Phonics

[DaisyRaine90]

To wonder how the hell my child is supposed to get from phonics to reading actual words?

She knows the letter names
She knows the phonic sounds

What next??

I swear she’s getting more confused not less.

Daisy - breaking that word down into parts is exactly what yoh do if using phomics!

My DD is in year 1 and so far we have found phonics great. She has been able to write a phonetically-plausible story for a year or so now. She responds well to having rules to remember and follow.

I went too the parc wiv mai sista and wee had a gow on ower biycs

Would be a sentence of hers for example.

I think for a lot of children it can help them feel they are progressing really quickly as they are soon able to use the knowledge to read and write. We have noticed that because she now has a love of reading, many of the common undecodable words are becoming second nature already, so I guess she'll iron the anomalies out as she goes along.

I'm sure there are some kids it doesn't work for but like most things I guess it's practice.

I spend most of the academic year teaching phonics and listening to readers, the combination of phonics and constant revision of tricky words really does work. In less than a year the vast majority leave eyfs confident readers It really doesn't work for all of them. My GS spent 4 years failing at phonics, totally. In one year his progress with me doing look say with him was described by the school as miraculous. In 18 months he was in top group for readers. School still don't know that the miracle was look say as they don't approve. The obsession with phonics and the stubborn belief that it always works is damaging some children.

It you don't use phonics, how do you read new words that you haven't come across before? For example medical terms, or legal words? You can't possibly 'know' every single word in the English language, and must have some mechanism for 'sounding them out' .

But, children who are just beginning to learn to read, the Cbeebies program Alpha blocks is very good at teaching blending.

I was never taught phonics (though I teach it now).

If I come across a new, long word, I use a combination of breaking the word into syllables and using words I already know to work the word out, as I have always done. I was a free reader at 6, despite never having read anything before I started school, aged 5. Learning to read uses many different methods. Phonics, on its own, may work well to begin with but there are so many exceptions to rules that it is not sufficient to achieve fluency and can be very confusing. I can think of at least 5 ways to spell 'a'. Is it caip, ceighp, cap, cape or cayp? All of those are phonetically right.

If children are getting books home with words like 'through' that they don't have the knowledge to decode yet, then that isn't the fault of phonics. It's the fault of schools teaching phonics badly.

Why does she have to know letter names? It isn't useful for helping children learn to read or spell and does provide a barrier for some children in learning to read.

All are phonetically right and there are a few more rare ones two. Part of teaching reading and spelling using phonics will involve teaching children to choose the correct spelling for a particular phoneme in any given word

This is done by providing lots of opportunities to read, sort and write words with the same sounds but different spelllings. Usually done as part of phase 5 or the equivalent in year 1.

You need to get a list of vc and then cc words. These are vowel consonant or consonant vowel consonant. These are the words she will be using to blend with initially if she's in reception doing phase 2 phonics. Just Google vc words or cvc words and you will get yourself a nice bank of words to focus on blending for reading and segmenting for writing.

Cvc*

Is she in reception? I was really sceptical about phonics but my six year old is an amazing reader now after he learned using phonics. My reception aged child went to school six weeks ago not knowing any of his letters and today has been reading 'the cat sat on the mat' etc. I'm a real convert.

I truly hate phonics. Teaching my daughter them delayed her reading massively. I started Home educating her almost two years ago and the first thing I did was get rid of them. I honestly cannot see how they are better than the way reading was taught when I was younger.

I think in the long run phonics is the best system of teaching children to read. I learned with the look and remember system, it worked really well and I was reading very soon after starting school. However I can't blend words even now, and my spelling is pretty terrible because all I ever learned were the shapes and meanings of words, not how words are actually put together.

DD learnt phonics, she learns in the same way I do and I've no doubt phonics held her reading progress back by at least six months, but that extra time taught her how to spell and understand the structure of English in a way I don't.

Every time I try to sound a word out with her it breaks the rules

Compulsory phonics in a non phonetic language is bonkers, but also a nice little earner:

www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2014/02/phonics-the-sounds-that-letters-make-kerching

^Phonics, according to Ofsted, are “letters and the sounds that they make”. But for some producers of phonics materials, the sound is the noise of cash registers going "kerching!".

Figures obtained under Freedom of Information by Professor Margaret Clark, visiting professor in early years education at Newman University, show that £25,593,109 funding has been provided under the Government’s match-funding scheme for buying phonics materials from a Department for Education (DfE) approved list. £22m was spent on materials and £1.3m for training.

Michael Rosen has written about it:
michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/17-of-children-good-at-phonics-but-not.html

One of the best places to learn to read is a friendly, warm, professionally staffed library, full of lovely children's books.

Reading is conceptual, it's not a utilitarian skill of 'decoding', especially in a language as singular and young as english.

a language as ... young as english.

Young in comparison to what? English has been a written language since around 600AD. It was a spoken language centuries before that. Yes, it's evolved since then, but every other language has evolved too.

I just don't understand how phonics can work with English. I could see it with something like Italian or German where there is consistency.

Be careful how you pronounce the letter sounds. If you say cuh a tuh it is hard to blend them. Try running them into each other and maybe saying the vowel sound for a longer time -caaaaat. The child will then begin to recognise that this is cat without sounding it out each time. As they get older they will learn that certain combinations make their own sounds. Like ough depending on the word it is in. Think of through, though, thought, rough, bough, and cough. ough can make 6 different sounds so then a child will the sense of the sentence to know which sound.

600AD. ?

Not sure where this comes from? You mean the Anglo Saxons? The language would have been extremely Germanic.

Chaucer writing in the 14th century is one of the earliest recognisabl-ish forms of English, but even now it reads like a foreign language.

Great thing about Chaucer is it reveals the immigrant language that 'English' is with Norman French Germanic Saxon, Latin, Viking Scandinavian roots. It's why English is such a brilliant language, it's made by immigrants.

It is a very young language compared to: Hebrew, Sanksrit, Mandarin, Arabic etc. which go back millennia, whereas current English is barely 500 years old.

Be careful how you pronounce the letter sounds

Another reason for it being a barking mad scheme. It makes no allowance for the beautiful regional differences in pronunciation.

I was deeply sceptical but DD clicked with it suddenly in Yr1 and is now a very confident reader in Yr2. But it hasn't happened like that for all of her friends - I suspect it just suits some children better than others. It does seem like a very 'fixed' system and although DD has done well on it I'm not convinced it's good for everyone.

Fitzsimmons this might help.

English orthography is more complex than other languages, but it isn't totally opaque. It is learnable by well over 95% of children. It just takes a bit longer to learn all the sound symbol correspondences.

Yes phonics teaching does allow for regional differences in pronunciation. You teach to the accent of the children in the area you are in.

There are a lot of misconceptions about phonics on this thread.

There are very few words in the English language that really can't be read with phonics at all. Most are fairly easy to decode once the complex code has been taught.

Phonics (if it is taught well) works for 95%+ of children, while other methods work for around 80%. So while it doesn't necessarily work for every child, it is the best method that we have.

Most problems with phonics are down to the way it is taught e.g. not covering all of the complex code, not providing appropriate reading material so that the child has to guess, teaching children that many words can't be sounded out' because again that makes them think they have to guess.

£25 million pounds spent just to start up the scheme could have bought few more lovely school libraries and librarians, which arguably would have been a better way to spend the money.

Not to mention conflict of interest issues in the funding:

Ruth Miskin was also an adviser to the DfE on the primary curriculum. When the primary curriculum review was announced and the names of advisers, TES reported concerns about a possible conflict of interest between Miskin’s role as adviser and a producer of teaching materials. The DfE and Miskin denied this at the time saying the curriculum review would not be recommending particular publications.

www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2014/02/phonics-the-sounds-that-letters-make-kerching

A version of it had been trialled with many problems already revealed in America, but somehow it was imposed on English schools.

Phonics (if it is taught well) works for 95%+ of children, while other methods work for around 80%. So while it doesn't necessarily work for every child, it is the best method that we have.

Where's your citation for this claim?

I will read up on other methods. As many have said, it works well for many but not for all.

You can say I use phonics to decode long words or know how to say or spell them, but honestly I learnt to spell by learning while words. When I come across a new word I tend to look it up, and memorise the word, meaning and spelling. I have been doing this since I was on primary school and am one of the best spellers I know.

Sometimes I say words wrong, sure, but who doesn’t the first time they say a word they’ve never said out loud before.
It’s kind of irrelevant though because most people don’t understand the true meaning of long words, so I write them in my academic work but when I speak I try to simplify a little so that it makes sense to the average lay person who does not take an interest in linguistics.

I will try blending with her. I am also going to try to get her to memorise some common words such as “and” “you” “the” etc. To help her reading fluidity.

She has to learn her letters because she is starting a school that does not use phonics. She also needs to learn A-G for music 😊

I have to say, there are a lot of things I disagree with in modern teaching and the rejection of rote learning is one of them. It is still how I (do very well) in exams to this day and I cannot see a problem with that for those it works for. I think they should use a combination of methods in schools instead of sticking rigidly to the current fad.

Yes I am sure I do “sound things out” a little when speaking or reading other languages, but even those that use the same alphabet often have different sounds than the phonics used in English.

I can’t see how phonics will help when it comes to a child learning Latin, French, German, etc.

"Yes phonics teaching does allow for regional differences in pronunciation. You teach to the accent of the children in the area you are in."

It's because phonics isn't phonetics. It's the code between the phonemes - ie the sounds of a language which carry meaning (whatever the accent) and the graphemes- ie how they are written. So it doesn't matter whether you say bah-th or bar-th, it's a different phoneme to 'both'. The code isn't one-to-one in either direction, but doesn't cover pretty much everything in the English language (except a few imported words which retain the phoneme/graphemes correspondences of their original language.