Will the multi-cueing reading strategies ever go away?

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Will the multi-cueing reading strategies ever go away?

Post by debbie »

http://nifdi.org/news-latest-2/blog-hem ... er-go-away

There is a huge difference between using various cues (multi-cueing) to support understanding of the text compared to using cues such as pictures, context and first letter/s of words to guess the words on the page.

Here is evidence that multi-cueing is actually (wrongly) promoted as a means to lift the words off the page with phonics decoding a very misrepresented strategy and low in the pecking order of what readers should do to lift the words off the page.

Many schools and teachers, even in England despite the official promotion of the Simple View of Reading as a 'useful conceptual framework' to replace the multi-cueing Searchlights model, give the following type of (flawed) guidance to parents to support their children read:
An emphasis on the three-cueing system is evident in these advisory booklets provided to parents from two local schools.

School 1: During reading. When your child gets stuck on a word, follow these 4 (sic) steps.

Ask your child to:

1. Guess what the word might be.

2. Look at the picture to help guess what the word might be.

3. Go back to the start of the sentence and re-read it, adding the word you think might make sense.

4. Read to the end of the sentence and check that the word "makes sense".

5. If the word makes sense then check if it "looks right" (could it be that word?).

If the word is still incorrect, tell your child the word and allow him/her to continue reading. It is inappropriate for your child to be directed to "sound out" words, using individual letter sounds, as many words cannot be identified in this manner.

School 2: Teaching your child reading strategies: If your child has difficulty with a word:

· Ask your child to look for clues in the pictures

· Ask your child to read on or reread the passage and try to fit in a word that makes sense.

· Ask your child to look at the first letter to help guess what the word might be.
Miscue Analysis (the 'running record') was also developed with flawed understanding and yet is still promoted as a valid analysis of children's reading:
Finally, psychometric studies have indicated that measures of alphabetic coding ability rather than of semantic and syntactic ability are the strong predictors of word identification and comprehension facility (Vellutino, 1991). Whole language theorists had assumed the converse to be true. The finding regarding comprehension is particularly damning to the argument for psycholinguistic guessing, with its unfailing focus on meaning.

“Two inescapable conclusions emerge: (a) Mastering the alphabetic principle (that written symbols are associated with phonemes) is essential to becoming proficient in the skill of reading, and (b) methods that teach this principle are more effective than those that do not (especially for children who are at risk in some way for having difficulty learning to read)” (Rayner et al., 2001, p.1).

Thus the presumption that skilled readers employ contextual cues as the major strategy in decoding is not supported by evidence. There is, however, no dispute about the value of contextual cues in assisting readers gain meaning from text (Stanovich, 1980). The comprehension of a phrase, clause, sentence or passage is dependent on attention to its construction (syntax) and also to the meaning of the text surrounding it (semantics). The critical issue here is the erroneous assertion that the use of contextual strategies is beneficial in the identification of words, and that skilled readers make use of these strategies routinely.

Does it matter how the process is conceptualised?

Yes, it is crucial. For one reason, a test developed expressly to assess students’ usage of the three-cueing system is frequently employed to ensure students are in fact using this flawed system. The significance of any reading errors is thus superimposed on the reading behaviour through the adoption of the three-cueing system conception of reading. " ... the model of reading makes the understanding of miscues possible" (Brown, Goodman, & Marek, 1996, p. vii).

Miscue analysis is a very popular approach to assessing reading progress by attempting to uncover the strategies that children use in their reading. Goodman and his colleagues in the 1960's were interested in the processes occurring during reading, and believed that miscues (any departure from the text by the reader) could provide a picture of the underlying cognitive processes (Goodman, 1969). He used the term miscue, rather than error, reflecting the view that a departure from the text is not necessarily erroneous (Goodman, 1979). Readers' miscues include substitutions of the written word with another, additions, omissions, and alterations to the word sequence.
Last edited by debbie on Sat Aug 16, 2014 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Debbie Hepplewhite
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Post by debbie »

A worrying indication of teachers' current professional knowledge or beliefs in England was the Sheffield Hallam University's review of teachers taking part in the 2011 Year One Phonics Screening Check.

Nearly three-quarters of the teachers taking part still used the multi-cueing reading strategies approach to teach beginning reading.

And yet this contradicts the conclusions of international research. :?

It is also not in line with the thinking promoted by the Department for Education in England since 2006.

I visit many schools and districts to provide training, consultancy and talks - and I still find many teachers who have not heard of the Simple View of Reading model which 'replaced' the multi-cueing Searchlights model in 2006 on the recommendation of Sir Jim Rose in his report for the independent review of teaching early reading (Final Report, March 2006).

If you are a parent or teacher reading this thread, do check your 'guidance to parents' and try to ensure it is up to date with the prevailing research and leading-edge practice.

Sometimes guidance such as 'guess the words from the pictures' is based on lack of up-to-date training (a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge) but sometimes it is based on the belief systems and old habits of the senior managers or teachers in the schools.

Sometimes parents contact me direct, or the UK Reading Reform Foundation, with their worries about such flawed guidance - and practice - in their children's schools. Any subsequent meetings with teachers and head teachers are often not well-received or handled sensitively and, in the end, parents give up trying to speak to the school and say they will just have to teach their children the alphabetic code and blending skill themselves to try to address the balance of all the promotion of guessing the words in the school.

However, it is not clear just what message the universities give to student-teachers about these issues. What training student-teachers receive varies widely, I suggest, dependent on the lecturers' views in the universities. The universities are under pressure to provide high-quality systematic synthetic phonics training and will certainly provide 'some' training but quality and content may still vary widely across the country - and certainly across the world.

For example, there are very grave worries in Australia about the content and quality of teacher-training when it comes to professional 'understanding' of what works best for reading and spelling instruction!

And there are very grave worries internationally about the continued funding and promotion by governments and education authorities of the well-known Reading Recovery programme which is based on multi-cueing reading strategies and miscue analysis.

:shock:
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Post by debbie »

http://www.dyslexics.org.uk/main_method_2.htm

Susan Godsland's excellent site www.dyslexics.org.uk provides masses of information about different types of reading instruction which is very well-referenced and a 'must' visit for people seriously interested in the topic of reading and spelling instruction! :D
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Post by debbie »

http://www.rrf.org.uk/pdf/Report%20BDA% ... 202012.pdf

A very revealing critique by Elizabeth Nonweiler, on behalf of the Reading Reform Foundation, illustrating the very different 'messages' that people receive when attending different training events.

This is a very important critique providing food for thought regarding selection of training events considering they give very different content! :?
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Post by debbie »

It's not very often that I refer to my personal experiences with my own children and this is one of those rare occasions. I wrote the following article especially for the My Baba folk at their request with both a teacher's and parent's perspective, providing some suggestions and access to free resources:

http://www.mybaba.com/chatter-books-and ... pplewhite/
You also need to be aware that many teachers have been misguidedly trained to tell children to ‘guess’ unknown words on the page from picture clues, sentence clues and clues from the first letters. This is not a good idea as it distracts children away from looking at the new words and decoding them and leaves children with a guessing habit that can stand in the way of good reading in the long term. It is better to tell your child any words that are too challenging to read by himself or herself rather than telling your child to guess the word. The pictures and the context, however, help your child’s language comprehension – that is the understanding of the content.

By the way to finish my personal story… although my firstborn picked up reading so easily – my other children did not and yet they all had the same kind of ‘at mother’s knee’ experience. Sadly, their (lovely) teachers did not know how to teach them reading and spelling well enough – and it took me a long time to learn what I know now about reading and spelling instruction. So – two of my own children slipped through the net both at home and at school. You know what people often say with great regret, ‘If only I knew then what I know now’…
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Post by debbie »

http://phonicsinternational.com/forum/v ... =1052#1052

I've linked this thread about multi-cueing reading strategies to a long thread about reading results in New Zealand linked to the Reading Recovery intervention programme which is based on the multi-cueing reading strategies.
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Post by debbie »

Another article by Hempenstall:

The Three-Cueing System: Help or Hindrance?

http://nifdi.org/home-2/documents-libra ... -fall-2002
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Post by Susan »

NIFDI keep moving links around. The link below should work:

The Three-Cueing System: Help or Hindrance?

http://nifdi.org/resources/downloads/do ... ing-system
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Post by debbie »

http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID= ... eNumber=49

Dr Bonnie Macmillan undertook a detailed review of the Early Literacy Support programme designed for Year One intervention in 2001.

Bonnie refers to multi-cueing and other important issues such as the development of 'phonemic awareness' and uses 'time spent on task' to evaluate the potential of the Early Literacy Support programme.

The ELS programme was heavily linked to Reading Recovery methods and the RR 'Bookbands' catalogue was heavily promoted in ELS even though ELS is a government-generated programme.

This demonstrates the 'thinking' behind the National Literacy Strategy rolled out in 1998 based on the 'Searchlights' multi-cueing reading strategies - based on whole language.

Possible influences at this time were Australia's 'First Steps' programme and New Zealand's 'Reading Recovery' programme.

Inadvisedly.
Pictures and guessing play no part in any of the word reading processes that occur. Nor is the use of context among the processes that occurs during an initial eye fixation. Only after an initial eye fixation occurs, and only on the occasions where word meaning is in doubt, do the eyes regress back over the preceding text to use context as an aid to meaning. These particular regressions constitute a post reading strategy that may occur afterwards: in effect, a non-reading strategy used to confirm meaning, not to extract it in the first place.

In order to become readers, children need to learn how to become very adept at the word reading processes known to occur and perform them in the correct sequence: recognising letter shapes, translating these into phonemes, blending phonemes of a word together, arriving at a mental sound equivalent of the word, and finally recognising this as an understandable word on its own (if it appears in isolation), or a word that makes sense with preceding text (if it appears in continuous text). If the aim is to teach children to read, activities that have nothing to do with word-reading processes (teaching children as in the ELS lessons to memorise text, to guess at words by looking at the pictures, a word’s first or last letter, or by repeating preceding text, to arrange cut up sentences in order, or to copy and invent sentences or stories) are not surprisingly, entirely useless (demonstrated convincingly in the study by Sumbler and Willows, 1996).

b) Phonological activities in the ELS lessons

The ELS lessons reveal that government officials have been influenced by the vast amount of phonological awareness research. But, once again, the composition of the ELS lessons reveals the extent to which they have misconstrued it. First, in spite of the bulk of research demonstrating that for the purposes of teaching children to read, phonological awareness instruction is of little or no usefulness unless it is combined with letter-sound instruction (e.g. Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Watson, 1999
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Post by debbie »

http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID= ... eNumber=57

Geraldine Carter comments on the multi-cueing advice in the NLS rolled out at the same time as Marilyn Jager Adams's paper on the 'Three Cuing System'.
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Post by debbie »

http://phonicsinternational.com/forum/v ... .php?t=636

I am cross-linking with the thread (link above) featuring the May 2014 NFER report in England which illustrates very clearly that the over-riding 'belief' in the multi-cueing reading strategies looks embedded amongst many infant and primary teachers in England despite the very explicit guidance from the government (the official 'core criteria' for evaluating phonics programmes and practice) of the dangers of 'multi-cueing'.

Extracts from government's 'core criteria':
Explanatory notes

1. Phonic work is best understood as a body of knowledge and skills about how the alphabet works, rather than one of a range of optional ‘methods’ or ‘strategies’ for teaching children how to read. For example, phonic programmes should not encourage children to guess words from non-phonic clues such as pictures before applying phonic knowledge and skills. High quality systematic, synthetic phonic work will make sure that children learn:

*grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences ( the alphabetic principle) in a clearly defined, incremental sequence;
*to apply the highly important skill of blending (synthesising) phonemes, in order, all through a word to read it;
*to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell; and that blending and segmenting are reversible processes.
Further:
7. It is important that texts are of the appropriate level for children to apply and practise the phonic knowledge and skills that they have learnt. Children should not be expected to use strategies such as whole-word recognition and/or cues from context, grammar, or pictures.
This, then, is not to apply the Systematic Synthetic Phonics Teaching Principles in full - but to provide systematic synthetic phonics along with multi-cueing.

Whilst the majority of teachers describe that they use the 2007 publication 'Letters and Sounds' as their core phonics programme, nevertheless despite the guidance against multi-cueing within Letters and Sounds, it looks like many may persist with the multi-cueing reading strategies in addition.

Guidance in 'Letters and Sounds, Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics, Notes of Guidance for Practitioners and Teachers':
In the early stages, however, children will encounter many words that are visually unfamiliar, and in reading these words their attention should be focused on decoding rather than on the use of unreliable strategies such as looking at the illustrations, rereading the sentence, saying the first sound and guessing what might fit. Although these strategies might result in intelligent guesses, none of them is sufficiently reliable and they can hinder the acquisition and application of phonics knowledge and skills, prolonging the word recognition processes and lessening children's overall understanding. Children who routinely adopt alternative cues for reading unknown words, instead of learning to decode them, find themselves stranded when texts become more demanding and meanings less predictable. The best route for children to become fluent and independent readers lies in securing phonics as the prime approach to decoding unfamiliar words.
Research on reading has shown us that there are inherent dangers for at least some children when taught multi-cueing - in terms of their default reading reflex - as any emphasis on the multi-cueing reading strategies will undermine phonics teaching and detract the reader from applying alphabetic code knowledge and automatic blending. :cry:

When pictures disappear, and unknown words in print are beyond the reader's spoken vocabulary, there is ONLY phonics decoding to help the reader lift the words off the page.
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Post by debbie »

Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of 'Balanced' Reading Instruction

Louisa Moats


Dedicated to the memory of

Jeanne Sternlicht Chall 1921-1999

America's foremost authority on how children learn to read.

She taught us to look for the evidence.
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED449465.pdf
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Post by debbie »

Susan Godsland's summary about options for special needs - what to avoid:


http://www.dyslexics.org.uk/should_I_options.htm
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Post by debbie »

Gordon Askew's description of the realities of guessing words from context and picture cues (12th July 2014):

A litany for failure


http://ssphonix.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/ ... sphonix%29
Does much of this sound rather familiar? A struggling reader (let's say it's a girl, although it could just as easily be a boy) is being 'heard' by a teacher (or TA, or parent or carer, or volunteer or whoever).

G: (reading) Tim . .

T: (correcting) Tim's

G: Tim's dad . . . was a . . . (long pause)

T: Why have you stopped?

G: I don't know that word.

T: Well what do you think it is? Read the sentence again.
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Post by debbie »

Martin Kozloff comments on the rationale (or lack thereof) for promoting the multi-cueing guessing strategies labelled 'whole language':


http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/wlquotes.html

A Whole Language Catalogue of the Grotesque

Martin Kozloff

September 12, 2002

The founders of whole language (e.g., Kenneth Goodman) asserted in the late 1960's that their so-called revolutionary approach to reading was a "scientific" alternative to then existing approaches; e.g., instruction stressing essential skills such as decoding words using knowledge of sound-symbol correspondence. However, early papers that laid the groundwork for the whole language cult movement reveal that whole language does not at all rest on a scientific way of thinking. In fact, the revolutionary whole language conception of reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game" is a bizarre fantasy--a fantasy that managed to catch on (and make many thousands of children illiterate) because students in schools of education naively trusted their "literacy" professors--who were more interested in getting tenure, making a reputation, and selling themselves as innovators and self-inflating champions of social justice than they were at making sure new teachers (1) are guided by scientific research (which does not support whole language) and (2) know exactly how to teach reading effectively. In some fields (medicine, law, engineering) this combination of self-aggrandizement, immorality, and ineptitude is called malpractice, fraud, and criminal negligence. In education, it is called "philosophical differences" and "academic freedom." Apparently, school children and new teachers are supposed to pay for the academic freedom of education professors.
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