Sue Lloyd - Synthetic phonics proponent (Part 3)

Here is Ms Sue Lloyd's response to my first email. She is a committee member of the Reading Reform Foundation UK.

16 Nov at 17:14

Dear Luqman Michel,

Thank you for your interesting email. I think the reading problem comes when children are asked to memorise words and not decode them. When strong systematic synthetic phonics is used, in whole class situations and intervention for the slow-to-start, then all the children become good at decoding. 

Letters and Sounds is not the problem. The failure, which is thankfully reducing in the UK, is caused by the teachers giving the children books to read that have letter-sound correspondences that have not been taught. These children, who are not so secure with their blending skills, then lose faith in trying to work the words out. Instead, they prefer to predict (guess) the words. They even start to forget the letter sounds they learnt in the first place. 

English has a very complex alphabetic code, so it is even more important, especially for the strugglers, that it is systematically and carefully taught. Decodable readers help the strugglers to become better at blending, as well as continually revising the letter sounds so that they become fluently known in their long-term memory.

My favourite research can be found at http://syntheticphonics.net/reseach.php   

I hope this helps.

My comments now: I believe that many people just want to say what they have been saying for years without actually reading and understanding what others say.

Did Sue understand the following from my email to her? 

"I believe letter sounds should not be taught with extraneous sounds. What is your view?

            Please, read my blog post and give me your valued comment.

http://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2018/10/correspondence-between- babytv -and.html"

She says, "Letters and Sounds is not the problem." 

I, on the other hand, say that teaching of sounds of alphabets wrongly throughout the world is exactly the problem. 

Kids predisposed to shutting down, disengage from learning to read when they are confused. As Thorndike had said in 1913, kids will not accept new information that is contrary to what they have initially learned. Fortunately for us, there is a majority who learn regardless of how they are taught i.e. regardless of initial input.

To be continued...