Research Papers in Education ISSN: 0267-1522 (Print) 1470-1146 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rred20 ‘English has 100+ phonemes’: some errors and confusions in contemporary commercial phonics schemes Greg Brooks, Roger Beard & Jaz Ampaw-Farr To cite this article: Greg Brooks, Roger Beard & Jaz Ampaw-Farr (2019): ‘English has 100+ phonemes’: some errors and confusions in contemporary commercial phonics schemes, Research Papers in Education, DOI: 10.1080/02671522.2019.1646795 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2019.1646795 Published online: 11 Sep 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 72 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rred20 RESEARCH PAPERS IN EDUCATION https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2019.1646795 ‘English has 100+ phonemes’: some errors and confusions in contemporary commercial phonics schemes Greg Brooks a, Roger Beardb and Jaz Ampaw-Farrc aUniversity of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK; bUCL Institute of Education, London, UK; cIndependent Consultant, Milton Keynes, UK ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY From 2006 the British government strongly favoured synthetic pho- Received 24 May 2019 nics as the principal approach for the teaching of initial literacy in Accepted 12 July 2019 state-funded primary schools in England, and since 2010 has made it KEYWORDS – mandatory. In 2007 2013 just over 100 commercially published pho- Phonics schemes; phonetic nics schemes were available, and in that same period the govern- errors; phonic errors; ment maintained a system of quality assurance, in the form of two misguided pedagogies; (successive and non-overlapping) panels of independent evaluators. classification criteria Their task was to judge whether commercial publishers’ self- evaluations of their phonics schemes and materials were correct, in the sense of justifying statements that they met the government’s criteria for such schemes, etc. Of the schemes that were judged, just over half (54) were found to contain linguistic errors. In this article the errors are analysed in detail, and classified into three main categories: phonetic inaccuracies, phonic inaccuracies, and misguided pedago- gies. The criteria for that classification are stated, and conclusions and recommendations drawn – the main recommendation being that existing schemes need to be scrutinised in detail to ensure that they are fit for purpose. And this would apply to all phonics schemes used anywhere in the English-speaking world, not just in England, even though the criteria for phonetic and phonic accuracy would neces- sarily differ across accents. Background Context The task facing children learning to read and spell is to relate the marks on paper to the words and meanings already known to them in spoken and auditory form. For those learning to read and spell in languages with alphabetic orthographies, attention to the correspondences between the phonemes of spoken language and the graphemes of written language is one element in this process. For children learning to read and spell in English, teaching focusing on the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes (that is to say, phonics) is known to be beneficial as one part of early instruction (NICHD 2000; Ehri et al. 2001; Torgerson, Brooks, and Hall 2006; Torgerson et al. 2019), despite the inconsistencies of the language’s deep orthography. CONTACT Greg Brooks g.brooks@sheffield.ac.uk University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 G. BROOKS ET AL. Given this, and given that the British government has mandated a particular variety of phonics, synthetic, to be used in the initial teaching of literacy in state-funded schools in England, it is no surprise that a plethora of phonics teaching schemes and materials is available in this country. And given all that, it ought to be possible for teachers of initial literacy in England to have confidence in the accuracy and quality of the available schemes and materials. This confidence is likely to be enhanced if insights from linguistics are used to inform investigations into the quality of these schemes and materials. Such application of linguistics is in line with long-standing arguments that linguistics has been under-used in educational research (e.g. Wardhaugh 1969; Spolsky 1978;Dörnyei2007). These arguments have become more compelling in recent years after the publication of new research into the English spelling system that is referred to below. The present article is effectively an application of this research. By addressing the question ‘How accurate and pedagogically sound are some contemporary phonics schemes available in England?’,weshowthat teachers need to be cautious in assuming that available phonics schemes and materials are accurate and pedagogically sound, and to exercise diligence in making their selections. The emphasis on schools in England evident in the previous paragraph needs to be justified; there are two aspects to this. First, in the United Kingdom, education is a devolved responsibility of the four national administrations, and the British govern- ment’s requirements on state schools in England do not apply to those in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland (or even to other types of school in England). However, teaching materials and approaches transcend national boundaries, and the criteria used here to judge phonics schemes available in England will apply, subject to the caveat in the next paragraph, to such schemes across the entire English-speaking world, as do the conclusions and recommendations that arise from those judgments. Secondly, the criteria for phonetic and phonic accuracy stipulated in this article are based squarely on the British English spelling system and the standard southern British accent often known as Received Pronunciation (RP). We draw attention later to three major regional variations in the accents with which English is spoken within England, but it would be outside the scope and feasibility of our analysis to attempt to deal with how phonics schemes and materials should be judged against (say) the Scottish Standard English accent, with its systematic differences from RP. Afortiori, it would be even more unrealistic to attempt to deal with phonics schemes and materials available in the United States, where both the spelling system and the most widely understood accent, General American, differ substantially from those we are concerned with here. Nevertheless, we consider that the criteria we adopt and the conclusions we draw have lessons for phonics teaching throughout the English-speaking world, provided relevant accents and spelling systems are taken into account. This is so despite the database used dating from 2007–2013. Most of the schemes analysed here are known to be still in use in 2019. Some have ceased to be available, and others may well have been revised, but we do not have access to that information. We maintain that the analysis and conclusions have value independently of that. Introduction There has been relatively little systematic research into the content of schemes that areusedfortheteachingofearlyreading.Theseschemesoftencomprise RESEARCH PAPERS IN EDUCATION 3 incrementally graded books, with supporting materials and activities. They may also reflect particular emphases, such as controlled vocabulary, systematic coverage of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, or the use of syntactical structures that are suitable for young children. There is sometimes explicit attention to age-appropriate subject matter, narrative, poetic or factual. However, when the content of these schemes has been discussed, this has often been part of wider pedagogical debates. Concentrated attention on the linguistic accuracy of such schemes is rare. For instance, the use of ‘decodable’ books in the USA, mandated by the federal government, prompted a review of how different kinds of text facilitate or hinder reading acquisition, how different types of words are acquired, and the characteristics of current texts. The authors of that review noted the lack of research in this area of literacy education, and suggested that ‘One of the reasons that research on [early reading] textbooks has fallen between the cracks is the gulf between the publishing industry and academe’ (Hiebert and Martin 2002, 372). The federal mandate also prompted an empirical study of the features of the texts of basal reading books (Hoffman, Sailors, and Patterson 2002). The authors investigated the general features of student texts, including instructional design, ‘accessibility’, and ‘enga- ging’ qualities. Using a variety of analyses, these authors suggested that such mandates heavily influence the materials presented to beginning readers, but that there was an apparent lack of attention to other features that support beginning readers, specifically predictability and the engaging qualities of the texts. In the UK, after a period when there was a largely rhetorical debate about the respective merits of reading schemes and individual (or ‘real’) books (Root 1988; Meek 1988; Donaldson 1993; Perera 1993; Beard and Oakhill 1994), more recent investigations have been largely focused on the effectiveness of systematic schemes, both ‘mainstream’ (EEF 2018) and intervention (Brooks 2016). However, the linguistic accuracy of reading schemes, especially in relation to how they deal with the grapheme-phoneme correspondences between written