Sad news

[chew8]

I've just heard that Joyce Morris died yesterday, aged 93. She was the grand old lady of phonics in Britain. Some RRFers may know of her 'Phonicsphobia' paper.

Jenny C.

[Susan Godsland]

That is very sad news.

She was also co-founder of UKLA in 1963 (then The United Kingdom Reading Association).

Here's her Phonicsphobia paper
http://www.englishspellingsociety.org/j ... sfobia.php

[Debbie Hepplewhite]

Thank you for letting us know, Jenny.

I mention Joyce Morris all the time in training events.

She coined the phrase 'phonicsphobia' and this state of mind still exists does it not!

What a remarkable lady.

[Susan Godsland]

Joyce Morris obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/education/20 ... yce-morris

In 1983 she began an investigation at Roehampton Institute of Higher Education (now Roehampton University) to discover to what extent student teachers, at the beginning of their pre-service courses, understood the nature of English orthography in enough detail to help children acquire initial literacy skills. The generally poor results of the 275 undergraduates involved forced the rector of the institute reluctantly to ask her to discontinue the research because of the distress caused.

However, other researchers in Britain and the US administered her linguistic questionnaire to their students, with similar results. This reinforced Joyce’s longstanding conviction that both phonics schemes and teaching methods needed to be more firmly based on linguistics and research, and that “you can’t teach what you don’t know”

[Debbie Hepplewhite]

I've developed a thread about Joyce Morris and her work - because her work is really 'ongoing' and just as relevant today as when Joyce was on her original and personal voyage of discovery:


http://www.phonicsinternational.com/for ... .php?t=768