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.

Phonics gives them the independence to work out unfamiliar words and works well for most kids. As you say, a lot of English words are not phonetic, so in the early stages, they are given words that largely are. The point is, it makes them understand the link between sound and letter, and as they develop, they learn the more complex ways of forming sounds via letters. It truly is one of the most successful systems, but like any system, one size does not fit all, and some children don't get it with phonics. Don't contradict what the school is teaching - that way, mega confusion lies, but try adding some other strategies to your dd's reading experience. All kids need to know there are several ways through any problem, so that will be useful. Make it fun, read to her, help her enjoy books - she'll get it.

But the limiting factor in comprehension is oral vocabulary acquisition. It has nothing to do with the method children are taught to decode with.

Apart from that it seems unlikely that hundreds of secondary Age children have been taught to read using a phonics only approach. It's far more likely that they've had mixed methods with a bit more phonics than they would normally have had.

Pengggwn you can disagree all you want - that's the evidence.
It is a shame though when children are being taught by someone who won't listen to the evidence.

www.teachingtimes.com/articles/the-simple

But why would they not be reading words in context of taught through phonics?

Your same argument could be made about teaching words through sight.

word recognition seems to me to be the way to go.

What I've never understood about this or 'Look and Say' and similar systems is what happens when children are reading independently and come across words they've never seen before. How do they read words they've never been taught to recognise?

Exactly Harriet.
What tends to happen is that as they read using word recognition the child notices the letter sounds and develops their own phonics recognition. Unfortunately this development is not usually sufficient to cover some of the more obscure variants. And less able children just never make the connection at all which is why they end up at secondary schools and can't cope.

Haven't read all the comments. But I have to defend phonics here. I teach it and we need it because there are so many variations of how to spell words and there are often so many different ways of spelling one sound. Children need to recognise these sounds so when they approach these words they recognise that, for example, bird and herd sound the same because they both have an 'er' sound in them.
Children have daily phonics lessons, we intensively teach sounds, we teach them to sight read the tricky words. We build our way up through the sounds and children should be getting reading books at their phonic levels. We stream our children across ks1 and teach groups depending on ability rather than year group.

. But I have to defend phonics here. I teach it and we need it because there are so many variations of how to spell words and there are often so many different ways of spelling one sound
I'd have said that was actually a negative against phonics. Because it leaves the child thinking there are many possibilities of spelling a word when in fact, in most cases, there's only one correct one. They then have to learn the correct one to actually write it correctly.
You don't get credit for writing it phonetically correctly in the real world.

Harriet I learnt to read with look and say and didn't get phonics until I was in year 2. I remember it clicking. I was half way through book 2 in Lord of the Rings Trilogy at the time.
If there was a word I didn't know and couldn't work out from the context (eg a name) I'd ask someone and then remember it.

I think for me the worst thing about phonics is how there is a fanaticism about it. People have told me that I wasn't actually reading before I learnt phonics-it didn't apparently count. Or maybe I was just reading in phonics so quickly I didn't realise it

I'd be interested to actually see the research. And how much has actually been checked over the years. I've been told by researchers that generally if you take a group of children and do some wonderful new idea and study them they almost always do better because of the attention and other factors.

I suspect give a few years down the line there'll be research to show it's not as successful as they first thought and we'll start on the circle back round again.

@Pengggwn

Why do you think that other methods (than phonics) improve comprehension?

I think that children who can decode, blend and read fluently at an earlier age (as phonics usually enables) can then read to learn, improve vocabulary, understanding etc. I view it in a similar way to times tables. From Year 1 in my school, children have a 3 minute times table quiz. When they've mastered them (usually by Year 3), most other maths comes much more easily.

Why should a method like word recognition improve comprehension over phonics?

No witchend I disagree. It teaches children that if they've learnt the simple word 'Her' for example then not every other word with the 'er' sound in it is always spelt er. It's not teaching them many possibilities of spelling one word at all. But it is making them aware of bear, bare and pear, pair, to name but a few.

user if those rhyme in your dialect are you from Liverpool or Manchester?

How do they know it says 'bother' not 'buther' if they've never been taught the different sounds that 'o' makes?

And what happens at secondary school when they'll be coming across words like photosynthesis, sedimentation, dissolution, parliamentarian, electromagnetism, and lots of other unfamiliar words?

I was never taught using phonics
That means you were lucky enough to teach it to yourself. You still use it.

Yes Dr spouse I am although I'm not sure how else bear and bare are said ?
Those were just a few examples though. As I said I teach phonics and english on a daily basis and see the troubles children have if they do not use their phonics.

So what is your point then?
You were lucky enough to be able to teach yourself.
Everyone else is saying that only a proportion of children can teach themselves.
So why throw the children who can't teach themselves phonics under the bus by stubbornly saying you don't think it should be taught?