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.

I will be teaching my own child to read using traditional methods

Phonics is the traditional method. 'Look and Say' and all the rest were only introduced around the 1970s.

It matters which is the method that works for more children, and it also matters if you are implying traditional = tried and tested, better etc.

But how will she pass the phonics screening in year 1 if you teach her to read by sight?

OK, so is it that your child doesn't matter? Or you have a crystal ball that tells you that your child can already teach themselves phonics without you bothering? Not sure which it is.

Do you care about your child enjoying Dr Seuss, Roald Dahl, JK Rowling, JRR Tolkien?

I started school in 1978 and learned using phonics. My own children were taught that way too for the first couple of years of primary school before reading by just learning the words. The eldest in particular has always been a brilliant reader

Just to challenge the two crazy assertions made recently.

Firstly it is madness to suggest phonics help develop vocab. Children are learning their vocab from listening to people speaking not by reading.

Secondly its mad to suggest if you don't learn phonics formally you will never be using phonics to read. Clearly your brain absorbs the information about which patterns sound like what, as you read no matter how you learned to read initially.

As a final point, people seem very happy to sacrifice 5% of children to the system. Where the number 5% comes from I don't know but even supposing it is correct this is 33000 children every year. Its probably worth developing new methods to help them also, no?

Jolly phonics is good, they have songs to go along with learning (can be found on YouTube) I think I liked this for my child as she learns more through songs and actions so it really helped her along.

For all the people saying 'ah but if you didn't learn phonics how do you learn a new word without looking it up??' Well, first, if I come across a word in a sentence and I have absolutely no idea of the meaning or the pronounciation I WILL look it up (yup like all the people who think 'hyperbole' sounds the same as 'hyper bowl' should have done...).

And secondly - has nobody heard of context? Generally the context of a word will give you an idea of what the word means to the point you will understand the sentence. And if it doesn't, then look it up in a dictionary; phonics won't help you learn the meaning of a word, only how it sounds, if it works within the rules of phonics. I can read German pretty fluently out loud; my comprehension of what I have just read can be anywhere between 10 and 100% depending on the subject and vocab but that doesn't mean I can 'read German', it just means I understand the phonic code for German and where the stresses go in the sentence.

Morphene I think you might want to look at the research on vocabulary learning as MOST new vocabulary from school age and beyond is learned through reading it.

Has anyone said that phonics is about the meaning of words? It isn't. It's about knowing how to read and pronounce them, or how to spell them if you hear them spoken without seeing them written down.

It's not complete madness. Most adults use a relatively limited selection of vocabulary day to day. Which is enough for young children but as they get older, especially as they move into ks2, then vocabulary acquisition comes largely from reading widely. It's very difficult to learn new vocab from reading if you have no means of being able to decode words you've never met before.

IIRC the 95%, I think comes from a number of old studies and is a conservative estimate. TBH I don't know of any schools teaching phonics well that have a failure rate anywhere near as high as 5%.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay one of my (many) struggles with phonics is that my children have a different accent to me. So I find doing phonics with them difficult! They don't understand my sounds.

It's definitely more challenging teaching it in an area with a totally different accent to yours!

There's also the fact that most kids in school are talking to their peers and not to adults most of the time.....

Kids have more than half their total vocab by the time they learn to read...so getting more from reading than listening isn't really plausible.

On a personal note I was mis-pronouncing antipodes for a while back there....so I definitely learnt that word from reading...also proselytize. So thats at least two out of 20,000.

rafais but how you read as an expert is completely different to the method you learned initially. By the time you have read hundreds of books you have internalized the BS rules of English pronunciation, regardless of how you were taught initially.

This is similar to the way most native English speakers of my age can execute near perfect grammar while knowing absolutely nothing about grammar in a formal sense. You don't need to understand what an adverb is - you just have to have used the language for several decades.

The idea that you could only ever learn how to read a previously unseen word if you were formally trained in phonics aged 3-6 is total bollocks.

There not that similar are they? They are two very different processes. One is a developmental process and the other isn't.

And some children internalise jus through exposure, others will internalise the more common patterns but not the rest and others will not get it at all. IMHO reading is too important a skill to just leave it to chance.

TBH I can't think of any other area of the curriculum where we just hope the children will teach themselves.

For those looking for a good online resource, Reading Eggs is brilliant. Based on phonics but covers the sight words too. Good use of combination approach, great for all primary age, from basic letter sounds to quizzes about cinquain poem structure.

I think the 5% statistic comes from the Clackmannanshire studies - it’s something like the percentage of children taught synthetic phonics who by P7 (in Scotland) were two or more years behind in their word reading ability.

Details here:

www.gov.scot/Publications/2005/02/20688/52460