Spelling out a way forward for reading

8:21am Friday 25th April 2008

The Minister for Yorkshire and Humber, Rosie Winterton, when visiting Bradford, said our rebirth' will depend not only on the physical regeneration of the area, but also its people'. She argues education and skills are absolutely key'. She then cites Sure Start as an initiative that can help break the cycle of unemployment in deprived neighbourhoods.

So how are the people of Bradford to be regenerated'? From Sure Start to employment is quite a jump, but it is true that education is the key, starting right from the start. Sadly, Sure Start, throughout the country, is deemed to be a failure.

What would be a better model? Let's imagine Education Bradford opting out of the national curriculum and its associated regime of tests. It could initiate its own programme, which would be a model for sadly needed primary regeneration throughout the country.

It could reinstate language centres for children, for recent immigrants and others who do not have English as their mother tongue and so are not equipped in their knowledge of English to profit from mainstream schooling and constitute a drag on other children's education. When their English is adequate, they should be drip-fed back into the mainstream.

Special emphasis should be placed on the ability to use language in speaking and listening in order to develop interactive and intellectual skills. Since learning to read is parasitic on spoken language, formally learning to read should be left to Year 2, the age at which most European children start to learn to read.

What do I mean when I say reading is parasitic on spoken language? For a start, a child's comprehension of written texts is directly dependent on her comprehension of spoken language, because reading is, in the first instance, the process of translating print into language you can hear. Many problems in learning to read result from poor spoken language skills.

Formal reading instruction should start with systematic synthetic phonics because children need to be shown how words they already know in spoken language are coded in writing. Synthetic phonics begins with the skills of sounding out and blending for reading, and segmenting in order to spell. Reading by synthetic phonics is the process of sounding out the letters in a word in sequence and then blending those sounds into a word the child recognises from her spoken vocabulary. Segmenting is the process of hearing the constituent sounds within a spoken word in order to be able to code it writing.

But synthetic phonics is only a stepping stone on the way towards successful reading. The next step is learning to see groupings of letters all at once as significant chunks'. We do not read cat' by saying kuh-a-tuh' forever.

We see it as a meaningful and pronounceable unit - cat'. We leave the sounding out behind. The end product of synthetic phonics is a growing capacity in the child to developing chunking' as the way forward towards adult reading.

So this is just the beginning of a curriculum for Bradford education. In my opinion, it would offer Bradford more hope of regeneration than languishing low in the league tables as we do now.

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