Last week I wrote about how testing phonics through dictation gets very complicated very quickly. Processing sound, identifying the word, and understanding meaning is not a one way linear process. You can't decide if someone is saying porc or port until you have understood the whole sentence. So a dictation is much more than a test of knowledge of phonics.
I had a similar experience this week with reading aloud. Reading aloud is the other proposed way of testing phonics knowledge in the proposed new GCSE.
I am a big fan of reading aloud. I have always believed that if something is tricky, that means you work on it more, not avoid it. I teach phonics (the sound-spelling link) at the very start of Year 7, and then constantly reinforce it. Even when pupils are reading silently in their heads, it is important that they are sounding the words correctly. In a sense, all their reading is "reading aloud". But I am not sure about reading aloud as a test of phonics. As with dictation, the interplay between phonics and meaning is too complex.
I was doing the Debbie and Harry lessons.
It's the first lesson on Free Time with Year 8. It gives them sentences with new topic vocabulary. In sentences which are too repetitive, all with j'aime. So straight away the pupils will want to be improving this in speaking and writing, by using their conjunctions and a variety of opinions and other structures like je peux...
We did some work on phonics on some of the words. The hidden gorille in maquillage and the bébé in télé. Then the pupils had to make sense of the new vocabulary (darts, going out). Which was writing, not speaking at this stage.
The second half of the sheet is fun. Based on what they know about Debbie and Harry (names, gender, photos, a liking for darts...) they have to predict who they think likes each of these new activities:
They write them out. Then they have the opportunity to tell me in French who they think likes which activity. Which is a chance to go over manipulating j'aime into Harry aime / Debbie aime...
The next lesson, more activities follow, including a Listening where I tell them in French what activities Debbie and Harry actually like and don't like. The pupils make notes on the page as I tell them, reading a model text in the first person for Debbie and for Harry.
We then co-constructed the text on the board. With pupils telling me in French their suggestions for what to write. Changing the je to il/elle, adding conjunctions, and giving better alternatives to the repetition of aime... All of this without me having to correct pronunciation. Either of known words (adore, mais, peut) or the new words (conduire, fléchettes).
The main part of the third lesson is to ask the pupils to write their own paragraph for a 3rd person whose photo I show on the board, writing their own version of what they think they like/don't like. But first, I did some work on reading aloud the paragraph we had co-constructed in the previous lesson. It didn't go well.
In the previous lesson, giving me their guesses as to who liked what, the pupils were working from text to speech, but mainly concentrating on telling me something. As we constructed the paragraph, they were working from some known language and some new language presented in text. Mainly concentrating on the coherence and variety of the paragraph we were creating. Without pronunciation being a big issue.
Not so when it came to reading aloud. There was something about the focus on a body of text and the explicit focus on sound that kept making it go wrong. Silent letters pronounced. Cognates pronounced as if they were English words. Worse than when we weren't focusing on pronunciation.
And the solution was to ask the pupil to read ahead in their head. And then look up from the text and tell me what it said in French. Reading aloud, focusing on a word at a time or a syllable at a time, was having a strange effect. Instead of making their reading more correct, it was spoiling it. Reading a whole sentence silently, understanding it, and saying it, with support from the text when needed, was much more successful.
I have never agreed with the 1990s approach of not allowing reading aloud because it would corrupt the pupils' pronunciation. But those teachers weren't being willfully stupid. It's not easy and it's not straight forward. And as with dictation, the link between sounding out and the brain's need to find meaning was getting muddled. Reading aloud wasn't testing phonics.
What is a reading aloud phonics test going to look like? How prepared are we to teach pupils how to tackle this? Will we advise them to read it for meaning first? Do we understand how meaning and pronunciation interact? And whether reading syllable by syllable is good for careful accuracy or actually distorts? Is this the same for different languages? (I know in Spanish I tell pupils the important thing is NOT to look up from the word.)
If this is how our pupils are to be tested at GCSE we need to gear up massively to have effective teaching in place. It is more complex than you think. And the exam boards have a lot of work to do to work out what sort of tests and texts will actually test the phonics.
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