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.

You're more likely to have encountered photograph and phone and, knowing that you start with the nearest letters, that gives you the ph/f sound, then you've probably seen and heard mystery (because you're a kid and have watched Scooby Doo or any other number of stories about mysteries) for the iz sound, and then there's ic-s or ix, maybe heard in school that PE is short for Physical Education. Bingo, word is Physics.

Weird 'words' test the ability to do exactly that - and not just recognise the shape or see part of it and have a stab at it. It's how people learn to say (or spell if they've only ever heard it on TV) complex words like Archaeopteryx or pneumonomicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (which is also a bit of a flex when you're nine and can finish off your triumph with 'It's a disease of the lungs in miners, duh!') and switch to reading something written in French using the correct pronunciation, even if the letters look almost identical or exactly the same - you've learned to do it in English, you've learned that those rules/sounds are slightly different in another language; the skill is transferable to both other languages using the Latin alphabet with various differences and for many other languages where text represents sounds.

When you see people spelling words incorrectly but more or less phonetically for their accent, that's them using phonics - and when you see a mispelled word, phonics gives you the ability to decode it (even if you do want to scream IT'S NOT CHESTER DRAWS OR REST BITE).

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.

Yes, that would be… phonics. ‘Physics’ and ‘mystics’ - the ‘ys’ have the same sound, the ‘ics’ have the same sound. But physics doesn’t have a T like mystics, so why would you add that into the physics??

And yes phonics varies regionally, my northern nieces and nephews (and husband) pronounces the ‘u’ in ‘luck’ differently to my southern children and me, for example

There are many languages that lend themselves far more amenably to phonics than English. Irish, Russian, Finnish, German, French spring to mind.

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.

You'd be fine tackling the word 'syphilis', but 'syphon' would be problematic.

@PhonicsShmonics There are outliers to learning phonics, but at a population level it is by far the most effective way to learn to read.

This doesn't help your child, but by saying phonics is rubbish, you're ignoring the 95% of people that are better readers because of it.

Not everything works all of the time with every child, but schools have to go with the evidence of which method applies the best to the majority, and the clear winner is phonics.

I've seen the difference in secondary classes. Kids can decode much better than 25 years ago. The problem now is students comprehending what is written.

And that brings us back to vocabulary and children's experience of language in everyday life, both written and verbal.

I would say that the main problem with phonics is that, in most schools, the teaching of phonics tends to stop in Year 2, or after a child has successfully passed their phonics screening check. This means that children aren't taught the 'advanced code' of phonics, such as when to choose the different graphemes (eg. C,k,ck,ch can all represent the 'c' sound -cat, kitten, duck, Christmas). Unfortunately key stage 2 teachers often aren't skilled in understanding and using phonics and children just learn that a large number of words are 'irregular' whereas good, solid teaching which combines phonics, morphology (eg, using -ed for past tense, even though this may be pronounced in different ways - as in washed (sounds like 'd') jumped ('t') landed ('ed') and etymology (the history of words) can teach all children to read and spell. Another example is looking at related words - the 'g' in sign isn't actually representing a sound, it is part of the root word and can actually be heard in other related words using the same root (eg signal, signature).

Phonics doesn’t work for all children but it works well for the majority, England now has some of the best attainment for reading in the world, which I think is a sign of its success, although it should also be recognised that some children need a different approach.

Passing the phonics check (or not) is not a solid indicator of future life success, so I wouldn’t worry about that in/of itself.

Most kids will grasp phonics (if taught well), and will be able to use it to decode and read new/unfamiliar words. The made up/alien words in the tests are how they can assess if they’ve grasped the concept of phonics rather than just recognising words they will have seen regularly.

for a small minority of kids, they will really struggle with phonics. many of those who struggle with phonics are subsequently diagnosed with dyslexia.

Switching to another reading scheme based on whole word recognition is usually helpful for these kids. However, early days can be a struggle either way as most texts in reception/year 1 are short words, which can be more visually similar to each other and thus harder to recognise than longer words.

my DC could recognise words like butterfly but were still struggling with bed/bad/dad

Dd2 has never passed a phonics test. I raised this at the time and later and they said its nothing to worry about. Moved to a village school of just 30 pupils and was diagnosed as dyslexic within 6 months, in Y4.

They do alien words in phonics all the time, it won't be new to him.

‘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.

Ghost, ghostly, ghostlike
Ghoul, ghoulish
Ghillie
Ghetto
Ghastly
Ghee

Aghast
Spaghetti

Anti
Cacti

Quasi
'Pepsi'
Farsi

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.

@cantkeepawayforever
That is a definition of phonics that strays a long, long way from letter/sound correspondence and well into etymology territory.

When you delve into etymology as a means of teaching pronunciation and spelling, you are presenting a situation where a student is asked to forget much of what he or she has learned of letter/sound correspondence and simply learn spellings in certain classes of words in order to read and write them correctly.

I’m a bit puzzled - in none of those is the grapheme [gh] encoding the phoneme ‘f’, which is exactly the point I am making.

’Fish’ cannot be written starting with gh, because gh is not used to encode the ‘f’ sound at the start of a word. I completely agree that ‘gh’ can be used at the start of a word to encode the sound ‘g’.

Have I misunderstood?

Phonics is more than 'complicated' in English.

Success in learning to read in English via phonics (or any other method) requires much more reliance on context and on working memory and a strong vocabulary than in any other language. Not all children come to school equipped with all the tools needed.

Spotting patterns will only get you so far.
Enough
Rough
Trough
Tough
Though
Through

Threw

The advanced code of phonics does look exactly at where and why certain correspondences are used - and I agree the advanced code is rarely taught well. It remains a better way of teaching reading - and spelling - than random look/cover/write/check ‘Year 3/4 word lists’.

No, you haven't misunderstood. I omitted a chunk of my intended point, which was that GH isn't a great example of how patterns or rules work in English. In fact, G in general poses problems (similar to C).

Nobody is saying that ‘phonics us the only tool needed to learn to read, write and spell’. But, properly taught, it’s a better tool, with significantly better results for reading at a cohort level, than the alternative methods tried.

I only introduced it because of the ‘ghoti’ = fish point made by a PP, who I should have quoted for clarity. Apologies.

Most words are phonetically spelled, the rules are just complicated.

I bet you can read all of the alien words and know exactly how they are pronounced.

The phonics test doesn't test how good your child is at reading, it tests how good the school is at teaching phonics. You don't need to worry about it.

To be pedantic:

CVCC, CCVC or CCVCC words only contain single letter graphemes such as jump, frog or drink. The letters all make their usual sounds. This is what used to be called phase 4 of phonics and is all about blending letters together (sounds such as dr, br, cl, str).

Two letters together making a new sound is called a digraph and these are what are taught as a big part of phonics. Some are taught before phase 4. Most are taught in what used to be called phase 5. Examples: sh, ch, th, ai, ow, ir, oa, ay, a-e
You can also have trigraphs eg igh

All schools in England (apologies, I don’t know about the rest of the UK) should be using government accredited synthetic phonics schemes which teach all of this and usually have linked reading books.
If taught well, alongside common exception words (tricky words) such as the, one, was, phonics is very effective at providing most children with the tools to both decode words when reading and write independently (in terms of giving them ways to write sounds down to create words). From about year 2 onwards they start to learn which phonetic combinations are used for different words eg ay in day, ai in wait, a-e in cake
The teaching of reading obviously involves more than phonics but phonics plays a big part. The analogy pp gave of times tables and maths is very apt.

I think the idea will be to make sure the child knows the sounds of common blends, not just sight recognises words. Some children are excellent at sight learning common short words, but that means that any unfamiliar word they are instantly stuck on. So for instance:

Take 3 words

• shop
• erop
• shet

They could learn "shop" as a complete word. They could recognise that word in their books or even on a sign. They could be confident at reading "shop". However, the minute they see "shoe" or "flop" they have no idea. If they have to read "erop" or "shet" they don't recognise those as a complete words, and there are no signs with those on, or pictures that clue them on those words, so they HAVE to read them by knowing OP makes the sound "op" like in "shop" or "sh" makes the sound "sh" like in "shop". So now when they see "shoe" or "flop" they definately know how to sound out part of the word.

Absolutely agree.

It's a huge improvement over look and say, which really was a cult (see the influence of Lucy Calkins).

I was wondering if anyone would recommend her Sold a Story podcast - I listened in utter disbelief at the damage that was done. It's worth a listen.

I also agree that while phonics isn't perfect, it does work for the majority of children and the phonics screening helps to identify those that may need more support.