| AdminHistory | Guardian Obituary 16 January 2015. Copyright © Guardian News and Media Limited
Joyce Morris, who has died aged 93, was a tireless worker for the better teaching and learning of literacy. She influenced generations of children through her input to the pioneering BBC television series Look and Read (first broadcast in 1967) and Words and Pictures (from 1970), and her Language in Action series of initial reading books (1974-83). Both were informed by her analysis of the phonetics of English – a system that she dubbed Phonics 44, published in 1984 but devised much earlier – and by a keen appreciation of how to make reading appealing to young children.
Joyce argued that English orthography is highly patterned. Only a relatively small proportion of words diverge completely from conventional patterns. The vast majority of words can be recognised and spelled by applying the alphabetic principle of phoneme-grapheme correspondence and a knowledge of the statistical probability of sound-symbol relationships in English.
Language in Action included both realistic and fantasy stories, in a variety of settings, and simple information books written by a team of talented authors and illustrators working to Joyce’s brief. The books had several distinctive features that set them apart from other early-reading books of the time: they were published in different sizes and formats, with embossed white covers; “pre-reading” books encouraged children to track picture narratives; individual alphabet books had large felt letters on the covers to encourage the kinaesthetic learning of each letter shape; and teaching guides encouraged the blending of letter sounds that is now government policy. Later books celebrated specific sound-letter correspondences with various kinds of word play, eg “The thin king with a moth in his broth”. Throughout, the scheme aimed to engage children by making a virtue of the contrivance that often typifies early reading texts.
She was born Joyce Pinder in Crigglestone, near Wakefield, West Yorkshire, daughter of Frederick, a police constable, and his wife, Florence (nee Hallam). Joyce had her love of reading nurtured by both parents, and she had read all the Beatrix Potter books by the age of four. Having originally intended to pursue a career in science, she instead began teacher training in 1939 at a primary school in Ealing, west London.
Her first day as a teacher is best described in her own words: “I well remember how the children stared at me when I said, ‘Please take out your books and read while I mark the attendance register.’ My repeated request provoked no response and so I asked a boy in the front row why he was not doing as I asked. He replied, ‘I can’t read,’ and added, ‘Nobody in this class can read.’” She later discovered: “I had been made responsible for the [school’s] most ‘backward, virtually illiterate’ pupils.” The shock propelled her into a lifetime of literacy research and development.
Having taught at primary level until 1948, she took a University of London degree in psychology while teaching in a secondary school in Surrey, and in 1952 registered at the Institute of Education in London for a diploma in child development and a PhD. In 1953 she was appointed to the newly established post of reading research officer at the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales, then in its infancy and based in Wimpole Street in London. During nearly 12 years at the foundation, she conducted fundamental research on reading attainment, published as Reading in the Primary School (1959) and Standards and Progress in Reading (1966). A pamphlet based on her research, The Challenge of Reading Failure, sold more than 25,000 copies.
She directed the project Teaching Beginners to Read (1958-61), involving infant classes in 100 London schools. The tenor of her early work was that teachers needed research evidence on which to base their choices of teaching methods – and that those would include accurate, linguistics-based phonics within a broad and rich curriculum. After a phase of resistance to phonics, this was the message reiterated by Sir Jim Rose’s review of literacy teaching in 2006, but which had meanwhile run into anti-phonics resistance.
Joyce left NFER in 1965, and for the rest of her career freelanced as an independent trainer and consultant, with the support of her husband, Michael Morris, an art dealer, whom she had married in 1954. Joyce was central to a group of researchers and teachers who in 1961 had established the Reading Council, which became, in 1964, the UK Reading Association (and is now the UK Literacy Association). Joyce served as the association’s president (1965-66), and in 1966 was UKRA’s representative at the first World Congress on Reading, at Unesco headquarters in Paris.
Joyce had hoped that interest in reading research would lead to the establishment of a national reading centre, or a network of such centres, but in the event only one was founded, at the University of Reading. It was awarded a research grant in 1974, and Joyce chaired the committee that administered it.
In 1983 she began an investigation at Roehampton Institute of Higher Education (now Roehampton University) to discover to what extent student teachers, at the beginning of their pre-service courses, understood the nature of English orthography in enough detail to help children acquire initial literacy skills. The generally poor results of the 275 undergraduates involved forced the rector of the institute reluctantly to ask her to discontinue the research because of the distress caused.
However, other researchers in Britain and the US administered her linguistic questionnaire to their students, with similar results. This reinforced Joyce’s longstanding conviction that both phonics schemes and teaching methods needed to be more firmly based on linguistics and research, and that “you can’t teach what you don’t know”. She used the questionnaire results, and Phonics 44, to assemble The Morris-Montessori word list (1990) for the Montessori Centre International in London.
She was appointed OBE in 1992, and four years later became patron of the Queen’s English Society. |