Great news today. The UK Government is bolstering the potential happiness to be had from reading. It is going to establish a nine minute reading test next summer for each and every 6 year old in all the UK primary schools on its ability to interpret synthetic phonic symbols for the linguistic sounds we make. This follows successful trials in 300 primary schools. This method is at last gaining ground among more of our educationalists!
Yet to my amazement some of them are still resisting it because they say it is not 100% successful! When we have between a quarter and a third of our children functionally illiterate, I would have thought that they would have pounced on this solution to reduce that deficit.
The happiness and joy children ( and adults too) gain from reading the great diversity of books available is palpable. Let us hope and pray that this system becomes available to and is embraced by schools across the UK. It has been about a long time as a system in different proprietary forms.
As Diane McGuinness said in her admirable 1998 book, Why Children Can't Read and What We can Do About It, writing is the employment of the code we have devised to represent the linguistic sounds we make when we speak. It follows that reading is the process of decoding, language by language. Teach a child the relevant linguistic code - that's for the difficult sounds as well as the easy ones - and we vest in them a key to their future happiness and fulfillment.
More detail here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8766371/New-reading-test-for-600000-infants-given-go-ahead.html
Well done I would say..
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