Teaching tricky words

[JennyPen]

DD does pretty well phonically sounding out - at at present is learning sounds like ea, ee, ou etc. So we teach her these things as do the school and then she gets totally stumped with her daft ORT reading book which completely goes against what i've just taught her - "Measurement" which she of course starts off mee - then sure is another tricky part to teach. Another word in the same book - journey, another contradiction to the sound of ou that she's just been taught!

Then up crops Know

How do you go about teaching these contradictions in the english language??

Poor girl - this teaching reading malarky is very tricky!She should have had a photographic memory!

[mrz]

They aren't contradictions to the English language they just follow rules she hasn't been taught yet. Once children have been taught all the ways of writing the phonemes they can choose which sounds correct. kn is a common alternative to n (as is gn) our is an alternative to er s represents zh e can be written as ea (think the words head or bread)just as ee and ea are alternatives
That is why using ORT Look & Say books alongside synthetic phonics before children are taught the rules isn't a great idea.

alternative ways of writing phonemes

[Openbook]

I would just tell her the words she can't work out fairly easily and leave the phonics to school. As cat64 said, there's so much more to reading than phonics only this has slipped out of fashion. At home you can do a brilliant job encouraging her enthusiasm and won't be making her lazy by really helping her out. She will be able to follow the story thread and get lots of enjoyment from the boooks she reads with you. Make it a joy and you will really be supporting school. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise!!! (As you might be able to tell I feel quite strongly about this.)

[mrz]

By Openbook Sun 14-Feb-10 11:02:13
At home you can do a brilliant job encouraging her enthusiasm and won't be making her lazy by really helping her out. She will be able to follow the story thread and get lots of enjoyment from the boooks she reads with you.

enjoyment and ORT ...

[maizieD]

As Openbook suggests, you read the words which are beyond the level of her current phonic knowledge. If she wants to try to sound them out, point out the 'tricky' bit and tell her that is a bit of the 'code' that she hasn't yet learned for whatever the sound is that it represents. For example, the 'ea' in 'measurement' represents a 'short e' sound, as it does in 'head' and 'bread', but if she hasn't yet been taught this she will naturally use the correspondence she does know, /ee/. Many children are well capable of learning the complex alphabetic code quite quickly with this kind of 'incidental' teaching, which extends the phonic work she should be doing at school.

Please don't encourage her to try to guess the words from pictures and context, or to memorise common phrases; that is a very faulty and, ultimately, non-productive strategy which will will weaken the efect of the phonics teaching. Children often find guessing far easier than sounding out and blending and it can become a habit which will let them down badly when there are no longer any pictures to help them and words become more complex.

I would be suspicious of the quality of the phonics teaching in a school which is using non-decodeable books for children in the early stages of learning to read. At this stage the important thing is that she becomes secure with sounding out and blending and learning the 160 -180 common letter/sound correspondences.

Don't worry about reading for meaning and higher order reading skills at the moment. If she has a good spoken vocabulary she shouldn't have any problem in understanding what she is reading and 'inference' can come later(though, once again, this skill is just as easily developed through oral work).

[JennyPen]

Thank you, very helpful replys, thanks for that link mrz, i've printed it off to have a good read of.

I also feel slightly confused with the choice of book scheme that the school using, ORT and nothing else at this stage, a lot of non-decodeable words for her to tackle considering she only started getting reading books at the end of october!

[mrz]

In the school's defence they probably purchased ORT when the government favoured searchlight methods and now can't afford to replace it. Perhaps the PTA could buy some early phonics reading books and save ORT until children have the skills to read them.

[mrz]

Personally I would encourage a child to use context but I wouldn't encourage them to guess from pictures

[maizieD]

I'm sorry, cat64, but this is one adult who has never in her entire life used pictures or context to work out what an unfamiliar word is. I rely on phonics to work out what it 'says' and a dictionary to find out what it 'means'.

I don't know what age group you teach (though I suspect that it is KS1 or 2) but I work with KS3 struggling readers who have been completely messed up by the strategies you believe in and my experience tells me that they should be binned...

As far back as 1974 Keith Stanovich, now one of the foremost cognitive psychology researchers of reading, was amazed to discover that the 'context' strategy was used by the poorest readers, while skilled readers used phonic strategies. He was amazed because he had been enthused by the ideas of Frank Smith about reading (a great exponent of the 'context' strategy) and they turned out to be invalidated by his research.

In the grand scheme of things, over hundreds of years of literacy, it is not phonics that has been a 'fashion', as it has always been taught, but the wild attempts of 'look & say' theorists to teach reading without involving phonics which have influenced the teaching of reading for the last few decades.

Anyway, I understand that this debate has been done to death here in the past, so I leave it to the mumsnetters to make up their minds which one of us they want to believe

[mrz]

Can I just ask what you would do with a word that uses an alternative letter pattern that represents more than one sound - for example the ea from the OP.

I went to the shop for a loaf of b r ea d.

the child has only been taught that ea represents the long vowel /ee/ ... so sounds it out breed

I personally would ask does that make sense in this sentence (context) and then talk about how sometimes ea represents /e/ and look at a list of words that follow that rule.

[JennyPen]

Yes, when we have a word just like that mrz I will say to her, is that a word you know? and then i'll say to her, how else could the word be sounded out to give you a word you know.

I don't encourage her to use the pictures though, and in fact she doesn't use the pictures to guess the words although she loves looking at the expressions on their faces and things.

[allchildrenreading]

Children who struggle to learn to read need a very firm structure - they need a great deal of practice in learning to blend and segment and in learning common letter-sound correspondences.
If, like me, you've had to pick up the pieces with those children who couldn't cope with the multi-strategies that we, as competent readers use, you'd understand just how important it is to keep things simple and logical.
It would have made much more sense if the DCSF had spent money on replacing the early ORT sets with decodable readers and allowed schools to choose between any of the excellent SP programmes that were already 'out' there.

[Openbook]

cat64 - I'm with you every step of the way. MaizieD - the OP is not talking about a child with special needs.

[JennyPen]

She's also not a struggling reader,just a beginner reader. She's only been reading for 3 1/2 months and has taken on board a lot of information in that time. I was also under the impression that learning to read and decode words was best to use a mixture of phonics, context and pictures.

[maizieD]

Openbook,
Neither am I.

[witchwithallthetrimmings]

I JUST HATE HATE HATE THE ORT (AND SIMILAR) BOOKS THAT WE GET SENT HOME. ds does too, he knows most of the sounds and get make a good stab at writing his own sentences (we maid a toatm poal was my favourite) but still thinks he can't read because he is given books with things like LOOK A RHINOCEROS (he guesses it but knows he is guessing and want to read)

[claig]

I am reluctant to post on these phonics threads because they often turn heated. However, I agree entirely with cat64 and Openbook. I think context and pictures are very important. I know that when I was young, I tried to avoid the use of a dictionary unless it was absolutely necessary, because it slowed down the process of reading books and turned it into a chore.

When I read Paddington Bear as a child, I did not understand all of the words. However, I was able to ignore certain difficult words and still understand the gist of the story. For other words I was able to infer the meaning from the context.
There will be children reading Paddington in China who may not know what marmalade is, but they can infer that it is something that Paddington likes to spread on his sandwiches, and that is a sufficient understanding. If they are shown a real jar of marmalade or a picture of marmalade then this will stick in their memories and the word will make more sense. The dictionary definition of marmalade i.e. "a preserve or confection made of the pulp of fruit" won't help them much.

Cartoons contain pictures and are very useful to learn to recognise and read words. If you see a picture of Dennis the Menace aiming his catapult at someone, the word catapult, with its strange spelling, gains meaning and sticks in the memory. The dictionary definition of a catapult as a slingshot is not very helpful and doesn't convey the image of a Y-shaped stick with elastic attached that enables projectiles to be fired.

If I read about "the hoplite phalanx marched into battle, singing a paean ..." I don't immediately reach for my dictionary, but am happy to infer that a paean is some sort of song, a hoplite is some sort of soldier and a phalanx is some sort of formation of soldiers. Reaching for the dictionary will slow me down and make me want to eventually close the book. The more I see the same words used in different contexts, the deeper my understanding of the words becomes. If a word becomes vital to my understanding and there is no way of making a rough inference, then I will be forced to resort to the dictionary.

On a first reading of Hegel, something like this would not make complete sense to me
"Pure Being and pure nothing, are therefore, the same? or that ?They are (i.e. being and nothing) in this unity (i.e. becoming) but only as vanishing, sublated moments. They sink from their initially imagined self-subsistence to the status of moments, which are still distinct but at the same time are sublated?? "
but I would hope that the meaning of sublated would become clearer as I persisted with the text. Reading complicated books and having to constantly refer to a dictionary soon becomes unpleasurable. It will eventually lead to you not attempting to read the book at all.

If you try to read novels in a foreign language, you soon realise that you have to make guesses at meaning from the context, because there are far too many words that you have never come across before. If you see no smoking signs of a cigarette in a red circle with a red line through it, with the words "rauchen verboten" and no entry signs with "eingang verboten", you can soon infer that verboten means forbidden.

I agree with cat64 that reading is complicated and does involve things like context and picture cues.

[ZephirineDrouhin]

These threads do get surprisingly sort of breast v bottle feeding, don't they?

[maizieD]

"These threads do get surprisingly sort of breast v bottle feeding, don't they?"

Whoa -oa! Speaking as an ex-breastfeeding counsellor, I wouldn't go near that one!!

But the method of teaching reading isn't a lidfestyle choice, it is something which can have a profound effect on the emotional and educational well being of a child. The adverse effects of faulty instruction can be lifelong and debilitating.

[ClenchedBottom]

Maizie - I'm always alarmed to hear people completely discounting the role of context (and hey, sometimes even pictures!) in decoding - in favour of 'my way is the only way to do it and every other way is wrong.' Please note, I am in favour of thorough, structured teaching using phonics. But what is the point of reading? Not decoding, but understanding, so why on earth would we want to discourage pupils from using their understanding to inform their phonic approach to an unfamiliar word?
And for a young pupil, expecting them to not pick up a clue from a picture is just unrealistic IMO.
And it is only my opinion, of course.

(And breeeeeaaaaath)

[Thromdimbulator]

I have complete sympathy with the OP on this one. Beginner reading books have so few words anyway in the early stages that it makes a complete mockery imo of synthetic phonics teaching if half the words are beyond the reader's code knowledge. My DS had books with a big picture of ladybird, text read: "a ladybird", picture of a spider and ... well yes, "a spider"! What exactly were we supposed to do with these? The school's response told me they either did not 'get' synthetic phonics, or that they did not support it.

A child that is searching for picture clues is not looking at the words. How can a child learn to read without looking at the words?

[bishopb]

A school that is truly committed to teaching synthetic phonics should NOT be sending home ORT reading books- as simple as that! This smacks of confusion on the part of the staff. If I were you I would simply read any 'tricky' word to your child without giving them a chance to guess. If the school can't afford or be bothered to provide de-codable books for home reading I suggest you might buy some yourself-Dandelion books or the like. (Some tricky words such as 'your' 'was' etc they do need to know at an early stage though.)

[maizieD]

"Maizie - I'm always alarmed to hear people completely discounting the role of context (and hey, sometimes even pictures!) in decoding - in favour of 'my way is the only way to do it and every other way is wrong."

And I am always alarmed to hear that people seriously think that guessing words from pictures and context is 'reading'. As I said earlier, that is what the reputable scientific researchers find that poor readers do. Why on earth should children be taught strategies used by poor readers? I'm also alarmed to see that guessing words from pictures and context is thought of as 'decoding'. 'Decoding' is exactly what it says, using alphabetic code knowledge to 'read' a word by sounding out and blending it. There is no need for any other 'stratgey'once the code has been learned. And while it is being learned children should not be expected to read books which contain words which cannot be decoded with their current phonic knowledge.

Taking 2 years to learn the full alphabetic code (and many children take less time) and in the meantime being denied the dubious literary pleasures of ORT books is hardly going to ruin a child's reading 'career'. In some countries children don't even start learning to read until they are 7.

I'm happy to admit that a skilled reader can get the gist of a text by making educated guesses at the meaning of unfamiliar words, but they are skilled readers who have knowledge and experience; beginning readers have little of either. Reading, throughout a child's school career, should be focused on accuracy and vocabulary extension. Guessing from context can let children down badly in exams if they make the wrong guess. And I'm sure you all want your children to finish their education with a goodly collection of exam results...

[mrz]

Can I just ask what you would do with a word that uses an alternative letter pattern that represents more than one sound - for example the ea from the OP.

I went to the shop for a loaf of b r ea d.

the child has only been taught that ea represents the long vowel /ee/ ... so sounds it out breed

I personally would ask does that make sense in this sentence (context) and then talk about how sometimes ea represents /e/ and look at a list of words that follow that rule.