Seminar 6: The Science of Reading

[@ruairimacleanachain1642]

Thank you to all the panel…so good to hear from practitioners’ current experience and trials.

[@kevinoboyle5262]

Very interesting to hear the thoughts of others on reading. One point that I would like to have heard more about is the need for alternative strategies to reading for those children with specific literacy difficulties. Decoding is essential but for some children, a synthetic approach to decoding can in fact entrench their difficulties e.g. it prevents the development of orthographic knowledge. A child with working memory difficulties will really struggle to decode at this level and will need analytic phonics (onset and rime) to reduce memory load.

[@mmcgoran2271]

Hi Bronagh. We adopt the heart word method for teaching high frequency words. You are correct there are some hfw that are irregular. However for many there is only one/two graphemes that are irregular. So if children decode the graphemes that are regular and only need to learn by “heart” the One irregular grapheme then it reduces the cognitive load. Like the word ‘said’. Children decode the first and last sounds as normal and we put a heart over ai and children are taught ai is making short e sound. I try to avoid whole word memorisation as much as possible. Long winded but hope that makes sense.

[@bronaghodonnell7270]

Many high frequency words cannot be decoded at a simple level e.g. was, the -and need to be taught as a whole word? Combination of sight words and ability to decode to help with reading simple sentences???

[@abbotrasleigh1965]

🙏 Ｐ𝐫Ｏ𝕞Ｏ𝓢ｍ