Dr Tessa Daffern has now shared a link to a Youtube presentation of hers in another forum, and I have her permission to share it more widely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ComEHVhXbHg

It's full of very useful facts and figures.

Jenny C.

Whether the 2007 L&S is a ‘programme’ or ‘more akin to a framework’ as Debbie thinks depends on whether resources are considered to be an essential feature of a programme. Debbie thinks they are, but I don’t – nor, apparently, does Diane McGuinness, who is respected by many RRFers, including me. I r...

Study after study, review after review (or rather the ones that look at a significant body of empirical evidence) conclude that the closer a method of teaching reading is to Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP), the better it is. No refs. are given - I wonder what studies the writer has in mind. One ...

I’ve always believed in laying solid phonics foundations for spelling as well as for reading. I've also believed, however, that other things, such as morphology, soon start to become important for spelling, and I’ve often said this in the RRF forum. My thoughts on this have been based on the types o...

More thoughts, prompted by comments on Twitter suggesting that it’s nonsense to suggest that there are words that can’t be sounded out…. There are two kinds of sounding out: if the stimulus is a spoken word, one can sound it out (say the sounds in it) without reference to graphemes, but if the stimu...

I’ve belatedly acquired a copy of Diane McGuinness’s Sound Steps to Reading (2008), and it has made me think again about certain issues, some of which have been in my mind since 1998. That was when I first encountered McG thinking as a result of hearing them speak in London in connection with the UK...

One other brief point: I share Geraldine's interest in longer-term outcomes and will try to do more on this in due course, but my focus so far has just been on the relationship between programmes used and PSC results, as there is general agreement that decoding needs to be well taught as a first ste...

One thing Geraldine highlights is that the original McGuinness-type training in England didn’t emphasise spelling or the whole code, but did recommend getting children into ‘real reading’ as quickly as possible. I didn’t undergo that training, but followed McGuinness developments closely at the time...

Susan Godsland has recently tweeted about the plateauing of Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC) results in England. It’s tempting to think that if more schools were using certain programmes, results would improve dramatically, but some investigations I’ve done over the past couple of weeks make me ...

This is interesting: https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/controlling-the-text-the-dilemma-of-decodable-texts One thing to bear in mind is that there is not a simple two-way choice between (a) controlled-books-with-no-guessing and (b) non-controlled-books-with-guessing. There is also a (c) whic...

It's worth spending the 70 minutes or so it takes to listen to this:

https://www.podbean.com/eu/pb-fvjgw-ed2981

Jenny.

As has been stated several times in this thread, 5 of the 7 contributors to Reading the Evidence... mention the 2006 Torgerson, Brooks and Hall meta-analysis, and all 5 accept its conclusion that there is no definitive evidence showing that synthetic phonics is more effective than analytic phonics. ...

Another article by one of the contributors to the Clark book:

https://educationhq.com/news/myths-and- ... ols-79934/

Jenny.

Something is puzzling me about a document I've seen: https://linguisticphonics.wordpress.com/phonics-from-eyfs-y6/ You need to scroll down to scroll down to the link to ‘Spelling – Year 3 and 4 National Curriculum Word List’ and the equivalent for Years 5-6. What puzzles me is that in some cases, th...

I’ve recently watched this presentation on spelling by Tarjinder Gill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chmKA8VzGCY She talks very fast, and I had to listen to some sections several times in order to get a clearer idea of what she was saying. I liked some of it, but also felt there were some inaccura...