Target Audience Review

After the lecture with Janet Read I thought it would be a good idea to try and focus our device onto a smaller age group, rather than children under the age of 11. My research suggests a better age range would be between 7 and 11.

According to the school curriculum, children should reach certain levels at key stages of their development and the SATs are a way to measure this. At the age of 7, a child should be aiming for a level 2 in English, which is the average. At this level the child they use more than one method for reading unfamiliar words, such as phonics, syntacts and contextual strategies. This would make our word scanner ideal for this point in a child's development and would be used to aid these strategies, with the hope of getting the child to the average level of 4 at the age of 11. Importantly, we must not make the child lazy, and ensure that the device still carries out these methods to help the child develop their sound blending when reading.

The diagram below shows the levels that children are expected to achieve in their SATs at 7, 11 and 14 years old (click to enlarge):



Details about the levels can be found at the National Curriculum in Action website here.

The diagram and supporting information was gathered from the Woodlands Junior School website

Case: Synthetic Phonics Reading

I'm not sure if you remember, but about 2 years ago there was quite a big news story on how a selection of children in Scotland were taking part in a study where they were being taught to read using the Synthetic Phonics approach, compared to the traditional Analytic Phonics approach.

The typical Analytic approach involves firstly teaching the children the sound of letters in their initial position and moving onto how the letters sounds in different positions and secondly teaching the children how to blend sounds.

The Synthetic approach involves teaching the children a few letter sounds a week and how to blend the sounds together to understand unfamiliar words.

The second approach has shown remarkable success, with children being able to spell words/read words seven months of those children taught the traditional method.

This may be important when deciding out how the words that are scanned are read out and also the types of games/tools we put on the PC software.

More can be found about the Synthetic Apprach on the old article on Hull's University website here.