In the second episode of The Sounds-Write Podcast, John Walker answers the question 'what is Sounds-Write?' He deep-dives into the theoretical underpinnings of the approach and discusses what differentiates Sounds-Write from other phonics schemes. We hope that this is helpful both to those of you who are new to Sounds-Write and also to practitioners who wish to refresh their understanding of the programme's core principles.
Some helpful links:
John teaching word building
The Sounds-Write showcase
In the second episode of The Sounds-Write Podcast, John Walker answers the question 'what is Sounds-Write?' He deep-dives into the theoretical underpinnings of the approach and discusses what differentiates Sounds-Write from other phonics schemes. We hope that this is helpful both to those of you who are new to Sounds-Write and also to practitioners who wish to refresh their understanding of the programme's core principles.
Some helpful links:
John teaching word building
The Sounds-Write showcase
Laura: 0:01
Hello and welcome to Episode 2 of the Sounds-Write podcast. I'm Laura, the host. And today I'm back with John Walker, Sounds-Write's Managing Director. In this episode, we're going to be laying out the foundations of the podcast in general, giving you more information about the underpinnings of our approach to teaching phonics. We'll be discussing how Sounds-Write came about, what the core concepts of the programme are and how this applies when it actually comes to teaching. If you're not familiar with Sounds-Write already, I hope this episode will serve as a helpful introduction for you. If you've trained with Sounds-Write before, this should be a great reminder of some of the theory and research that underpins your practice. I hope you enjoy the episode. Hello, John. How are you today?
John: 0:46
Oh, hi, Laura. No, I'm very well, thank you. It's great to be back in the studio and able to speak with you again.
Laura: 0:55
Yeah, nice to have you again. So, obviously, today we're going to be talking about what Sounds-Write is, how it first came about. So, that's really the first question for you that I have: What made you first interested in phonics and what was the path that led you towards starting Sounds-Write?
John: 1:16
Okay, great question. In fact, I think somebody asked me something like this a few months ago, and where it started for me, really, was that, as you probably know, I started teaching first of all in what we now call Year 3, or the first class in the Junior phase. Now, of course, it's Year 3 and Key Stage 2. That's where I taught for a couple of years to begin with. And one of the things that really puzzled me was that while I was really enjoying the teaching and found it incredibly stimulating, enjoyed working with the class, there were several children who weren't really making any progress in reading or writing. Now, of course, what I thought then was what some teachers still think, and which is absolutely wrong, of course, but I thought it was the job of the infant teachers, or the Key Stage 1 teachers, as they're now called, to teach reading and writing. I didn't see it as being part of my job. And in fact, to tell you the truth, I didn't have a clue how to teach reading and writing from the beginning, so I had no idea what phonics was about. Phonics teaching wasn't encouraged, and it took me really quite a long time to find out what it was all about, really. And that waited, really, until I went to work in a secondary school. And we had whole lots of children coming into the school with very, very low reading ages, so much so that they weren't able to access the secondary curriculum, which was pretty challenging in some places. And so, really, I was trying to figure out what was going on. I used to teach children, or young students anyway, in small groups, and again, they weren't making any progress. And that's because I was using a whole language approach. Well, off I went to the Institute of Education a bit later on. I did a year's course in all this. I came back and I still had no idea how to teach reading and writing. I had no better idea, anyway. And it took me, really, to work for the British Council, for the penny to drop, because when I worked for the British Council teaching English, a foreign language, that was when, really, I realised that words are comprised of sounds, and all of those sounds had been assigned spellings at some point in time or other. And so I acquired a really good understanding of how the phonological system in English worked.
Laura: 3:55
Yeah, I imagine that story is probably quite familiar to a lot of people in that maybe they haven't had the support or training that they need to teach students who are struggling with reading.
John: 4:08
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, we hear it again and again, and it's an awful thing to hear, really, when we've had the knowledge now for really quite some time. Certainly, well, more than 20 years, 25 years, we've known how to teach reading and writing very well indeed. And yet the training institutions, many of them, are still churning out people who haven't the first idea of how to teach early reading and writing.
Laura: 4:37
And so what led you from there to developing the programme?
John: 4:43
Well, I think I was teaching colonial and post-colonial literatures at Warwick University on an MA course, and at the same time, I did a course called Phono-Graphix years ago, as well. And, from that, I did learn how to teach or to catch up, children who'd fallen behind in their reading and writing. And so it came to the point where I really had to make a choice between the two. And I figured that all these clever kids that I was teaching on this MA course could probably work all this stuff out for themselves if they just simply went to the library. So I made the jump, really. I made the choice to start teaching children how to read and spell, and I did that for quite a number of years, actually, before we started Sounds-Write, and I started Sounds-Write with a couple of other people. We wrote the programme to begin with, and in 2003, we launched the first Sounds-Write trainings in a place called Wigan in Lancashire, and we had a great time with that. And, of course, we've been since always working on improving the programme.
Laura: 6:08
Yeah. So it's coming up to 20 years next year since you launched it.
John: 6:14
Indeed it is, yes. I don't know how we're going to celebrate that, but I'm sure you'll think of something.
Laura: 6:21
I'm sure a cake will be involved somehow.
John: 6:25
Perhaps, if I'm lucky.
Laura: 6:29
Fantastic. Could you give us a quick kind of in a nutshell overview. What is Sounds-Write?
John: 6:36
Okay, it's difficult to do in a nutshell, but I'll try. Well, first of all, it's a sound-to-print linguistic phonics approach, that's what we call it, to the teaching of reading and spelling. And it's actually designed to be delivered whole-class or as an intervention at the level of small group or even one-to-one.
Laura: 6:56
Yeah. So let's unpack a couple of those terms that you used. So you said sound-to-print. What does that mean and why is it important?
John: 7:06
Yeah, well, I think most phonic approaches really teach from print-to-sound. What they teach children is, they teach that these letters that they present to them make or say sounds. And we think that's a fundamental mistake, actually, because letters don't say anything. They don't say or make sounds. Children say and make sounds. So what we bring to their conscious attention as soon as we possibly can, is this very fact. Whereas Sounds-Write teaches children explicitly that the words that they speak are comprised of sounds and those sounds are represented by letters or squiggles on the page or spellings, whatever you want to call them, if you like. And of course, what children do know, is that they know the sounds of their own language. The sounds of their own language are something that every child learns wherever they are in the world. You don't have to send a child to school to learn the sounds of their language. The whole idea of doing that would be absolutely ridiculous. In fact, Stephen Pinker, I think, says that it's so natural to learn the sounds of the language, it's as natural as a spider learning to spin a web. Spiders learn to spin webs? They don't learn to spin webs. In fact, they're programmed for spinning webs. And so are we, programmed, if you like, for spoken language. So the way we do this, the way we bring this to the attention of children, the fact that words are comprised of sounds and those sounds can be spelled, it is in the beginning at a very, very simple level. We start, in fact, with real words, concrete words that children know and understand. They know words like 'mat', they know words like 'sat' and 'sit' and so on and so forth. There are lots of CVC words or words with a very simple structure that children readily understand. It's part of their, if you like, it's part of their spoken vocabulary, already. So one of the things that we thought was very difficult for kids was that if you present them with flashcards, with single-letter spellings on and say, 'this is /m/ everybody say /m/', 'this is /s/ everybody say /s/' and so on and so forth like that, actually, lots of kids find that very, very difficult to do. It's called paired associate learning in the language of psychology, and humans find that very difficult to do. It's also very boring for some kids, especially if they can't do it. And these associations /m/ with the letter < m > are very hard to remember. We think that we make it very much easier if we situate these sound-spelling correspondences in real words right from the start. So far from being abstract, actually, what we do is very concrete, it's very practical, and I'll give you a very brief example. So we introduce, in the first two weeks of Sounds-Write, we introduce the spellings < a > < i > < m > < s > and < t >. Now, we don't use any of those letter names. We use sounds. So we might start by building, word building, a word like 'mat'. We're making the link when we're doing word building between sounds and their spellings or the letters that represent them. We're teaching them the link between /m/ and < m >, /a/ and < a > and /t/ and < t >. We're also teaching them to segment sounds in words. If we structure this very carefully and give them sufficient scaffolding, as we do in Sounds-Write, and then we teach them to say the sounds and read the word, which is, of course, is blending. So we're teaching three things altogether here. We're teaching them the skills, we're teaching them the code knowledge, and we're also teaching the very beginnings of conceptual understanding that these letters represent sounds in words. And that's a very important bit of understanding, which I'll come to explain a little more in a second.
Laura: 11:48
So, great. Yeah. You mentioned as well in your first little nutshell summary of what is Sounds-Write, you mentioned the term linguistic phonics approach. What does that mean? Because I know that all of these terms kind of get thrown about, analytical phonics, all of these, it's never really clearly laid out what they actually mean. So what does that mean?
John: 12:11
Well, what it means is that we teach then from what children learn naturally, to what they don't learn naturally. What they don't learn naturally is the script, if you like, of their own language, the writing script. So that needs to be taught explicitly. And that's what we set about doing as soon as they arrive in school. Of course, one thing I ought to mention is that there are 44 sounds in the language. All of our teaching is grounded in those 44 sounds, although we don't teach the spellings for those 44 sounds all in one fell swoop. We start off by teaching the simple one-to-one correspondences. And we build on that until we build all the way through to very complex polysyllabic words. And the other thing I want to say about that is we teach all the common around 175 different ways of spelling those 44 or so sounds. That's very important because you need to teach all of them to make sure that not only can children read those sound-spelling correspondences in words, but eventually, they learn to spell them as well.
Laura: 13:25
Great. So would I be right in thinking, are all linguistic phonics approaches sound-to-print?
John: 13:35
The ones that I know of, particularly those, shall we say, inspired by Diane McGuinness' work, are sound to print, yes. I have seen that one or two other approaches claim to be linguistic phonics sound-to-print, but when looked at very carefully, that seems to fall apart a bit. If I just might say, I mean, there are lots of systematic synthetic phonics programmes and they all purport to do certain things and yet actually, when you look at them and closely examine them, they vary quite a lot in what they include and what they don't include.
Laura: 14:20
Right. So you mentioned before that it's really important to teach children the basic skills and conceptual knowledge that underpins learning to read and really ingrain that in the activities that you're doing with children. Could you talk a little bit more about those skills specifically and the conceptual knowledge and what that actually entails?
John: 14:47
Okay, so a lot of people do think that code knowledge is the be and end all. And one of the reasons why they do this, of course, is if you work a lot with flashcards and things like that, then that's where the emphasis is for a lot of the time. But actually it's incredibly important to teach the skills. And what the skills are, or the skills that emerge time and time again in the research as correlating very strongly to learning to read and spell, are the skills of segmenting... Segmenting is the ability to pull sounds apart in words. I always like to think of a chocolate orange, which I know you like.
Laura: 15:27
My favourite!
John: 15:28
Which has a lot of very nice segments to it. And as long as you haven't had it in your pocket for a long time, when you open it up, it falls very nicely into all these separate segments. Rather like words can be separated into their individual phonemes, the smallest units of sound. And that's a very important skill that enables children to read and write very well. The next one is blending. And blending is the skill of being able to push phonemes together or push sounds together to make recognisable words. An example might be /m/ /a/ /p/ those are the three sounds in 'map'. Push them together and you get 'map'. And, of course, that becomes more complex over time and we build on CVC structures to more complex structures later on. Phoneme manipulation refers to the ability to pull sounds out of words and tell somebody what's left, or the ability to swap sounds out of and into words. So to give an example, if we take the word 'frog' and we take out the /r/, what we have left is 'fog'. And we teach children how to perform this skill to a very, very high level of mastery, so that later on they're able to use it almost immediately in reading words. So, for example, if you read the word steak, < ea > can be /ee/, it can be /e/ and it can also be /ae/. So if you read the word 'steak' as /steek/ to begin with, presumably if it was in the context of a sentence, it isn't going to make sense. The brain is going to say /steek/, /steek/. I don't know the word /steek/. I have no idea. So let's try this one. /s/ /t/ /e/ /k/. Oh, /stek/. Is it /stek/? Well, it might be if you come from Yorkshire, but from anywhere else, it probably still isn't going to make sense for you. So you take out the /ee/ or the /e/ and you put in the /ae/. /s/ /t/ /ae/ /k/, /staek/. Now, it makes sense. Of course, somebody needs to have taught you that < ea > can be /ee/, it can be /e/ and it can also be /ae/. But you also need that skill of phoneme manipulation in order to be able to do that successfully and try it. I was once told by a university professor that how would they know any of this sort of stuff? And the answer is, obviously you'd teach it. So thinking about the word 'deaf', for instance, you can try /deef/. Does that make sense? No. Does /daef/ make sense? Does /def/ make sense? Yes, /def/ does make sense, /d/ /e/ /f/, 'deaf', where < ea > represents in this case, the sound /e/.
Laura: 18:33
Right. And I think that idea leads us nicely into conceptual knowledge. So would you talk a bit about the conceptual knowledge that you think is really important?
John: 18:44
So we also teach children conceptual understanding, and we think conceptual understanding is of paramount importance because it actually offers us a conceptual framework which applies to the whole of the English writing script, as a matter of fact. So we start off by teaching them that we can spell sounds with one letter. And of course we do that in the context of CVC words. And we also teach them, by the way, that they need to read from left to right. That is, of course, peculiar to English. It might not be if a child is learning Arabic, for instance, then they might be reading there from right to left. So we need to make clear the orientation as well. So we're teaching children that we can also spell sounds with one letter, as I've explained before, occasionally that we can also spell a sound with two letters and that's the next thing that we take them onto. So having taught them that they can spell sounds with two letters in context, in the context perhaps at the beginning of double < f >, double < l >, double < s >, double < z >, and then later the consonantal digraphs < sh >, < ch >, < th > and so on, we could teach them then that we can spell a sound with three letters. And we can spell sounds with three letters, we can spell the sound /ch/ with a < tch > spelling. That's three letters, but it's just one sound. Or in the example of, for instance, 'light', the /ie/ in 'light' is spelt with three letters < igh >. And we can even spell sounds with four letters. So we can spell the sound /ae/ in the word 'weight' with the four-letter spelling < eigh >. And there are others, although four-letter spellings aren't as common as two-letter spellings or even three-letter spellings. So that's what we take children onto next. But at the same time as well, we'll be teaching them that there's more than one way of spelling a sound. And of course, that's the difficult bit for a lot of people in English, knowing which spelling to use. You often have people say to you, 'hey, how'd you spell so and so?', and you have to provide the particular spelling that they're unsure about. So that's one of the really difficult bits of learning to spell, in particular, knowing which particular spelling to use to spell a sound in a particular word when there are so many to learn.
Laura: 21:23
Right. And we came up with quite a nice example recently to illustrate this. We were trying to think, could we think of a one-letter spelling, a two-letter spelling, a three-letter spelling, and a four-letter spelling of the same sound? And we could. It was /ie/. So the first one-letter spelling was 'find', two-letter spelling 'Thai', three-letter spelling 'light' and four-letter spelling 'height', all of those different ways of spelling the sound /ie/.
John: 21:53
You ought to tell people that actually when we had a quick word about this before, that I couldn't remember the four-letter spelling and you had to provide me with it. Thank you.
Laura: 22:02
It's all right, we've got it written down for next time.
John: 22:05
All right. Okay. So, the final element in conceptual understanding is also that like the < ea > example that I gave before, a spelling can represent more than one sound. And we need to teach children these. Of course, when they're reading, they're practising this all the time. Once they've got the hang of it, away they go.
Laura: 22:29
Yeah, and so... Okay, what we've talked about so far has all been quite abstract and conceptual. I would like to go into a little bit more of how teachers and educators are supposed to actually teach these concepts in practice. Could you talk a little bit about how Sounds-Write prepares teachers to do this?
John: 22:51
Well, what we do first of all is we run a very rigorous training. And to begin with, of course, we certainly talk about the fact that children learn the sounds of their own language naturally. We talk about how we need to teach explicitly and systematically the code itself and how to teach it from simple to more complex. So we take people all through all of that and we build on everything that we've taught previously in simple to complex terms, of course, throughout the four-day course, if people are doing a face-to-face course, or over a six-week period if they're doing our online course. What the course covers, of course, is the teaching of segmenting, the teaching of blending, the teaching - how we teach phoneme manipulation, how we teach children more ways of spelling a sound than one. How we teach them that many spellings can represent more than one sound. And we do all of this very carefully and systematically, and we do it through a scripted programme as well.
Laura: 24:00
Yeah. So, something I think, that's really important to note with the scripts, that we lay out really clearly what teachers need to be going through in class. And actually that's something that's underpinned by cognitive load theory. We really make sure that students know the lesson outlines, know exactly how each lesson is going to be structured. We don't have all of these, kind of, a million different games that they're going to play in class, so students know what's going to happen. And the only new thing that's being introduced in each lesson is new sounds and new spellings. And so students' working memory can purely focus on those new sounds and spellings that they're being introduced to.
John: 24:50
Yeah, that's an absolutely fantastic point that you make there, really. And I think this was borne out during the pandemic because once many children in class had had the opportunity to get used to the structure of the lessons, teachers found them very easy to present online because the children knew exactly how the lessons went. So all the teachers had to do was to give them more practice in what they'd learnt already and to build a little bit on some of their code knowledge as they went along, while at the same time practising the three skills too, of course. So yeah, that's absolutely right. So structure is incredibly important here in reducing cognitive load.
Laura: 25:37
Yeah.
John: 25:38
Now, as we know from the work of Sweller, you say, know, cognitive load theory follows on very well here, because what the work of John Sweller, Paul Kirschner, Clark, has shown us is that working memory is both time and capacity limited. And that really, if you introduce more than three or four things (and for some children we need to remember that might be even fewer), three or four things generally, then there's a chance of whatever it is you're teaching falling off the table of working memory. So we need to present information to students in small quantities and then we need to give them lots and lots and lots of practice. One thing that was introduced into cognitive load theory was David Geary's proposition as well, and we've talked about this already, we've touched on this a number of times, what children learn naturally and what they need to be taught explicitly. And so he distinguished between what's biologically primary and what's biologically secondary, and everything that's biologically secondary would include things like human inventions if we've invented it, mathematics, music notation, writing scripts and so on. These all need to be taught explicitly, otherwise we can't expect children to work them out for themselves.
Laura: 27:10
Right. And I think an example with cognitive load theory that really sticks with me always is, if you imagine learning a script that's completely new to you, like, for example, the Greek alphabet or Japanese script, for instance, it would be so difficult to learn these new sounds, not just sound-spelling correspondences, but also the very shapes. And if you really think about what that's like as an adult, and you applied that to children learning our alphabet for the first time, I think that gives a really clear example of why it's so important.
John: 27:52
I think you're absolutely spot on there. I think that being able to put yourself into a child's shoes is very difficult sometimes, and I think that we assume all sorts of knowledge. One of the things that emerged from research on all of this kind of thing is that when adults are presented with something that they've never, ever done before, they know nothing about, they actually don't learn it any more efficiently than children. In fact, probably children pick things up a bit quicker. And I did want to say something about this, actually, because I think the work of K. Anders Ericsson, in a book he helped to put together with some other people on expertise and expert performance showed very clearly that research on the effects of practice showed that what he called the character of cognitive operations can change after only a few hours. And I'll give you an example of this in a second. So operations that start with very slow serial and they demand conscious attention, soon become much less deliberate, and more importantly, they can run parallel with other processes. So, in the beginning, when children are reading 'mat', for instance, they go /m/... /a/... /t/ 'mat'. Very soon, those processes speed up, they become much faster. They have to devote far less conscious attention to it and at the same time, they can devote their attention to other things, such as comprehension, planning, monitoring of their own work, if you like, if they're writing and so on.
Laura: 29:48
Right. So something I wanted to discuss, I mean, I'm sure we could do a whole episode. I think we could probably do a whole series just talking about the science of reading and some of that research which we'll get onto in future episodes, I'm sure. But something I did want to ask you a bit more about is the influence that Professor Diane McGuinness' work has had on the development of Sounds-Write. Because I think that's really key. And I know that she's one of your heroes. She actually recently passed away a few months ago. So I think it's worth talking about the lasting impact that her life's work has had, and it continues through Sounds-Write.
John: 30:34
Yes. It was very sad, actually, when we heard the news that Diane had passed away. I've got two books which she signed for me personally recommending the good work that we do in Sounds-Write. I'm very, very proud of that. I had quite a lot of conversations with her about the way in which we teach reading and spelling. One of the most important things that she said to me was that her approach evaluated research on the basis of the facts. She didn't try and fit the facts into some sort of theory that she already had, if you like. So she let the theory emerge from the facts as she saw them. And I think one of the very important things that happened post 70s was that she completely upended the view that children start from the word to the syllable to the onset or the rhyme to the phoneme. That's how it was thought that we should teach them and that children's language development developed along those lines. And of course, she went back to the research and she looked at the research, and there was very clear and conclusive evidence that even when children have only just been born, after a few weeks alone, they can differentiate between /ba/ and /pa/. Which actually sounds like a pretty difficult thing to do, given that /b/ and /p/ are so similar. And what she maintained was that newborns have a built in phonetic discriminator, if you like. Which is very similar to the sorts of things that Pinker has argued, as well. What she started with, of course, is that - or rather what we see emerging from her work - was a prototype. And the prototype was incredibly important because in the prototype, what she laid down was what shouldn't be done, as well as telling us later on in her book, Early Reading Research what should be done. And one of the first things I'll mention, a few things, perhaps you can think of one or two yourself here, that she said that we shouldn't be teaching sight words. If you teach sight words, learning sight words actually is pretty easy for some children, but it gives them the wrong idea of what reading is about. And of course, trying to sight words, so called sight word read, everything breaks down as soon as words get more complex and they get longer and so on. She also said, don't start with letter names if you're teaching young children, because if you're teaching letter names and you're teaching sounds, then for some children you're increasing cognitive load to the extent that they can't learn both things, but also that they get very confused about what they should be learning. What's the signal? What's the noise? The noise is letter names. We don't need letter names. Actually, you sometimes see it. And I'm very fond of telling this story, that I went into a secondary school and talked to a boy of 15. I was asked to look at this boy and to say what I thought we could do with him. And his name, fortunately for me, was Sam. And I said to him, what are the sounds in your name, Sam? And he said, < sam >. What about the sounds, though? Those are the letter names. What are the sounds? < sam >. He just repeated < sam> . And I said, look, I could say < sam > until I die, but I'm never going to get to 'Sam'. But if I say /s/ /a/ /m/, you can hear 'Sam'. And one of the things he took from this was he was furious, really, because he said, well, why hasn't anybody ever told me this before? And of course, what he needed right from the start was sounds and not letter names. So letter names can actually obstruct our teaching. They do come in handy later on, of course, as a shortcut. So, of course, when a child, as one did once, asked me to spell the word 'stream', I knew this child very well and I knew the child knew /s/ and /t/ and /m/ very well indeed. So I knew that they didn't want me to spell any of those sounds. So I said, well, what's a difficult bit for you? And she said to me, It's the /ee/ spelling I don't know. And that gave me a choice. Did I write it down < ea > and let her copy it, or did I just say, at this point, if I knew that she knew how the writing code worked, I could just say: it's the < ea > spelling. So that's when letter names come in handy. And of course, if you're spelling your name over the phone or using a dictionary, which four year olds don't usually have to do.
Laura: 35:47
Yeah, I was speaking to a friend of mine, actually, recently, who is a teacher. And we were talking about how when you send, for example, decodable texts home with children, you don't have complete control over how the parent is going to assist that child in reading. And so actually, you probably do get quite a lot of instances in which parents say letter names rather than sounds. And the child, I guess, having an awareness of the fact that you can do that. And actually, in the non-phonics world, a lot of people do spell words out in letter names rather than sounds. So, yeah, I think it's important to build that awareness that that's not what we do in class necessarily at this point yet, but it's something that you might be exposed to.
John: 36:44
Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And you said assist, and I think very often the word is hinder. They actually hinder the child's reading development by drawing on, I like to call them maladaptive practises that they learnt in school themselves, sometimes. And one of the other things that McGuinness talked about in a prototype was not teaching blends, so called blends. Well, for us, blend is not a noun, it's a verb, it's a process. Blending is something we do. A lot of people used to think, and still do actually, that if - the reason why we teach so-called blends, so, let's take the word 'bring', for instance. The word 'bring' begins with what some people refer to as an onset, a blend, o f /b/ and /r/. And they thought that because children couldn't segment and blend sounds in words, that they ought to teach them /br/, as a piece of code knowledge, if you like. Well, there are so many of these to teach that actually it really complicates the amount of code knowledge you have to teach. Much easier, really, to teach them that this is /b/, this is /r/, and teach them to segment and blend, and then they can do it for themselves.
Laura: 38:06
Yeah. I think another part of this prototype as well is avoiding silent letters. Is that right?
John: 38:15
Definitely, avoiding silent letters.
Laura: 38:18
Yeah. So I was recently replying to someone on Facebook who'd commented on one of our posts. The post was about how we advised that you don't teach silent letters when you use the Sounds-Write programme. And they had linked to something that they called zombie letters. Which was a different but very similar approach, where it was based on, where there were these letters that weren't very common spellings of particular sounds. They were explaining them by talking about how they were kind of old relics of Old English, and they'd just been left in there. So zombie letters in that sense of being from the past, but actually, I think in the way that we approach it, they may be very uncommon spellings of a certain sound, but you can build those into the code. And another way of framing that, I think, is just building it into an etymology lesson. That could make such an interesting phonics and etymology lesson when the students get a little bit older and get a bit more confident in their understanding. And you can talk about how these spellings came about from Old English.
John: 39:36
Yeah, no, that's right. And from a conceptual point of view, of course, we have it covered. So, for instance, people often mention the word 'comb'. How many sounds are there in 'comb'? Three sounds, /k/ /oe/ /m/ and the /m/ is spelt < mb >. Well, it's spelt < mb > in 'tomb' and a few other words as well. Now, how does one remember this? Or how do you teach children to remember this? By giving them a lot of practice, and in particular, giving them a lot of reading practice and a lot of writing practice as well. But simply pointing it out, what you pay attention to is what the brain starts to take in, to recognise the patterns that take place. But you need to do lots of this and you need to practise it an awful lot as well for it to go into long-term memory. So, yeah, nice example, really. So the terminology that people use, like 'magic < e >' and 'letters being friends' and 'hard sounds' and 'soft sounds' and 'long sounds' and 'short sounds', you don't need any of that stuff. Not if you have a very clear conceptual framework in the first place.
Laura: 40:46
So, to kind of wrap up this episode, you've given us a pretty detailed idea of what Sounds-Write is and the theory that underpins it. What is it exactly, do you think, that sets Sounds-Write apart from other programmes?
John: 41:03
Oh, unquestionably, the rigour, whenever anybody asks me this. The rigour with which we teach the code, the skills and the conceptual understanding. And obviously, rigour has to do with practice. So giving lots and lots and lots of practice, and I think people sometimes don't realise how much practice that children need. So we think, we believe, that every single child can learn to read and write if the material is presented in such a way that teaches them from simple to complex, which takes into account the limits of working memory and which provides a very rigorous practise in the early stages before we embark on many of the complexities. We also think that bearing this in mind enables teachers to make sure that even children who find it difficult, who find it a bit harder to remember, the link between sounds and spellings and spellings and sounds, who find the skills a bit more difficult, and so on, even those children with extra practice, to keep up, if you like, with the whole class, even those children can learn to read perfectly well.
Laura: 42:25
Yeah, that's something we came across recently, the phrase keep up, not catch up. And I think that's really central to Sounds-Write's approach and our belief that any kid can learn to read and they should be taught to read. It's not the child's fault if they have not learnt to read, it's what can the teacher be doing better and what extra support can be given to that student?
John: 42:51
Absolutely. It's not a biological problem, it's an environmental problem. It's the teaching.
Laura: 42:57
Fantastic. I think that's a lovely way to wrap up our second episode of the Sounds-Write podcast.
John: 43:04
Yes, I think so. It's been great talking with you again and we must do it again sometime soon.
Laura: 43:11
Perhaps in exactly a month from now.
John: 43:14
Perhaps.
Laura: 43:16
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us, once again.
John: 43:21
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to appear on the podcast again. Very kind of you. Thank you.
Laura: 43:26
Bye everyone, and we'll see you next month for the next episode.