Intensive Systematic Phonics, Tests of Reading Comprehension, and the Garan Effect
An article in the Guardian announced that a new study confirmed the positive effect of intensive systematic phonics. In my letter to the Guardian(see below) I said that the study only confirmed what we already know: "Intensive phonics instruction helps children do better on tests in which they are asked to pronounce words out loud, and on tests of spelling. Not mentioned is the consistent finding that intensive phonics instruction makes no significant contribution to performance on tests in which children have to understand what they read."
I like to refer to this as the Garan Effect: The National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) concluded that the experimental research supports intensive systematic phonics. Garan (2002), in an examination of this report, noted that the impact of intensive phonics is strong on tests in which children read lists of words in isolation, but it is miniscule on tests in which children have to understand what they read. Thus, intensive phonics instruction only helps children develop the ability to pronounce words in isolation, an ability that will emerge anyway with more reading. Garan's results agree with the results of many other studies that show that intensive phonics instruction has a positive impact on tests of decoding but not on tests of comprehension (Krashen, 2009).
Two responses of my claims have been posted on twitter. Both deserve a more detailed response than twitter allows.
In one tweet, it was maintained that the unpublished report that was the basis for the Guardian article (Grant, 2014) did in fact contain data on tests in which children had to understand what they read and that intensive phonics-trained students did better: Students who had studied of intensive systamatic phonics SKrashen: Intensive Systematic Phonics, Tests of Reading Comprehension, and the Garan Effect:
