by Pamela Readhead
A damning report released by Ofsted, the schools watchdog, said that a fifth of children entering secondary school were unable to read or write properly because of poor teaching. The inspectors also found that schools using traditional phonics from an early age had the greatest success in helping children to read and write.
Schools minister Jacqui Smith announced that the government will shortly be setting out plans to help schools with catch-up programmes in basic literacy.
There is growing support for the "back to basics" method of teaching reading, which is based on recognition of the sounds and shapes of individual letters rather than whole words, and it will be the focus of the government's literacy review in January 2006. But critics argue that there is a lot more about literacy that children need to learn to enter secondary school with the desired standards of performance.
A team of ESRC funded researchers at Oxford Brookes University has developed a technique which helps children to spell by breaking down words into units of meaning (called morphemes) instead of trying to remember how they are spelled. 'We are not devaluing phonics, but it is only one aspect of how English is written, says Professor Terezinha Nunes who led the research, which is part of the ESRC Teaching and Learning Programme.
The morpheme intervention method, which has been tested by more than 1,000 primary school children in 30 schools in London and Oxford, shows that children across a range of abilities can benefit enormously from learning about grammar and analysing the structure of words. The children in the trial schools came from a large variety or socio-economic and linguistic backgrounds.
The morpheme intervention method... shows that children across a range of abilities can benefit enormously from learning about grammar and analysing the structure of words
'We found a big improvement in the children's spelling and vocabulary after they were taught to see the different elements of a word like "magic-ian" or "un-happy" and how the prefixes or suffixes could be transferred to other words,' says Terezinha Nunes. 'It was particularly important to us that the programme had strong benefits for children whose scores in our initial tests were low as well as for children whose initial scores were high'.
The morphemes teaching package provides teachers with an easy-to-use CD which allows children to play games with words displayed on a computer. 'The material is colourful, fun and engages children's imagination,' says Terezinha Nunes. 'It shows children that there is a genuine spelling principle for words like "election" and "mathematician" which sound similar but have different endings.'
The new method helps the many children who write words like "elecshon" or "elexon" and "magishen" or "magishon". 'One child in the study improved his spelling score for suffixes like this from 27% to 81%,' says Terezinha Nunes.
Teachers have been enthusiastic about using the morpheme intervention in the classroom. 'They are under terrible pressure to meet targets but they become fascinated by morphemes,' says Terezinha Nunes. 'We think there is a good case for including the method in the National Literacy Strategy. There has been some interest but it is not yet being used systematically.'
The introduction of the National Literacy Strategy in 1998 has had marked effects on the way teachers work according to another ESRC research project at the Institute of Education, University of London. According to Dr Gemma Moss, top-down pressures on the content of the literacy hour have led to uniformity in the teaching of English, with more emphasis on targets and less topic work. The report says that activities such as 'writing workshop' and 'everybody reading in class,' which were once lessons in their own right, have been integrated into the literacy hour. 'The frequency of word and sentence level work taught to the whole class has increased and the proportion of the curriculum devoted to quiet reading has diminished,' the research says.