Fonics, phun and the reading wars at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas

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• Dominic Wyse, Senior Lecturer in Primary and Early Years Education and a member of the Centre for Commonwealth Education at the University of Cambridge
• Tuesday 25 October 2011, 18:00-19:15
• Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Mill Lane.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Learning to read is a vital aspect of education hence arguments about teaching have been called ‘the reading wars’. Dominic Wyse looks at the best ways to teach reading and asks why the government has failed to recommend the best approaches. Historically a long-standing debate has been about whether reading is best taught through bottom-up methods or top-down methods. In fact neither of these approaches is fully supported by research.

This session will begin by showing a top-down approach through engagement with a ‘real’ picture book, and a bottom-up approach by showing a popular commercial phonics scheme. The use of a real book will also encapsulate one of the ways that learning to read should be ‘fun’. An argument will be made that phonics teaching (direct teaching about letters and their associated sounds) has been done in England at least since the late 19th century. The session will illustrate that there is a powerful body of research showing the most effective ways to teach reading, and it will seek to explain why politicians in England frequently distort practice so that it does not reflect the evidence base for what works.

Dominic Wyse is a Senior Lecturer in Primary and Early Years Education and a member of the Centre for Commonwealth Education at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow and Director of Music-Making at Churchill College Cambridge. He was a primary teacher for eight years which included posts in London, Bradford and Huddersfield. Following his work as a teacher he lectured in Primary Education at Liverpool John Moores University for eight years, latterly as a Reader.

Dominic’s research focuses on curriculum, pedagogy and policy. A major strand of this is his work on the teaching of English, language and literacy. He also works on creativity, and educational innovation. His current research includes a project funded by the National Gallery in London. Dominic gave evidence in relation to England’s National Curriculum to the House of Commons Committee for Children, Schools and Families, and was consulted for the government review of the national curriculum in 2011. He has spoken about policy and pedagogy on BBC Newsnight and BBC Radio 4 Today.

Dominic is editor (with Richard Andrews and Jim Hoffman) of The Routledge International Handbook of English, Language and Literacy Teaching and editor of Literacy Teaching and Learning: a SAGE major work. The third edition of his influential book Teaching English, Language and Literacy (with Russell Jones) is due in 2012. He is Associate Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Education.

This talk is part of the Festival of Ideas series.

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• Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Mill Lane

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