Sceptical about phonics, the test includes made up words.

[SueSuddio]

I've thought that phonics hasn't totally worked for my eldest because pretty much every other word over 3 letters in English is not phonetic.

I've just been given an email about an upcoming phonics test and this para stood out:

"It comprises of a list of 40 words that children read one-to-one with a teacher. The list is a combination of both real and made up, non-words which rely purely on using phonics to decode. The non-words are words that have been made up and will be shown with a picture of an imaginary creature to help them."

So the phonics test includes non words. I don't quite understand how if we want children to read English, we aren't using real words, so many of which have their own rules and pronunciations. We're not teaching them how to read Pokémon names surely?

It's s a shame because my DS is good at word recognition so he won't really get these non words.

I failed phonics. Only thing I truly could not do in school. My dd also massively struggled with phonics. It had absolutely no impact. Dd has hyperlexia and can read and write anything. Her reading comprehension tests are always dramatically beyond her age. She just can’t manage phonics.

i honestly don’t get the point. All you need to do to read is look at a word and read it. Apparently though most of the population’s brain doesn’t work that way, hence the ridiculousness of phonics that ASD people must endure. Vowels and letters make different sounds under so many different conditions in English and even by region that phonics is a constant set of contradictions.

Phonics was the only thing that made sense to my autistic, dyslexic DD, the Toe by Toe programme uses made up words to test decoding which showed that rather than decoding words she was memorising them. While that was a great feat of memory, she was always going to be limited in her literacy. Having been unable to decode age 9, her reading age is now consistent with age expectations. The made up words showed where her gaps were and was very worthwhile for her.

The reason nonwords are included is because children can't guess at them by what they 'look' like. They have to apply their knowledge of each phoneme (letter sound) in order to decode it.

I don't know, I'd have thought, like many, a lot of people look at new words and compare them mentally to other words that look like them and apply their pronunciation rules, because phonics is often unreliable.

But isn't that phonics? Comparing to other things that have the same sounds?

The bit that you describe as ‘look at new words and compare them with other words’ is, essentially, the reader working out the phonic code for themselves (my DS did this - taught himself to read before he started school, by applying the ‘rules’ he worked out from being read to (‘th’ makes that sort of sound in word A, it probably does in this new word B too) to become a reader.

Synthetic phonics is, at base, just teaching the rules directly, rather than expecting every reader to work them out for themselves.

Sorry, cross posted with PP making exactly the same point.

That's my natural take on it, and as an 80s kid, I was a sightreader,. My DS was behind in reading and observing him phonicsing every word was a bit painful, but I guess many posters have said it's useful. I think it should be a blend perhaps.

I don't know, I'd have thought, like many, a lot of people look at new words and compare them mentally to other words that look like them and apply their pronunciation rules, because phonics is often unreliable.

Yes. This is why when a child is shown the non word 'chack' they don't want them to guess at 'chick'. They want them to accurately decode.

This is why they tell the child it's a non word - an 'alien' word. So that the child knows not to guess but to read what it actually says. This tells us whether or not the child can decode. This is important because if the child cannot decode, which as some posters have pointed out does happen, the school can use other methods to support that child's reading.

Phonics is complete bullshit imo. You can't have as many exceptions as you can rules!
Silly... just let the kids learn to read because reading is fun!

It's not teachers doing their own phonics checks that's the problem, it's them being mandatory and reported as a way of judging the school. Phonics are so easy for teachers to check and they'll be doing low stakes checks regularly, and are able to put the score in context with other knowledge such as reading age etc.

I think the national phonics and times tables checks are a fad and will be scrapped soon enough, just as national curriculum levels were. Try not to stress if his teachers think he's progressing.

Edited as 'low stakes' autocorrected to 'low stages'.

I think I could live with phonics checks. I went to school in the 80s. Phonics was such a fad then that we had a phonics textbook and it was on the schedule every day, just like math, science, and reading. It was even a subject listed on our report cards in primary school.

I started working for a company that creates medical diagnostic tools last year. Never worked for a company that does anything sciency before, I'm a glorified web developer.

Lots of long complicated names of chemicals and medical conditions etc, none of which I'd laid eyes on before. The fact I can sit in a meeting and ask "So what is a doohickythingamawhatsit?" without completely garbling the pronunciation is entirely down to phonics.

It’s not fun if you can’t do it, if having rules about sounds and blends helps you learn how to do it then great. Different strokes for different folks.

The fact I can sit in a meeting and ask "So what is a doohickythingamawhatsit?" without completely garbling the pronunciation is entirely down to phonics.

Yes, exactly. I was just coming to say that you not only need to be able to recognise the word on the page, you need to know how it's pronounced, so you can say it, and recognise it when someone else says it. If you can't match letters to sounds, and sounds to letters, how do you do that?

But if you were coming across the word 'physics' for the first time, your brain would probably recognise the same characters as the word 'mystics' and try this pronunciation.

I think there's a lot of word comparison going on and to be honest it's probably a better way than sounding out 'fie-sics'.

I also see my child trying a pronunciation and then twigging the word as he's saying it, because he's realising what it might be. So that's another way of recognition, from just having a broad spoken vocabulary.

I really appreciate all these posts by the way, it's good to hear from different perspectives, phonics and the use of it intrigues me.

I also see my child trying a pronunciation and then twigging the word as he's saying it, because he's realising what it might be. So that's another way of recognition, from just having a broad spoken vocabulary.

But that’s the point! Reading, using phonics, enables a reader to sound out a word, rapidly compare it with ‘existing word knowledge’ and therefore blend and read it accurately. So ph-y-s-i-cs: try [f] [ie] and [f][i] options instantaneously, go ‘oh, physics’. Eye movement studies show that this is actually what fluent readers do even if they think they are reading the whole word.

The word 'off' is phonetically regular. Short o (taught first and standard) and 'ff'.
The word 'phone' is also phonetically regular. Known as the magic e. Compare the a sound in tap and tape. Put an e at the end and it elongates the vowel sound.
'Fish' also phonetically regular. F, short i and 'sh'. Will also be taught very early on after CVC words.
There are far more rules with phonics than generally a lot of people are aware of.

Never, ever talk about the magic E. It’s a split digraph!

The aim of phonics is not that a child should continue to explicitly sound out and then blend every sound in every word. It is that the decoding becomes almost instantaneous, in which the reader ‘scans through’ the word, comparing it to known words, known part words and known individual graphemes, to come up with what the word is.

The only difference between teaching phonics directly and ‘teaching through sight words’ - but the difference that massively increases the probability that the child will learn to read successfully - is that the code is taught explicitly and systematically, ratger than requiring the child to work it out for themselves.

Yes, there's always going to be some words that phonics doesn't work for, or that another method is better.

Phonics is just one tool in the toolbox. Yes, on this occasion you need a screwdriver but at some point you're going to need to hammer in a nail.

Spotting patterns like that is phonics though. It’s just that phonics is complicated in English. It’s not one letter to one sound. It’s one letter to several sounds, several sounds to one letter, and sometimes digraphs or trigraphs where two or three letters together make one phoneme - like <th> and <sh>

Phonics is also just teacher/education speak for grapho-phonemic correspondances - or in plain English, links between sounds and letters.

@Jellycatspyjamas I'm surprised he was exposed to other reading schemes was/ is he in private school?

@SueSuddio

I've done lot's of research into it, it's almost cult like.

My DD 1 learned to read with it no problems however that doesn't mean she couldn't have learned just as well with others reading methods. She's a bright girl and had a higher reading age than her age from 10.

Our reading is appalling as a country and high levels of prisoners are ilterate