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.

*my daughter read fluently at home and was on our chapter books whilst the school still had her shackled to buff and chop.

I remember at parents evening querying this and saying she's on lemony Snicket why is she on a low reading level. The teacher said she isn't reading fluently at school she's sounding out words.

When is queried this with my daughter she said, I thought that's what they wanted and how they wanted me too read!!!!😂 C.....a......t..

When she's flying through novels

Our reading rate is a lot better with phonics.

Who has read mystics before physics? Not me that's for sure!

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

Proper, systematic synthetic phonics has only been taught in all schools within the last 15-20 years (my DC are early 20s and are from the period when schools were swapping over but many were still using confusing ‘mixed’ methods). So only the youngest prisoners will have been taught this way - and as the level of literacy in the general population has improved with the focus on phonics, it is possible that the same is true of the youngest prisoners .

Sadly, there is still some very poor and limited phonics teaching in some schools.

Phonics is supposed to be a good method for most children, however there are significant outliers and I’d prefer teachers had more discretion. For example phonics is much more challenging for dyslexic children than traditional methods and diagnosis is discouraged before 7/8.

It’s “efficient” at population level as it works better for lots of children and the phonics test gives the government a metric on the quality of teaching and learning phonics. But it’s not effective if it disadvantages a good chunk of children, in that they find it harder to read for longer and of course it’s worse for the individual. I’d much rather we had skilled pedagogues making judgements tailored to the child than the factory approach.

OK. I think nobody's posted this one yet. Please can any phonics peep explain how this method deals with George Bernard Shaw's famous spelling example:

"English can, of course spell “fish” as “ghoti”—the first two letters pronounced as the last two in “tough,” the middle letter as in “women,” and the last two as in “nation."

Asking for a friend.

We have been told that DD is unlikely to pass the phonics test. Her teacher (who is lovely) thinks she may have some kind of learning/ processing disability.

She was referred to SENCO in Feb - still waiting for an assessment.

I'm not bother if she passes - she's happy, settled and try's her hardest. She is making progress, just not as much as her peers.

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

No she’s in state school but I found a specialist tutor for her. Once she found the right scheme for her, my DD caught up to her reading age within 3 years - cost a fortune but money very well spent. When I spoke to her school about Toe by Toe and how well it was working for my DD they commented it was an older reading scheme but didn’t change the way they were teaching despite it being a phonics based scheme. I think it’s ridiculous there’s no flexibility to use what works for kids who don’t fit in the Biff and Chip box.

‘gh’, though an alternative grapheme for the phoneme [f] at the end of a word, is never used at the start.

Equally, ‘si’ and ‘ti’ are alternative graphemes for the sound [sh], but are never found at the end of a word.

Phonics is not a simple jigsaw of ‘fungible’ sound / letter correspondences. Properly taught, it also looks at where particular options are used (which may involve knowledge of root words and languages- words derived from Italian / Latin, for example, have different rules about whether you can use ‘i’ at the end of a word.

To be fair, that’s the Government’s fault.

There has long been politics and reluctance to teach phonics properly (and to provide the money required for properly phonic reading schemes, of which Biff and Chip is NOT one) and for various reasons the Government has ended up mandating a few prescribed schemes (despite there being perfectly adequate others).

One would hope that, once ‘detailed synthetic phonics is the way to teach decoding’ is finally properly embedded (not holding my breath, it’s been a long time) things can become a little more flexible without a return to the confused ‘mixed methods with a nod to a few phonic sounds’ that has limited reading teaching for so many years.

Absolutely @cantkeepawayforever there needs to be a variety of approaches properly based on phonics. The “mixed” nature of Biff and Chip totally confuses my DD, so she memorised the word shapes to get through but because she masked so well the school didn’t notice she couldn’t decide - that surfaced in Covid when I was home schooling. If I had left it to the school she’d have left primary school functionally illiterate. While she does have learning difficulties she is able to learn, but needs the right method.

This. There’s also something called ´phonotactics’ which is about which sounds can appear in which phonetic contexts.
So, in English you never get a /h/ sound at the end of the word. You never get the /str/ combination at the end of a word either. And you can’t have /zdr/ as a combination of consonants in English at all, even though it’s almost the same thing as /str/ but voiced and it exists as a syllable onset in other languages like Russian.

Schools should not be using the ‘old’ Biff and Chip at all any more. It’s a decades-old mixed methods / sight word scheme that schools were actively given money to phase out in about 2010….

Any school still using it were very, very unlikely to be teaching synthetic phonics properly.

On the ‘ghoti’ example, phonics for spelling is more complex than phonics for decoding - because rather than a reader simply making the grapheme - phoneme correspondences that are there, in order to read the word, a speller has to select from amongst the various possible correspondences the one that is, in fact, right. DS, having taught himself to read, has always been an excellent speller. DD, taught synthetic phonics, was for a long time a dab hand at the ‘phonetically plausible but wrong’, before she was taught and observed more of the more subtle rules.

I think even phonics methods do end up teaching a bunch of words with a more sight-method approach because they are weird and wonderful in terms of phonics but super frequently encountered - things like ´I’ ´was’ ´has’ ´what’ ´why’ ´when’ ´does’ and also words that sound very different in a sentence to in isolation - ´can’ ´for’ ´and’ ´of’. But these words are grammatical building blocks are will be memorized really quickly despite their weirdness. It’s still super helpful for kids to be able to sound out words they might know but don’t see written down often.

So essentially you're saying that you come across physics for the first time you'd probably think:
Ph - that's an f sound like in photo and phone
y - a y in the middle of a word is usually pronounced as a short i like mystic
s, i, c, s - you know what sounds each of these letters make

Knowing those rules you could probably also read a nonsense word like 'syph' too.

Which is exactly what phonics is.

When people say 'I didn't learn phonics' or 'I don't use phonics' - generally what they mean is that they have learned enough words to work out the rules for how to pronounce sounds various combinations of letters (which is phonics).

Systematic phonics teaching in schools just means that children are explicitly taught the correspondence between letters and sounds rather than working it out themselves - because some children really struggle to work it out for themselves.

Phonics was the only way to read and they had to learn phonics there was nothing else

It's a massive over complication of reading and learning phonics and getting through the tests has totally lost sight of the entire point which is to simply, learn to read.

My brain isn't good at many things but I certainly didn't need this massively overkill system.

My second DD took three months without phonics to read.
We ditched it during COVID, went to be Peter and Jane books and within three months she went from a slow stuttering reader stuttering to blend s...ou...n..ds.. to just reading beautifully.

!!

It's got a cult like grip and yet if you search you can find extremely interesting articles against it.

Sure it has a place but we must be flexible from the get go and just let DC who don't get this over complication just read simple stuff.

And! If you have literacy issues and spelling issues phonics is another layer of nightmares

Strawberries, tbh it’s more about order. It is common in schemes for extremely common, short words that are that are essential to make sentences to be taught as ‘sight words’ because they have at least one grapheme that has not yet been taught (eg ‘the’). The child does learn the relevant grapheme - phoneme correspondences and eg the schwa sound , but does so later. They’re not really ‘not decodeable’, just ‘not decodeable YET but so useful we’re going to teach them now’.

It’s somewhat unhelpful to the image pf phonics, though, because it gives the early impression that ‘lots of words are not decodeable’ and this can lead to oarents and teachers deciding that ‘phonics is useless’.

However, you refer to Biff and Chip - not a phonics scheme? Do you mean ‘your school had a focus on phonics’ or ‘your school had a focus on Biff and Chip’? They are, genuinely, two totally different things.

If they used Biff and Chip - they taught using discredited mixed methods. I quite agree that that was unlikely to be helpful, especially if they combined it with limited prescriptive phonics teaching in class.

Is phonics a worldwide teaching method? I wonder if it's being bent, shaped and stretched to apply it to every language out there and perhaps it's better suited with some, not others.

For example, a really phonetic language is Tagalog - the common language of the Philippines - it has seemingly no silent letters, and you pretty much spell it like you say it. Kita tayo mamia, nag hihiro ako - things like that.

She wasn't taught mixed method it was phonics and taught to the test.

Like I said DD 1 got it but I believe would have got anything ds2 laboured under PhonicsShmonics and tricky trigraphs whilst failing to learn to read she did toe by toe and extra phonic
As I said thank goodness for COVID and Mumsnet and it was suggested to go back to basics and start again with Peter and Jane.

Three months!! Flying! Just looking at words and.....hey presto reading.

Disgraceful.

Pictorial languages with ‘whole word’ symbols - like Mandarin - cannot be taught through phonics, and my understanding is that being literate in those languages is considerably more difficult because of the number of symbols that must be momorised.

Your daughter will, however, use phonics - letter / sound correspondence- to read unknown words.

I’m sorry that the way she was taught it initially didn’t help. Some phonics teaching is AWFUL.

And does indeed lose sight of the fact it us a way to learn to read

Year 5 seems to be in a bit of a mess across the board from what I can see as a result of Covid