" and "said"
and "was" and "they" and "their",
the kinds of words that make text into sentences and not just
odd words. So your first experience will be looking at books with
Mum and enjoying the story, if you are lucky. Then you will be
shown black squiggles on a page, perhaps with a supporting picture
to tell you what that word is, then it will be books which are
based very much on look and say "Here is a picture. Here
is a word". Then you go through the book and you pretend
to read it and the chances are that you are saying the correct
words, but not because of the words themselves, which are very
hard to take on board, but actually because of the pictures above.
I am quite sure that if you swapped the pictures around, the children
would get all the words wrong. You are also teaching the child
not to look at the word by the alphabetic principle where you
learn the letter-sound correspondences and you learn to track
the word all through the word from left to right. You have some
experience of that and then you may well get some letter-sound
information and it is highly likely that at home you were taught
your ABC and you were told exactly that. You were told a lot of
names, not necessarily letter sounds and you are getting contradictory
information yet again, because when you are reading, you may think
automatically in terms of the letter name and not a sound. This
is another criticism of the NLS, because you are doubling your
learning and confusing the information. Then you may well get
a little bit of phonics creeping in, depending on how old you
are, or whether you hit a more formal setting. By now you have
had lots of different ways of being taught how to read. Now the
adult logic is that one of these methods will work and if something
fails, something else will succeed and you are only little and
you are loving the books and you are looking through and you are
building up that information. Now, I want to park that child's
experience for a moment, if I may, and I want to bring in another
child going into a different setting. In that setting, you still
have lots of books surrounding you so you have a literacy-rich
environment and you hear stories and talk about books and see
how books works and you still have a role-play corner. But when
the adults talk to you and teach you, they find a way of explaining
that when we speak, we have a way of writing a code and we are
going to teach you that code and how to use it to be able to read
and write. A lot of time and attention is given to just that,
to getting a response to automaticity, so that you are taught
at letter level and single unit sound level and you get a lot
of that. You do not get a little bit of it mixed up with everything
else. That teacher or that grown-up is doing that all the time
and building that information up quite rapidly and in the best
synthetic phonics programmes, you might get six letter-sound correspondences
a week including vowels and consonants. When you get those, you
are taught two extremely important skills. You are taught the
skill of sounding out and blending all through the word to be
able to decode the word and you are taught the skill of listening
to a simple word said very slowly. When it is said very slowly,
the sounds pop out. So if you say "zzzzzzzziiiiiiiiiiiiiip"
you can hear those distinctive sounds and you are trained to hear
those distinctive sounds and then you can spell and if you are
taught your handwriting as well, you have been taught everything.
Now that has been shown to be unbelievably effective, no matter
what the background of the child. Those elements of teaching are
not yet in the National Literacy Strategy programmes. You are
not taught contradictory messages and you are not given in the
first instance, words which are awkward, words with complicated
phonics, even if they are regular, irregular words, you are given
the words that work. By the time you start to be introduced to
more difficult words but useful words for reading text, you already
understand the principles of the alphabetic code and how to decode
words. Some pupils of four and five, and even three, are able
to sound out and blend and hear a word within the first couple
of weeks of being given that method and that is pretty impressive.
Within a few more weeks, more and more children can do that, which
means that within half a term, or a term, you can have a whole
cohort of children able to do the most fundamental skill, which
is sound out and blend for reading and segment the spoken word
for spelling. Now that is very powerful and compared with the
mixture that is here, where some phonics will be taught, the results
are pretty dramatic. What we have to do is show that, because
researchers like Morag Stuart, people in the Reading Reform Foundation
know that, as do growing numbers of people around the country,
but it would appear that the National Literacy Strategy team are
avoiding the public act of comparing these programmes and passing
that information to the teachers. Until the teachers get this
information, they are not in a position to make the informed choices
that they need to make to help their children.
The Chairman took the Chair at 4pm
Chairman: That is very helpful.
Q17 Mr Gibb: Yes, that is very helpful.
I just want to bring in Morag now as well. On this long tail of
underachievement which is talked about in PIRLS study and bringing
in the points both you and Debbie have made about the phonics
method of teaching, which Debbie has just said applies to all
children, is there not an argument that some children have a different
way of thinking? Indeed is it not the case that the type of children
you have mentioned before, who, when you ask them to find a word
which rhymes with cat, will say dog, some children with different
kinds of minds, minds like that perhaps, do need a different method
of teaching and we do therefore need a variety of methods of teaching
reading and not just an over-emphasis on phonics?
Dr Stuart: No, I do not think
that is what the research evidence suggests at all. What the research
evidence suggests is that the best way to make a child, who at
four thinks that dog rhymes with cat, into a reader is to play
games with them, so that they understand that cat rhymes with
mat and hat and so that they do become aware of sounds in words.
There are obviously individual differences in the speed with which
different children learn and in the success rate at which children
get to targets anyway. I remember saying to Ofsted at the very
beginning of the National Literacy Strategy that I thought it
was extremely unlikely that 80% of children would reach the level
4 target because the level 4 target is set on children's understanding
of what they read and understanding of what you read is limited
by your verbal ability and verbal ability varies among children.
I think it is very reasonable to expect that every child should
be able to recognise the words on the page and phonics teaches
you to do that. However, when we are looking at understanding
what you read, there are other factors which set limits on your
ability. I have lost your question.
Q18 Mr Gibb: The long tail of underachievement.
Who are those children and would they benefit from a different
method from phonics? Where is there that long tail?
Dr Stuart: The evidence suggests
that phonics teaching actually benefits children from low socio-economic
status homes, children with English as an additional language,
more than it benefits children from middle-class homes.
Q19 Mr Gibb: Are you not saying that
you are simply teaching decoding? So this is all about decoding,
it is not about comprehension. Do we not need comprehension? Why
is decoding so important?
Dr Stuart: Because you cannot
comprehend, if you cannot decode. If you are presented with a
page of text and you cannot recognise any of the words and you
do not know what any of the words mean or say, you cannot understand
the text. So as children grow up, they learn language, they learn
the language that they are surrounded by, they learn their mother
tongue and they can speak and they can understand. When they learn
to read, they need to get into that language comprehension system
from the printed word, rather than from the spoken word. At the
early stages of reading development decoding is essential.
|
