how are schools handling students who memorize books but can't actually decode

I think we are all talking among ourselves. I doubt we will hear from the OP again.

I suspect you are right, MOnica.

Good post though. Even if it's a bot.

In the end, as adults and elderly, we all seem to make it through life alright regardless of our kindergarten teachers.

My daughter teaches 6 year olds. Phonics are used and are widely successful with the majority of the classes.

As “understanding” of the words and texts grows “comprehension” is introduced.

Parents are encouraged both to read to and listen to their children read.

It works for most.

Those that struggle are picked up pretty quickly and given extra help.

I don’t know if this answers your question?

I’m pretty sure this system is used across most primary/infant schools?

The term "patterned text" or "patterned book" is used primarily in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is a foundational concept in the "Balanced Literacy" and "Whole Language" teaching philosophies that were standard in these countries.

I had guessed that "whole patterned" described the unique visual pattern that each word makes, and "decoding" meant working out what each letter or combination of letters contributes to the word and putting them together (ie phonics) In the US, they call things by different names, and teach them in different ways.

To some children, learning to read totally by "whole patterns" can be like learning Chinese, with each intricate symbol having a complex meaning and needing to be memorised as a separate item - tens of thousands of them. Learning totally by phonics has its drawbacks too, with many exceptions to the rules in a lot of English words. A flexible two-pronged approach seems a good idea.

It is not surprising that reading ability (and thus all education and familiarity with the written word) seems to be polarised in the States.

I don’t think it’s unusual for young children to come to know a familiar story off by heart.

My dd1 at no more than 3 did it with an old Ladybird book, one of those in verse with a colour picture opposite every page of text - ‘Downy Duckling’.

‘From her little cottage window, Mrs Downy Duck looked out.
Oh what a frosty morning, what a lot of ice about!’

See, I still remember it!

If I understand the question correctly, it seems to me that apples and pears are being compared here. The jargon is hitherto unknown to me, as I don't live in an English speaking country and I was never really involved in my children's learning to read - they taught themselves.

However, I still don't understand what being able to decipher the words and actually understanding the text have to do with each other. It's the difference between Eng Lang and Eng Lit. Someone who can read the words well might not quite grasp the overall sense of the text, whereas someone who skims over the words or only figures out some of them might well still be able to comprehend and summarise the basic ideas.

Learning totally by phonics has its drawbacks too, with many exceptions to the rules in a lot of English words.

Not if it's a good phonics programme. A good programme doesn't talk of 'rules', it teaches the simple sound/symbol correspondences and moves on to the complex ones. The most it teaches is 'probabilities'. Written English is complex because it contains words from a number of different languages which retain the sound/symbol correspondences of the original language. Learning the variations of the correspondences makes the learner flexible. It may be 'probable' that a letter or letters represent a certain sound, but if that doesn't work (make a recognisable word) the reader has other choices to apply. If children don't learn this they have nowhere to go if their initial choice doesn't work.

Most other written languages are much less complex and reading them can be learned quite fast. Written English is a bit of an outlier in the eyes of reading scientists because of its complexity. But the 'difficulties' are very high profile because it is such a widely used language globally.

BlueBelle

‘Whole pattern books’ and ‘decoding’
I don’t even understand your language ekartroda

I think OP intended to say “picture books” and decoding is the actual reading and not memorising of words.

MaizieD

Mamie

Phonics was reintroduced in England with the literacy strategy in 1998 and synthetic phonics in 2006. I remember huge arguments in meetings of teachers, advisory teachers and inspectors. Everyone had very strong feelings and some people had a very narrow view with no room for compromise.

I’m firmly one of the latter, Mamie.

I spent the last few years of my working life with secondary children severely disadvantaged by being barely able to read. Compromise was what led to that state.

I retired more than a decade ago but thinking of some of the children I worked with still saddens and enrages me.

I can understand that if you only worked in secondary mainstream schools. As an advisory teacher I worked across the whole range of disabilities and learning difficulties and that needed flexibility including Rebus.

Perhaps a way if explaining is that, because I know the phonics rules, I could read a few sentences of Latin text, but not understand what it means.

I appreciate what you are saying, Mamie. Of course I didn't encounter children at that level of educational need. But I did encounter many children whose 6 years of primary reading instruction had left them baffled but who 'could' have learned to read to a better level had they not been subject to the NLS.

Maremia

Perhaps a way if explaining is that, because I know the phonics rules, I could read a few sentences of Latin text, but not understand what it means.

I did learn Latin at school. When we had to do translations, some were Latin to English, some English to Latin. I got very good marks for the Latin-English, though not always so good for the English-Latin. The reason was that I had already read a lot of books (in English) and had a wide English vocabulary. The meaning of any Latin words which I had not had to memorise could be deduced from the words in the English language which were derived from them, and which I knew already. (To get as good marks, the English-Latin translation had to be grammatically accurate, which was more difficult to achieve)

A child with a good spoken vocabulary would be able to identify a strange word partly from a few phonic clues and partly from the context - which is one of the reasons it is so important to chat with children from an early age, and for them to be aware of words in places other than just school reading books They can be seen in places like food packets and tins, birthday cards, advertising hoardings, street names, everywhere they go. Literacy is not just textbooks.

I'm like that with French, Maremia. I know the phonics but my understanding is rather very limited... (mostly to understanding menus )

But teaching English speaking children to read English it would be a poor teacher who didn't help them to expand their vocabulary if they came across an unknown word...

Okay, thanks for the responses. What I actually was trying to convey is that there are some, very few, children with the cognitive ability to decode text but at the same time to not have the cognitive aptitude to understand the words.
It's a very niche, but genuine, educational need.

My learning disabled autistic niece can spell out and read words, but cannot understand what is written down as continuous text.

Maremia

Okay, thanks for the responses. What I actually was trying to convey is that there are some, very few, children with the cognitive ability to decode text but at the same time to not have the cognitive aptitude to understand the words.
It's a very niche, but genuine, educational need.

@#£%&&

So I did understand you correctly. It's not so much about the ability to read as about the ability - or inability - to understand what they have read. I notice this sometimes when reading; I can get through a whole page.and then realise I haven't taken any of it in. Also, this is how computers work: they can see the words, and point to them in a dictionary, but cannot say what emotion is being expressed or what exactly is happening in the text. (Although, with AI, they are getting there)

To get back to children, though, and to answer the original question. Are people seeing better results with stronger phonics screening up front or is it more about how classroom reading is being monitored?

I don't think it matters how, or by which method, the child learnt to read, I think the connection between the mechanics of the word and its actual meaning is made much deeper in the child's psyche and is not something that can be taught. It's an interesting topic. I'll talk to my DiL about it. She has a PhD in psychology. Mind you, her experience of learning to read is limited to German, which hasn't gone through the various phases of teaching methods, simply because it is not necessary due to the phonetic way of spelling.

In answer to your first question, yes.
Their decoding skills are good, but their comprehension is very poor.
The reverse of this is when you have youngsters who perfectly understand the story, the language, the texts, when read out to them, but are not able to decode the written symbols. Very often these pupils may be diagnosed with dyslexia.
Some authors are great at writing books with high interest low reading abilities, sometimes called hi/lo.
Hope this helps.

The dyslexic son of a friend was diagnosed as having short term memory problems. His brain was not good at transferring data from his short term memory to his long term memory

As a child he never read story books and now doesn't read novels because by the time he got to the end of the book he had no memory of what went before.

He learnt to read phonetically and by grinding repetition the phonics of reading are now in his long term memory, and, now in his 50s, he still reads using the phonics in his long term memory, rather on recognising whole words.

I did not meet my grandmother until I was 4 and she did not believe my aunt that I could read already. She was convinced I simply memorised the books I had at home. So she bought an early reader and instructed my aunt to bring me over. I remember quite a lot of that day and how I was promised a cream cake if I could read the book. It was called "Where the wild things are" and is still in print. Of course it was one of those books with vivid illustrations and sentences that spread across both pages. However I apparently read it perfectly and my grandmother was amazed.

We did not have phonics back then and I don't remember anyone teaching em to read so I must have done it myself. I know that I was always well in advance of my class for reading and writing and good at subjects like English language and literature.

Words have always fascinated me. They make patterns on paper and patterns in the mind. I find it sad that the basic skills of reading and writing are declining among the population.

Elegran
A child with a good spoken vocabulary would be able to identify a strange word partly from a few phonic clues and partly from the context - which is one of the reasons it is so important to chat with children from an early age, and for them to be aware of words in places other than just school reading books They can be seen in places like food packets and tins, birthday cards, advertising hoardings, street names, everywhere they go. Literacy is not just textbooks.

A very good explanation.

Phonics combined with some “look and say” of common high frequency words. made reading a lot easier for most children.

As a teacher I did find that children with a poor spoken vocabulary were, in general slower at learning to read.
They were having to learn not only how to decode the word either by “look and say” or phonics, but to use it in conversation or understanding the text.

Comprehension also benefits from conversation. I remember a few children who struggled to explain why a girl on a SAT reading paper called her rabbit “Shadow” even though in the story, the rabbit followed her everywhere.

Where did the OP meet all these children? I’m not sure about where reading progress isn’t or wasn’t monitored even before specific phonics teaching.

The OP has never been back.

A child with a good spoken vocabulary would be able to identify a strange word partly from a few phonic clues and partly from the context

This, too, may be a question of how the child's brain is "wired". My father left school at 14 but was very keen to continue learning and worked hard at improving his vocabulary. However, I was baffled that he couldn't see a connection between the English word "bread" and the German word "Brot" which to my mind are related in so many ways. This may be because he had always been monolingual (apart from a smattering of French and Swahili) but I think it more likely that he literally just couldn't make the connection.

This is a totally fascinating subject. I'll probably be thinking about this a lot and I can't wait to buttonhole my DiL to ask her what studies have been carried out.

The problem is when you meet a new word, you do not know how it is pronounced.

I was a precocious and avid reader, but many of the words I knew the meaning of, I had never heard spoken, so, when i used it I would pronounce it incorrectly, and get laughed at and corrected.

I've never said halcyon out loud.