The use of pseudoword cards provides an opportunity for children to read words that are not words and to practice their recognition and combination of graphemes from the earliest stages of their phonic development. This can help all of your children make progress in combining sounds in strange or non-word words, and allow them to improve their scores on these words on the Phonics Assessment Check.
I found three problems with pseudowords, alien or wordless, in my kids’ first test in 2012.
- My most skilled readers tried to read the foreign non-words as real words. This is because I hadn’t practiced enough strange words with them and didn’t realize the impact this would have on their score. Some of my more capable readers did not reach the threshold.
- Other children found it more difficult to detect digraphs and trigraphs in nonwords, so they read letters as single sounds. They were used to retrying real words until they made sense and looking for digraphs and trigraphs.
- I had often used ‘sound buttons’ to underline phonemes in words, but there were no ‘sound buttons’ on the test words. So when they tried to read the non-words, the children had trouble because they had no reference point to verify that they had read them correctly.
Reading Alien Words Isn’t Just About Phonics Screening Test Results
I realized that reading non-words shouldn’t be a skill that I just taught for the exam, or even just before. Reading non-words is, in fact, a useful skill that ensures children’s phonic awareness is firmly ingrained and can be used to decode more complex words as they enter Key Stage 2.
Although I found some excellent resources online, none of them were systematically related to the phases of development of the DfE Letters and Sounds Program. I looked up the Letters and Sounds Program and started creating words that used the phonemes and word structures from each phase of it. When I put these words on the flashcards, I deliberately left out the “sound buttons” or the underlining of each phoneme of the word. This allowed the children to practice recognizing digraphs or trigraphs in non-words.
It worked? Well, for my next phonics test, the improvement in the results of the children in my class was spectacular. From a pass rate below the national average in 2012, to a pass rate above 90% in 2013.
Changes in Phonics Screening Check 2014 mean that we won’t know the threshold or passing score until after the check has been administered. I am confident that the skills my children now have in reading strange words, through the use of my pseudoword cards, will help them score well on the phonics screening test again this year.