2. Mixture of methods / Range of Strategies / NLS Searchlights / Three-Cueing System / Eclectic Approach / Integrated Approach / Balanced Instruction (USA) / 4 Resources (Aus.), incorporating: analytic phonics / intrinsic phonics / contextualized phonics / analogy phonics / embedded phonics / **systematic (not to be confused with synthetic) phonics / cumulative phonics / onset-rime phonics

''The definition of what reading actually is, was hijacked by the whole language movement to fit in with their world view. Reading was to be reading for meaning, comprehension came from making meaning from the text. Quite how you were supposed to do this without being able to actually decode the letters on the page is how we arrived at the Searchlights model — by guessing, and by memorising, also known as ‘a range of strategies.’'(Shadwell)

Instruction in mixed method classrooms follows what many early years academics believe is a biologically dictated, developmental progression; that, as time passes, young children 'naturally' become able to perceive smaller and smaller units of sound (whole-words ->syllables->onset and rhyme-> individual phonemes) so teaching needs to follow this strict order too. The early years educationalists strongly suggest that any digression from this clearly marked route, or anything but child-directed, intrinsic learning, will damage children's progressive development of phonological awareness and spoil their love of reading. Explicitly teaching reading using synthetic phonics (which goes directly to the phoneme level) to children under the age of seven is, they warn darkly, likely to be, ''Too much, Too soon'' (Open EYE conference 16/02/08) and, '(A) recipe for disaster' (Whitehead 2009 p76). Much of this thinking has its roots in the philosophy behind Steiner Waldorf education, with a study by pro-Steiner researcher, Dr. Sebastian Sugatte, cited by TACTYC anti-phonics lobbyists- see Room 101.

As evidence of the benefits of waiting until children are age seven to do teacher-directed teaching of reading, the anti-phonics lobbyists can be relied on to flag up Finland, where all children achieve literacy within weeks of starting formal school - age seven. What they don't say is that Finland has a completely transparent alphabet code and most parents teach their children to read pre-school as it's so easy to do. They also omit to mention Denmark where, as in Finland, the school starting age is seven, but it has an opaque alphabet code. Danish children ''experience difficulties in acquiring the logographic and alphabetic foundation processes which are comparable to those observed in English, although less extreme'' (Seymour/Aro/Erskine) Additionally, they neglect to cite evidence from the Netherlands. Children in the Netherlands start formal school at the same age as British children (5yrs.old). Despite this early start, they, along with the majority of European children, learn to read and write accurately within the first school year. ''Foundation literacy acquisition by non-English European groups is not affected by gender and is largely independent of variations in the ages at which children start formal schooling'' (Seymour/Aro/Erskine p150)

Mixture of methods instruction begins with children memorising a bank of sight words (high frequency words/HFWs) as whole shapes, often even if they are phonically regular. This is based on the belief that children are biologically primed to view words as whole units at the start of reading instruction; 'Initially, whatever we try to teach them, young children recognise words as unanalysed wholes, making no attempt to map the component letters into speech sounds. [Frith] terms this the logographic phase..' (italics added. Prof.Dombey. Literacy Today 20). Aside from the fact that, as a recent invention, the way written language is viewed cannot be wired into the brain, research in Germany (Wimmer/ Hummer) has shown that children do not go through a 'logographic stage' when they are taught with the synthetic phonics method from the very start of reading instruction (RRF 45. p6/ D.McGuinness ERI p339-347) ) Advocates of the *Dual Route reading model also believe that beginning readers should learn a bank of sight words without phonic decoding. They hypothesise that this 'sets up the direct lexical route to word reading''. Early Years teachers may be unaware of these academic theories but still want their beginning readers to memorise the HFWs as quickly as possible.They know that, until the children know most of these words 'on sight', they will be unable to read the whole language scheme books which still make up the bulk of beginning reading practice material in the majority of EY classrooms.

Early reading instruction in the old National Literacy Strategy (NLS. 1998) was based on multi-cueing strategies (searchlights); the NLS directors stated that, 'More extreme recommendations from phonics evangelists to teach children not to use other reading strategies alongside phonics, should be treated with great caution' (Stannard/Huxford p189). In their Civitas paper 'Ready to Read' (p10), Anastasia de Waal and Nicholas Cowen wrote that, ''(I)n order to accommodate the more established academic orthodoxy (i.e. child centred rather than anything resembling didactic or mechanistic teaching), a medley of reading strategies was included in searchlights. This attempt to keep everyone happy, while also attempting to address reading standards, led to a rather chaotic model which would frequently prove ineffective. Searchlights encouraged children to learn to read using four distinctive methods simultaneously''.

Then, in 2006, all of the Rose Review's recommendations, including that the NLS 'searchlights' strategies should be dropped and replaced by the 'simple view of reading', were accepted by the government. Now, even if a *synthetic phonics programme is being used in class, the use of the initial levels of whole language scheme books (Book Bands: pink, red, yellow, blue...) for reading practice by the beginning readers is one of the main indicators that a teacher is continuing, perhaps unwittingly, to use mixed methods. Beginner readers have little choice but to use whole word memorisation and guessing strategies in order to 'get through' this type of reading book with any independence.

http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=23&n_issueNumber=45
The NLS Searchlight Reading Strategies

Leading whole language advocates, Henrietta Dombey and Frank Smith, are happy to recommend guessing as a reading strategy; 'Every child also needs a third key, careful guessing from context' (Dombey. Guardian Comment 30/04/08) 'Reading without guessing is not reading at all' (F.Smith. Psychology and reading). It's notable that many other whole language enthusiasts prefer to use a euphemism, 'predicting'.

The main strategy that children are taught to use is prediction using first letter, pictures, syntax and context clues; '(I)s it 'Mam' or 'Mummy', a 'horse' or a 'house'? This highly skilled predicting can be more highly tuned and corrected in retrospect if the reader is given the opportunity to go back and self-correct' (Whitehead.2010. p160) Another common strategy is 'onset and rime'. Until very recently, when teachers said that they ''always used phonics'' to teach reading, this is the type of phonics that they were usually describing; first the onset is recognised (beginning consonants are taught as one unit, a 'cluster') and then the rhyming family that the rest of the word belongs to, such as the 'ing' family - s/ing, br/ing, str/ing, th/ing. After much practice in orally breaking memorised whole words into onset and rime (hence all the rhyme and alliteration activities used in mixed method classrooms), it is assumed that children will then be able to use this strategy with previously unseen words; 'Recognising word families and patterns helps children develop inferential self-teaching strategies. If they can read 'cake', they can work out and read 'lake' without blending all the individual phonemes' (Lewis/S.Ellis p4)

Dr Macmillan says, '…teaching children about onset and rime as a route to discovering individual phonemes is similar logic to thinking that a person can be taught to read music by memorising chords on, say a guitar or piano. Although it may be relatively easy for a person to learn the names of some musical chords and how to play them, there is little possibility that this knowledge will lead to the ability to read musical notation, to the ability to play individual notes on these instruments in response to the corresponding written symbols.' (Macmillan p82). Recent studies 'have shown conclusively that children do not use rhyming endings to decode words; hardly ever decode by analogy to other words; and that ability to dissect words into onsets and rimes has no impact whatsoever on learning to read and spell. (D.McGuinness WCCR p148)

'Teaching word parts, analogies and word families creates the "part-word assembler''. This is the child who searches for little, familiar word parts and assembles them into a nonsense word, hoping it will be close enough to guess what it is. Jane sees the word "watermelon", which has these parts in it: wa wat wate at ate ter term erm me mel el lo on. Which of these 13 parts would you use? Jane chose "weatermeon" (D.McGuinness.THE.29/05/98)

'It is ethically unacceptable to pursue teaching methods that may cause anxiety and stress', says synthetic phonics opponent, Marian Whitehead (Whitehead. 2010 p.141). Following, is an example of the **'decoding' rigmarole that a child taught to use a range of strategies would be expected to go through on encountering any word they didn't immediately recognise: ''(I)f a child met the word ‘nightingale’ he would use a combination of initial sound (n), segmentation (night-ing-(g)ale), letter clusters (ight, ing), sight vocabulary (gale) and context (it’s a bird)’' (Fisher. Practical answers to teachers' questions about reading. UKLA p8) A better method of inducing anxiety and stress in a beginning reader is difficult to imagine.

Note, that as only the simplest and most consistent GPCs are directly taught in traditional mixed methods instruction and whole language scheme books are used from the very start, 'sounding out GPC by GPC all-through-the-written-word', one of the central tenets of synthetic phonics, will fail as a strategy and is therefore discouraged; 'Sounding out a word is a cumbersome, time-consuming, and unnecessary activity. By using context, we can identify words with only minimal attention to grapho/phonemic cues' (Weaver. Reading process & practice: From socio-psycholinguistics to whole language) 'Many ways of teaching reading rely on children learning to ‘sound out’ words they don’t know, but in Reading Recovery we are sceptical of the usefulness of this approach' (Running Record. Dec. '04 p8)

In her book, Language Development and Learning to Read, Diane McGuinness describes the decoding strategies that children taught in whole-language /mixed methods classrooms ACTUALLY use. 'In my research on children's reading strategies, I found that by the end of first grade, children in whole-language classrooms were using three different decoding strategies. A small minority were decoding primarily by phonemes (one sound at a time). Another group, whom I call "part-word decoders," searched for recognizable little words or word fragments inside bigger words. A third group ("whole-word guessers") decoded the first letter phonetically, then guessed the word by its length and shape – the overall visual pattern made by the letter string. Very few children used a pure sight-word strategy (the telephone number strategy -see Method 1*), and the children who did usually stopped reading before the end of the school year. Reading test scores reflected these strategies, with the phonemic decoders superior, part-word decoders next, and whole-word guessers the worst. When these children were followed to third grade, the whole-word guessers had not changed their approach and were the undisputed worst readers in the class. Some part-word decoders had graduated to phonemic decoding, but the majority of the third graders remained primarily part-word decoders. Once more, phonemic decoders were far and away the best readers. This shows that children are active learners, and when confronted with vague or misleading guidelines for how to read, they try out strategies to overcome this difficulty. The fact that these strategies are different, and that they tend to stay constant over such a long period of time, is strong evidence against a developmental explanation.'(D. McGuinness. LDLR p3),

Those who advocate a mixture of methods for the teaching of early reading say that such a mixture is necessary because, 'Children learn in different ways due to their different learning styles or 'learning characteristics', commonly expressed as, 'One size doesn't fit all'. As 'Equus' comments on the Guardian website, ''How often do we see this statement made as if it is the unanswerable clincher to the debate? Try applying the same argument to learning another skill, say, driving a car. Adults are all different and one size doesn't fit all, but they'd be in deep trouble if they didn't learn the correct sequence for using the pedals of a car, the correct procedures for signalling, and the rules of the road. There may be small variations in the way they acquire this knowledge, but there is only one body of knowledge which has to be learned'' (Equus.Guardian comment). In his final report, Sir Jim Rose also responded to this very widely held view saying, '...all beginning readers have to come to terms with the same alphabetic principles if they are to learn to read and write... Moreover, leading edge practice (in synthetic phonics) bears no resemblance to a 'one size fits all' model of teaching and learning, nor does it promote boringly dull, rote learning of phonics.' (Rose Review 2006 para.34)

The opaqueness of the English spelling system is another excuse given for teaching with mixed methods; 'In Scottish schools there is a preference for a mixed method which combines the teaching of a vocabulary of sight words with the teaching of the letters and decoding procedures. These methods are well adapted for deep orthographies in which commonly occurring words contain letter structures which are inconsistent with the principles of simple grapheme–phoneme correspondence'' (Seymour/Aro/Erskine) ''The phonological complexity of syllable structures in English, coupled with the inconsistent spelling system, mean that direct instruction at levels other than the phoneme may be required in order to become an effective reader'' (Wyse/Goswami p.693)

Asking children to memorise scores of high frequency words (e.g. Dolch words, or the 300 HFWs listed in the DfE's Letters and Sounds programme) as random strings of letters without phonic decoding is a dangerous practice, and why no genuine synthetic phonics programme expects the learning of more than a handful of words as logographs. Firstly, because words viewed as whole units form abstract visual patterns which humans find difficult to memorise; examination of different writing systems reveals that the usual memory limit for whole words is around 2,000-2,500, since no true writing system, past or present, has expected users to memorise more than this number of abstract symbols. When children reach their visual memory limits they will struggle to read texts containing more unusual words if they haven't, in the meantime, been taught, or deduced the alphabet code for themselves. Secondly, for most children memorising words seems easy at first and, if its use is encouraged, it will become their main strategy, subverting their phonological abilities and setting up a habit or reflex in the brain which can be hard to shift.

'If children 'receive contradictory or conflicting instruction, most children prefer to adopt a 'sight word' (whole word) strategy. This seems 'natural', it is easy to do initially, and has some immediate success, that is until visual memory starts to overload...becoming a whole-word (sight-word) reader is not due to low verbal skills, but is a high risk factor in the general population, and something that teachers should curtail at all costs.' (emphasis in original. RRF51 p19)

Homeschooling dad, Timothy Power, learnt the dangers of teaching global sight word memorisation the hard way. He says, of his small daughter, ''The skill of sounding out simple words, that she had been able to do shortly after she turned three, had been completely lost. If she didn't know a word by sight, she was stuck. Now, with that memory of hers that was able to memorize the 50 states by age two, she could get around this problem without too much trouble: she could just get someone else to read it for her a time or two, and then she would remember the word thereafter, and could even recognize it in new sentences. But this was still a work-around (although an effective one); even if a word was in her spoken vocabulary, she couldn't recognize it on the page if she hadn't seen it before in print, even if it was totally phonetically regular, with all short-vowel sounds. And when she came to these words she didn't recognize, she would try to guess, coming up either with nonsense words or with words that were similar-looking (same starting and ending letter, totally different middle), or with a synonym that bore no visual resemblance to the correct word on the page.'' http://tdpower.blogspot.com/2007/09/phonics-vs-sight-recognition-reading.html

In a paper presented at the 2003 DfES 'phonics' seminar, Ehri wrote “…when phonics instruction is introduced after students have already acquired some reading skill, it may be more difficult to step in and influence how they read, because it requires changing students’ habits. For example, to improve their accuracy, students may need to suppress the habit of guessing words based on context and minimal letter clues, to slow down, and to examine spellings of words more fully when they read them. Findings suggest that using phonics instruction to remediate reading problems may be harder than using phonics at the earliest point to prevent reading difficulties (www.rrf.org.uk/51%20In%20Denial.htm)

'Today, most primary schools still insist that children read commercially available storybooks (real books) or 'graded readers' before they have mastered the alphabet. This is equivalent to asking children to add or subtract before they can count to ten.' (Turner/Burkard. Summary) In stark contrast, in those schools that teach reading using pure synthetic phonics, beginning readers are given books from one of the phonically decodable book schemes and are not expected to read storybooks or whole language graded readers, 'until they can read the words in them independently with reasonable accuracy.' (Turner/Burkard p22)

‘The selection of text used very early in first grade may, at least in part, determine the strategies and cues children learn to use, and persist in using, in subsequent word identification.... In particular, emphasis on a phonics method seems to make little sense if children are given initial texts to read where the words do not follow regular letter-sound correspondence generalizations. Results of the current study suggest that the types of words which appear in beginning reading texts may well exert a more powerful influence in shaping children’s word identification strategies than the method of reading instruction’(Juel and Roper/Schneider. Reading Research Quarterly 18)

'Students tend to perceive words in the way they are taught to perceive them. This appears to be the case whether or not they are taught in a transparent orthography (Cardoso-Martens 2001)' (Rice/Brooks p34) The method used first, whether whole-word or synthetic phonics, forms a habit or brain conditioning that impedes the future use of the other method. This is the reason why it is more difficult to remediate difficulties in readers who have received faulty reading instruction for even a short period of time. With this in mind, parents should ignore any publications (even school or government ones) that advise them to use whole word 'meaning' methods and encourage guessing. Typical of the type of advice given in these publications for parents is, 'If they get stuck, encourage them to use all the available information and everything they know to make a guess. They should look at the pictures and remember what has happened in the story. Their ability to predict and guess accurately will gradually improve', and,‘(P)ause, prompt, praise’ helps – wait before you correct a mistake so that your child has a chance to get it right themselves, then give your child clues to help them get the word right, and finally praise them if they get the word right or even try to!'

Marian Whitehead believes that, '(I)t was in order to subvert instructional material like [read simple words by sounding out and blending the phonemes all through the word from left to right] that Dr. Seuss introduced 'The Cat in the Hat' to the English-speaking world' (Whitehead. 2009. p125) As a matter of fact, the children's author Dr. Seuss created his famous books using what was described in those days as 'a controlled "scientific" vocabulary' (high frequency sight words supplied by the publisher), but he was well aware of how useless the sight word method was to teach children how to read. In an interview he gave in 1981 Seuss said, 'I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the twenties, in which they threw out phonics reading and went to word recognition as if you’re reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds or different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. Anyway they had it all worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can only learn so many words in a week. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, "I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that’ll be the title of my book." I found "cat" and "hat" and said, the title of my book will be The Cat in the Hat. (Gatto p72-3)
....................................................................................................

*The learning of HFWs as global sight words right from the start by beginning readers is considered necessary by advocates of the Dual Route reading model hypothesis. They think that it is important to give children immediate practice in using a 'Direct Lexical route' to reading; ''A useful strategy for learning [HFWs] might be to learn them as sight words rather than decoding through them. By learning such a sight vocabulary children can begin to set up the direct lexical route to word reading'' (Flynn&Stainthorp p50). Advocates of the model believe that 'word recognition is the product of orchestrated activity that occurs within a number of different cognitive sub-systems [modules] which operate at least partially independently one from another' (A.Ellis p24), and that there are two, independent 'routes' or pathways the brain uses to read words; a fast, lexical/semantic route (see familiar printed word -> sequence of letters matches those of a word trace in whole/visual word store -> word meaning store -> finally, pronounce whole word) and a slower, sublexical/phonological route (see unfamiliar printed word -> no letter sequence match found in whole word store -> 'map letters onto their phonemes' in GPC store -> sound out word -> word meaning store)

Dual route model supporters acknowledge that 'teaching phonemic and alphabetic knowledge' to beginning readers is necessary because it 'gives children a means of decoding words', but also because it 'sets up the sublexical route of the dual-route model' (Flynn &Stainthorp p50) They believe that once a word has been processed correctly a few times along a 'slower phonological route', a 'permanent trace' of the word is made in a soundless and size-wise limitless 'orthographic store' in the brain with, 'all letters of the word in correct sequence' (Rose Review Appendix 1. para 54), The dual route theorists say that once a word is in this purely visual word store in the brain, when seen in text, it can pass immediately to a 'pre-existing store of word meanings' (Rose Review Appendix 1. para 52), with no phonological decoding being necessary. This hypothesis ties in very conveniently with the whole language rhetoric of 'reading for meaning' (Dombey). The sublexical / phonological word-reading route is, followers of the theory say, only used as a back-up by the brain when the 'direct to meaning route' fails or a new word is encountered (Kerr p19-22, 44-50) Most of the evidence for this theory came from a study of a small group of adults who suffered brain damage and as a result acquired 'dyslexia' (Flynn&Stainthorp p41). As the British Psychological Society say, 'The research supporting a dual route model comes primarily from work with adult patients who have various forms of brain injury or insult. These findings may not be applicable to children who are in the process of learning to read and who have not suffered any known neurological damage (Karmiloff-Smith,1997)'(BPS.2005.p24)

A theory can be wrong despite being supported by many authorities, including those such as Coltheart and Dehaene who oppose whole language. The Dual Route theory may sound intuitively correct, and expert readers may appear to be bypassing phonic decoding, but, in addition to lacking a credible research base, the theory was challenged convincingly by Glushko back in 1979. He argued, correctly, that the brain automatically processes ALL the information available about the input signal from each and every word in parallel, processing multiple modalities simultaneously (much of which does not reach consciousness) and processing is NOT carried out along separate routes or pathways (D. McGuinness ERI p289)  Brain studies show that 'the process of mentally sounding out words is an integral part of silent reading, even for the highly skilled'. In addition, studies of the profoundly deaf (Aaron et al.'98), who have no phonological sensitivity, have found that they are incapable of learning to spell words correctly after the age of 8-9 years, because they cannot decode via the phoneme-grapheme route at all and rely on two visual processing modes: sight word memory (which is limited to approx. 2,000 words (D.McGuinness / Mair)) and by visual matching of spelling probabilities (the repetition of visual spelling patterns in words). This latter is something the brain does automatically, and we are not aware of it. This research clearly shows that skilled readers do not read any words as wholes or as a sequence of letters, eschewing sound, as Coltheart and others believe. Additionally, research by Share, Siegel and Geva revealed that struggling readers behave much like deaf readers, relying mostly on visual information to decode words as they lack knowledge of the phonological information contained in words; the alphabet code. (D.McGuinness ERI. pp338-347)

http://books.google.com/books?id=geCphXcHm30C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Early+Reading+Instruction#
Read sections of Diane McGuinness's book Early Reading Instruction online

www.syntheticphonics.com/pdf%20files/Synthetic%20&%20Analytic%20Phonics%20Teaching%20Principles.pdf
What's the difference between synthetic and analytic phonics?

Diane McGuinness comments on the review of the Research Literature on the use of Phonics in the Teaching of Reading and Spelling, by Brooks, Torgerson and Hall https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/RB711.pdf

http://www.ednews.org/articles/abracadrabra-phonics-balanced-magic.html
Abracadrabra phonics

www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/educn/educn029.pdf
The harm done by 'look and say'

http://www.ldonline.org/article/6394
Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of “Balanced Reading” Instruction

http://tdpower.blogspot.com/2007/09/phonics-vs-sight-recognition-reading.html
Homeschooling dad, Timothy Power, learnt the dangers of teaching global sight word memorisation, the hard way

www.nrrf.org/essay_We_Do_Teach_Phonics.html
What to do when you're told ' We do teach phonics'.

www.nrrf.org/essay_disec.htm
Can whole language and DISEC teaching of phonics be combined?

http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=79&n_issueNumber=48
Phonics and Book Bands.

Nurture a Reader blog posting on leveled books
http://nurtureareader.blogspot.com/2010 ... books.html

http://www.coreknowledge.org/mimik/mimik_uploads/documents/435/Green%20Eggs%20and%20Ham%20%20The%20case%20for%20Phonics.pdf
The case for decodable text.

www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?t=1836
Goswami and the onset-rime theory

www.balancedreading.com/3cue-adams.html
Marilyn Jager Adams: an expose of the three-cueing system (UK:Searchlights)

http://www.ednews.org/articles/the-three-cueing-model-down-for-the-count.html
Hempenstall- Three Cueing System

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/class/Psy338K/Gough/Chapter5/three-cueing-system.html
Gough - Three Cueing System

*In England, the now most widely used synthetic phonics programme, the government's Letters and Sounds (L&S), was not intended, according to the DCSF (now DfE), to replace the fully-resourced, 'tried and tested in the classroom', synthetic phonics programmes which were already available commercially. L&S was hastily produced by the DCSF purely as a fall-back/stop-gap programme for schools, with the official status of 'guidance'. The government wanted all English primary schools to get aboard the synthetic phonics bus as quickly as possible, with no excuses, after its acceptance of the recommendations in the 2006 Rose Report. To limit the conflict of interest with the commercial programmes, it was produced without any essential resources including decodable books. Many of the schools which are now using L&S have simply carried on using the school's old, banded, whole language reading books with their beginning readers. There are also schools using whole language readers alongside commercial, synthetic phonics programmes, despite the fact that all the main commercial programmes produce linked, phonically decodable books. The use of the early levels of whole language books for reading practice by beginning readers can damage the effective teaching of synthetic phonics, creating reading difficulties for a significant minority of children.

Schools seem to be unaware that in Oct 2010 the DfE introduced a revised set of criteria for synthetic phonics programmes. It includes new advice on early texts to practise reading: '(E)nsure that as pupils move through the early stages of acquiring phonics, they are invited to practise by reading texts which are entirely decodable for them, so that they experience success and learn to rely on phonemic strategies. 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.'
http://dfe.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/pedagogy/teachingstyles/phonics/a0010240/criteria-for-assuring-high-quality-phonic-work

**That weasel word 'Systematic':
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less' Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland.

Describing phonics simply as 'systematic' is wide open to abuse by those who wish to keep genuine synthetic phonics out of the classroom or who have no real understanding of the synthetic phonics principles. Even Sir Jim Rose seemed to feel it was politically expedient to avoid using the 'synthetic' description as much as possible in his final report and, instead, focused on the phrase 'high quality phonics'. This is unfortunate as the mixed methods advocates have high-jacked the word 'systematic' and regularly use it to describe their type of teaching using analytic / contextualised / analogy phonics with the justification that, ''the phonics concepts to be learned can still be presented systematically''. www.readingrockets.org/article/254

Caution is also needed with the words 'phonics', 'predict' and '**decode', as mixed method teachers are likely to interpret these words differently from synthetic phonics teachers.

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