How did effective teachers achieve balanced teaching styles?
All teachers used some mixture of direct phonics instruction and wholelanguage type activities, but effective teachers achieved a better balance between whole-language and phonic skills than did their lesseffective colleagues. The researchers observed a number of significant features in the practice of effective teachers including: • teachers taught sounds to pupils, but in a less isolated context than demanded in a purely phonic approach • teachers taught decoding skills explicitly through teachermodelling, conscious revisiting of key points and opportunistic teaching, for example, word recognition strategies were cued whenpupils encountered difficulties in decoding, and spelling strategies were cued when pupils were experiencing difficulties when writing • explicit phonics teaching was supplemented by coaching of strategies for applying phonics to everyday reading • pupils were taught to attend to several cues at once, for example sounds, pictures and reading around the unknown word
