In my last eNewsletter, I was really encouraging people to 'want' to assess their teaching effectiveness by assessing how well their pupils were doing.
One way of doing this for children who have been receiving reading instruction in the English language is to take advantage of the statutory Year One Phonics Screening Check in England - which the Department for Education provides (free) once the official date for conducting the check in schools in England has past.
This means that not only do you get to use a very simple, ready-to-use word-level reading check, you can compare your results with results in England itself.
One of my international friends and associates working in a school in Costa Rica where English is the second language of the children did precisely this.
Mercedes sent me an email with the results in the school which are so impressive, they are actually better than the average result in England for 2013! How encouraging is that for all the hardworking teachers and children in this bilingual scenario!!!!
I was so thrilled to hear from Mercedes - and did not realise that the Year One Phonics Screening Check was used in her school, and then I received the following email and asked her permission to copy and paste it into the 'feedback' forum!
Mercedes wrote:
As you can see, Mercedes attached a spread sheet with their fantastic results and so I wrote back to Mercedes to check out the details of the situation and to confirm how many of the 69 children reached or exceeded the benchmark of the Year One Phonics Screening Check - that is correctly decoding at least 32 out of 40 of the words (20 real words and 20 pseudo words).Hi Debbie, how is everything? I imagine as busy and enthusiastic as always. Even if we do not write to each other very often, I follow all of your post through face book and read your newsletters. Thanks for all the valuable information you send to us isolated educators around the world.
I have noticed that lately there has been quite a debate about the phonics screening which encourages me to share some of our experience with you.
In November 2013, we decided to try the phonics screening with our Early Years 2 students (end of year 1). For this purpose we hired a UK teacher who was not working at the school. We thought an outsider will be more objective when administering the test.
It took her a week to assess all of the 69 students and we were very pleased with the results ( I am attaching an excel worksheet with them). The results helped us determine students who needed help. Those students are being helped by a special teacher and would be reevaluated at the end of the first semester 2014 (June).
As you probably remember, in Early Years 1 we do Jolly Phonics. In the second semester of Early Years 2, we start unit 1 of PI and continue progressing through all the PI units throughout the primary school.
By the end of Primary 5, our students will have covered all the PI units. We continue revising the Jolly Phonics list of tricky words in primary as we feel as learners of a second language our students need that bank of words to enhance both their reading and spelling. We do not do nonsense words. Our students have enough with making sense of a new language.
As part of our ongoing training, we are making videos of phonics lessons which teachers watch together as starting points for discussions on effective phonics teaching. I am sending you links to the videos I prepared for our next discussion meeting. I thought you will find it interesting to watch them. I will really appreciate any corrections, comments, suggestions or ideas that could lead to improvement of the phonics lessons.
Thanks a lot,
Mercedes
This is the reply:
To put that in context, 88% of the children reached or exceeded the government's 'benchmark' compared to an average of 69% in England.Out of the 69 children only 8 did not get the 32 points. We were extremely proud of both our teachers and students. Teachers are very motivated at the moment and I am taking advantage of their motivation to review and reflect on effective phonics teaching.
Thanks again Debbie for your sincere feedback - all of us at The British School of Costa Rica appreciate your time and effort towards improving literacy around the world.
I think that is pretty amazing.
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
It is fantastic that teachers in The British School of Costa Rica have conducted their own exploration of the best reading instruction methods and materials, that they have worked hard and achieved such high results, that they have had the professional curiosity to 'want to know' the effectiveness of their teaching - and furthermore they are still on the quest of becoming better still by taking very seriously their Continuing Professional Development - agreeing to their practice being filmed and reviewed.
This is the attitude and conduct that we need in every school and I must commend it very highly indeed.
Meanwhile, back in England, a survey of teachers' views of the Year One Phonics Screening Check and their views of early reading instruction was commissioned by the DfE and conducted by the National Foundation for Educational Research.
The results are shocking in my opinion although they come as no surprise considering the history of reading instruction in England and throughout other English-speaking countries.
I wrote about this NFER review and compared it to two further papers which were published in May 2014 - and my article was published online by SEN Magazine at the end of May and will be available in the hard copy magazine in July 2014.
You can read my commentary about the NFER survey findings and various issues which are current in England here:
https://www.senmagazine.co.uk/articles/ ... or-phonics
I continue to encourage schools overseas to take advantage of using the freely available Year One Phonics Screening Check. The 2013 check is available here and I shall add the 2014 check to this link below when it becomes available:
http://www.phonicsinternational.com/for ... .php?t=424
Also published online and provided as free access is the most excellent 'Learning Difficulties Australia' bulletin for May 2014.
Every single article in the bulletin is well worth reading - and I am very grateful to have been invited by the LDA to submit an article with the subject of the Year One Phonics Screening Check as portrayed in the British media (as it gets such negative press unjustifiably in my opinion).
So, see this excellent bulletin which includes my views on the scenario in England (half way through the magazine)!
https://www.ldaustralia.org/client/docu ... 14-WEB.pdf