AIBU to think that phonics should just be called "learning to read"?

[lukeiamyourmother]

I was taught phonetically, so was my brother, husband, mother as was every friend I have talked to about this over a range of ages. I can't see any other way of learning to read? I am probably completely naive to this topic but I have overhead so many people praising phonics lately, so many forum posts about it, blogs etc.

Phonics just sounds like such a hot new buzz word for a pretty standard and old fashioned way of learning to read. I am 36 so it isn't even new! In fact I was a bit when someone recently proudly announced that their child was learning phonetically "Its just like, sooooooo great." Er... Doesn't everyone?

But Luke when you're reading this you're not laboriously spelling out every word are you? You're using the "Look and say" approach. Yes, if you come across a word you don't know you resort to phonics, but the standard every day ones you have memorised.

I was part way through reading "Lord of the Rings" when phonics clicked for me. It was the names of the characters I was struggling to remember, but the standard vocabulary I had no problems with. I was 6yo and had been reading since I was between 2 and 3yo.

I basically agree with everything NowThenNowThen has said, and probably far more concisely than I could have done!

I learnt through the 'look and say' approach, when phonics was vaguely popular. Despite being a very 'average learner', I was a good reader and very very good at spelling. The technique as far as I can tell is partly phonics. I learnt small words or syllables, then as I came across larger words, I had a log of all the syllable sounds and could break it all apart into the separate bits and be able to say it as a word. The most important thing was reading to someone, who when we came across a word that didn't fit the standard sounds, could correct me, and then I effectively 'stored' that word in my mind. I have a very good photographic memory for words, hence why my spelling was very good.
One interesting thing though, if someone asks me to spell something remotely complicated, I struggle to spell it unless I write it down.

My DD1 is struggling at school with phonics. I suspect this has been made worse by me not really grasping it either. She has memorised some sounds for letters, but if I point to 'cat' and ask her to sound it out, she will sound the letters out perfectly... but still not know that those sounds equal 'cat'. Unfortunately the school is so determined that everyone learns through phonics, that there appears to be no attempt to see if she can learn another way (and I am afraid I will confuse things more by trying to teach alternative techniques).

Would like to thank the OP for starting the thread though, its a relief to see there are other children that appear to have not got the phonics system either. My DD1 is 6 years old... and really hasn't grasped it at all.

I didn't learn to read, i just knew how to do it.

go figure.

i mean, i could already read before i started school, and i think that came about from being read to by my grandad and just picking up stuff and "reading" it. and watching Words And Pictures on telly.
so i have no way of knowing. probably a good mixture of look and say and phonics.

but! i don't know the phonemes and how to say the sounds.
(i am just doing it out loud - i seem to be able to work out how to say the sounds of most consonants, but not the vowels. but that's fine, because they change depending on the other letters)

katy - i am also an excellent speller :)

ekidna - that blog post was interesting.
it took me ages to work out what the title was supposed to say.
it finally clicked as i worked out (from the text) that the polees was police and not please!

NowThen
"I never knew about phonics until he started school, at which point I sort of got told off for teaching him the names of letters, rather than the phonics.
They would insist that he was simply memorising, and encouraged him with phonics, at which point he began speaking phonetically! (Very weird!)"

similar happened to me - i used to refuse to read the phonic letters on the wallchart/frieze thing at infant school, - being a precocious child, i felt it was beneath me (in my mind, they were trying to teach me the alphabet, which i knew!) they called in my mum, my mum said "she already knows how to read, what's the problem? leave her alone"

"Decode" this:
cough
bough
slough
dough
rough

The trouble with English is that it is not wholly phonetic and the plethora of irregularities need to be learned as special cases.
Whilst there is an underlying phonetic logic to English, no amount of decoding/phonics is going to solve the above list.

Practice, practice, practice is really the answer.

I also ponder whether the emphasis on phonics is contributing to the now very common use of incorrect homophones:
eg
you're
your

Phonics does cover homophones, and listing homophones does not show anything other than that English does not have one-to-one grapheme/phoneme correspondences. All methods, including those with lower success rates than phonics have to cover those, but it is harder if you have not learned the possible pronunciations.

It's an error to say any language, other than mime or sign language isn't phonetic. Phonics and phonetics are not interchangeable terms.

If you know when listening the difference in meaning between, say, bat/cat, bet/bit and but/bug, then you do know phonemes.