In the classes I tested, it was clear that a number of students are able to use a combination of phonics skills and learned vocabulary to read a text. The majority, however, were over-reliant on learned vocabulary and merely substituted a word that looked something like the target word. Too many students made no attempt to analyse words according to the letter sounds. Even simple consonant-vowel-consonant words were beyond them. Clearly a lot of attention needs to be paid to revising the basic short vowel sounds and long vowel sounds (especially those formed by use of magic e.)
Using a sample of 80 students, I have listed the words in descending order of difficulty, with an indication of the most common misreadings. The number of students (out of 80) who could not read the word is indicated in brackets.
scrape (70) Problems with triple consonant blend and long vowel sound (magic e).
suds (60) Short vowel sound u is a major difficulty.
bench (54) Interference from learned vocabulary – beach. Some wrong vowels – binch, bunch.
grit (52) Interference – gift. Many attempted
soft g (impossible with r). Others transposed ri - girt
soap (51) Interference – shop, soup. Lack of awareness of “two vowels.” (A acting like magic e).
Zog (51) Errors in vowel and both consonants.
mutt (51) Short u problem again. Some read “must”.
stuff (49) Short u problem. Consonant blend misread.
aid (49) Another “Two vowels” difficulty. (I acting like magic e). Many read add or ide.
thick (46) Interference – think. Many ignored digraph – tick.
drain (46) “Two vowels” difficulty. Some problems with consonant blend.
pack (45) Poor vowel awareness. Very common interference – pick.
mess (42) Poor vowel awareness. Common interference – miss.
flows (40) Consonant blend problems. Interference – flowers.
spray (40) Problems - triple consonant blend. Not aware of long vowel. Adding an end consonant.
grey (34) Many added end consonant. Some attempted soft g.
feed (27) Interference - feel
Voll (24) Poor reading of consonants. Many substituted s (and others) for ll.
few (24) W substituted by other consonants.
plants (24) Consonant blend – missing l. Also nts caused some difficulties.
Fred (23) E read as long vowel. Consonant blend – missing r.
bright (23) Consonant blend and ght confused some
tries (22) Missing r or s .
dry (22) Other endings substituted for y.
hates (20) Read as has or hats.
left (14) lift
shine (13) vowel sound, sh
hose (13) horse
clean (8)
trip (7)
use (3) us
job (2)
must (1)
with (1) will
next (0)
Obviously, the words at the lower end of the list are likely to be part of learned vocabulary. The fact that students read them correctly does not indicate good use of phonic skills. For example, very few students failed to read must, but misreading of suds, mutt and stuff indicates a very poor knowledge of the short vowel sound for U.
Recommendations for future testing. I think the length of the passage is adequate. The reading time of one minute, while enough for most students, did seem to penalise some students who tried to analyse the words, as opposed to using guesswork or simply leaving out unknown words. I suggest we be flexible and allow an extra thirty seconds for students who need more time. This is consistent with the testing suggested by Neil Clarke, who allows 3 minutes to read a passage of about double the length of ours.
I did not find that the mark out of 3 for over-all reading ability served any good purpose, and possibly detracts from the objectivity of the test. I suggest this be dropped in future, and replaced by a formula of 36 key words, divided by 3.