Half of Americans can’t read

You don’t learn every word by sight, you learn some words and then as your knowledge about how the letters in those words work you start building a sense of how other words will sound based on your knowledge from speaking your language (not a very scientific way of describing this just my interpretation of how I read).

My children have all struggled with the way that phonics is taught because my families brain just doesn’t seem to work in the way that the people who developed the current method of phonics teaching assume they will. Sight reading really worked for the older two and I’m currently working on it with the younger one.

I learned with the whole word method as did my children and of course we can read!
We all have A level English and degrees in arts subjects which have included reading a lot and writing essays . You can't do that without being able to read!
Interestingly one of my children is an early years teacher now and has to teach phonics so she understand phonics too but that isn't the way she learned to read.

How old are you ? No Latin in my primary school. I did learn it in secondary, because I was at a selective, private all girls school. My older brother at a state school didn’t do Latin. My Dad did, at his grammar school.

It can't be true that you can't read without phonics. I started school in 1964. There was absolutely no mention of phonics . We were all great readers except for one boy. Looking back he was probably dyslexic but the teacher had no tools to help him as no knowledge of phonics. The rest of us flew along, becoming doctors, engineers etc. My mum, obviously older was a fabulous reader. Do you think she ever heard of phonics in rural lreland in the 40s?

My dd could read at 3 quite fluently without even one lesson in phonics. My dh is a fluent reader with a degree in a medical field. He has absolutely no clue of phonics as sometimes he asks me to spell an unusual word and when l break it down he looks at me like l have two heads.
But if someone runs into difficulty they need word attack skills and unfortunately if not given those they can become illiterate. I have taught adults, in a voluntary capacity for years and see how they fell through the net because reading didn't come easy and no one supported them.
I am a big advocate of phonics but won't accept that it's impossible to read without them.

Only for the favoured few.
The vast majority 80% went to secondary modern where there were no foreign languages

the cult of phonics is strong in schools. It’s not how I learned and it’s not the “best” method for every kid. I wish our schools had more resources, independence and creativity when it comes to teaching and learning.

I learnt to read in the very early 80s using the ‘whole word’ method. It worked very well for me; I always had a ‘reading age’ above my actual age through school. But I can well imagine it didn’t work for all children. It’s a shame schools can’t use both methods and tailor them to each child, though I realise this is probably impossible for a single teacher of a class of 30. As an adult, I seem to use a ‘whole word’ approach for tricky spellings too. If I am writing a word I’ve never written before, or a word I’m very familiar with but frequently forget the spelling of, I don’t sound it out but close my eyes to picture the word in full.

I’m reminded of when I tried to help my DCs with maths homework and taught them the ‘bus stop’ method for division. I got a note sent home from the teacher asking me to please not do that because they were learning ‘chunking’ for division, which I read up on but didn’t find as intuitive as the bus stop method. I did of course do as the teacher asked but was disappointed as my children had found the bus stop quite useful.

I'm mid-50s and I did Latin to A-level at my bog standard state secondary comprehensive. Probably varied by LEA.

I learned to read by breaking up words, which is why my family still refers to ker-niffs and ker-forks. I guess that is sort of phonics, though I don't know if it was referred to as such then. I also remember learning about magic E that changed sounds, e.g. car and care. That was probably around 2nd year primary.

Yes, I find most languages are more useful than Latin.

@ChocolateApples I guess I still don't understand how that's different from phonics.

I just explained it. Phonics involves sounding each individual letter, which is silly and pointless because all people, and children, know the sounds that all letters make. This is different from sounding a whole word at once.

What do you do with a long, unfamiliar word? Do you not break it down at all?

If it's extremely long, I may go through each syllable. Again, that's completely different from phonics.

Phonics is sounding out letter-by-letter, which is the wrong way to sound out a word.

Well you're splitting hairs now. The approach, fundamentally, is sounding things out letter-by-letter, which is silly.

If you have never seen the word "deep" before, then sounding it as "d" "ee" "p" is absolutely not going to help.

The correct approach is to follow the entire word and sound the FULL WORD at once. So you move across the word and say "deeeeeeeeep."

Everyone knows the sounds that letters make. The correct method is to sound out the full word, not letters.

I don’t know what phonics is as I’m older. I could already read by the time I started pre school - once I’d learnt the alphabet I taught myself, and was reading proper books by age 5.
I do remember being utterly disgusted at having to complete the reading scheme anyway, and did the whole thing very quickly then they just let me and the two other kids that could read, choose a book from the library and we were left to get on with it. It was great, but I was at school in the 70’s, it was all experimental - we had three year groups all in one class.

It was chaotic so I’m amazed we learnt anything although we could all respond to basic instructions in French as we had a teacher that just decided this was what she’d do!
No national curriculum back then. Somehow we survived and managed ok.

I could read long before going to school, and was punished in the first reading class for finishing the first book we were given before the teacher started.

Ha, yes, that sounds familiar !

Everyone knows the sounds that letters make. The correct method is to sound out the full word, not letters.

How do they know the sounds without being taught? How do they know ch is not cuh-huh but chuh? At some point, they will have been taught, and that's how they sound out whole words, from building it up.

I wouldn’t say that was splitting hairs @shuggles. Letters aren’t the same thing as sounds, not at all.

Phonics doesn’t sound out letter-by-letter. Some letters have simple sounds attached to them, other sounds require combinations of letters, like ‘ch’, ‘ng’ ‘ou’.

I went to a crappy state comp in the 1980s and studied Latin but it was only available because the head was a classicist. No other schools in the surrounding area did it.

I was reading at just turned 3 (turned out it may have been hyoerlexia contacted to AuDHD). However my mother taught me as I was ready and she thought it was too important to leave to the schools to deal with z.

With a president like Trump, education doesn’t seem to he a priority - I suppose the more educated the voters arw, the harder it would be to get away with his bullshit

You do not understand what phonics is at all. It is not about sounding out individual letters but rather blending the phonemes which make up a word.

If you have never seen the word "deep" before, then sounding it as "d" "ee" "p" is absolutely not going to help. Children learn to segment the word into the relevant phonemes; they will have learned the sound that the digraph ee makes, and can thus sound out and blend d-ee-p.

Oh I was talking about doing a division calculation on paper! Like you, I can’t really divide easily in my head, unless it’s an easy one. I’m ok at maths overall, and do at least know (most of) my timetables now, which obviously helps with multiplication and division, and I enjoy maths but I like it best with a pen and paper. Part of the problem with mental arithmetic for me is that I panic and go blank and forget the numbers I just had. If there is more than one step, I’m writing it down.

When I've seen children using "phonics," they sound individual letters.

Individual letters should never be sounded when trying to sound out a word.

I have to confess I haven't read the full thread, so may be repeating a pp's thoughts, but I think this is a little silly.

People have learnt intentionally via whole word throughout recent history, with 'phonics' something they intuitively picked up over time, as they learnt that certain letters and letter combinations usually produced different sounds.

But not always! Given that 'rough', 'bough', 'through', 'dough', and 'cough' all have different 'ough' sounds, and that kind of thing happens a lot in English, how useful is phonics really?

Personally I was hyperlinguistic, so reading complicated words from three (though not always understanding them!) so my experience was a little different, but my children (not hyperlinguistic) learnt the basics through whole words at home shortly prior to starting school, which taught phonics, and I think they ended up finding the very deliberate, broken down phonics an unnecessary confusion that weren't all that helpful to them.

So I think a blend of whole word with some phonics knowledge would be sensible, as some children will do better with the former, and others the latter. I don't think it has to be just one or the other.

But my point remains the same. If you sound out 5 or 6 different sounds individually, then by the time you've sounded out the 6th sound you'll have forgotten the others.

It is far easier and simpler to sound out the full word as a single unit, or do it syllable by syllable.

Like I said, if I had never seen a word before... let's say "universal"... I don't sound out every individual sound within the word. NO ONE does that in real life. I sound out the word in full. I move along the word and say "uuuuniveeerrrsssaaalll" as a single word. That's the normal way to sound out a word which everyone does.