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.

One of the aspects of phonics that I don't like is that it is, IMO, too mechanistic to really inspire a love of reading. I know that there will be lots of keen readers who learnt using phonics, but there will also be a lot of children, I worry, that end up turned off of reading. When I was helping my son learn to read in reception, I found phonics to be a clunky and confusing way of learning to read. And I did feel that all the sounding out and blending largely stood in the way of taking any real meaning from the sentence he was reading. Interestingly, as a 7 year old child of 2 very keen readers, he is a very reluctant reader. It might, of course, just be how he is, but I do wonder... He is quite a good reader (after a slow start) - so phonics does appear to have 'worked' with him - but he just takes no real enjoyment from it, which upsets me is like a knife through the heart

Fortunately the idea that teaching children to read puts them off enjoying reading is total bollocks. So it's not something we really need to worry about.

Not being able to read on the other hand or finding it difficult is a huge barrier to reading for enjoyment.

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? I learned to read with Look Say in the 1950s, my kids learned to read with Look Say in the 70s and 80s and 90s (wide age range) A total of 4 different schemes were used and in all of them the same thing happened, 1. Child learned a number of words and when they could recognise them they got book1 which only had the words the child knew. Success, first reading book is read easily and child is praised and confidence is reinforced. 2. Child gets second book which has same words as first book, result? Successs child feels even more confident. 3. Books get more words and children get clues from context and illustration and hopefully work out the word and then learn it. 4. Phonics is introduced, in all the schemes I have seen this happens.

This is what I don't get, however many times you tell people that when children learn Look Say they go on to learn phonics and when children learn phonics they will start to recognise whole words and of course they have to learn the "tricky" words.

I can work out words using phonics but it doesn't always work. I was reading a book yesterday and I read wind, initially I read it as in a windy day but that didn't work and I knew it was wind as in winding up the clock. Context tells us alot, world recognition tells us alot and phonics tells us alot. None of them are 100% the answer.

Phonics is the traditional method. 'Look and Say' and all the rest were only introduced around the 1970s. Not true, I learned Look Say in the 1950s.

I can work out words using phonics but it doesn't always work. I was reading a book yesterday and I read wind, initially I read it as in a windy day but that didn't work and I knew it was wind as in winding up the clock.

Those are both accurate renditions using common phoneme-grapheme representations. You were using phonics for both of those.
Of course context helps. Who said it doesn't?

Pengggwn sorry I missed your reply on Monday. I hope it goes well, nothing better than teaching your child to read and love books. I hope it goes well.

Of couse both are accurate renditions using common phoneme-graphemes, only one was correct in context. I wasn't using phonics for them, I was using world recognition and then context to disregard the one that didn't fit. Phonics didn't tell me the correct word.

Whole word recognition didn't tell you the correct word either. Phonics did tell you two possible pronunciations. Without phonics that visual pattern could have the alternative pronunciations "fizzle" and "standard".

I've said this on a few phonics threads.

1. Look & Say / Guess doesn't help children identify whether they are reading the word eccentric or eclectic or electric. Phonics won't tell the child the meaning of a word, but at least they will know it's one they don't know.

2. My (adult) DD1 has poor phonics knowledge even though her vocab is good. She quite frequently can ask what a word in a book means, and it is a word I have never heard of. However by the time she has spelled out the word and I have pronounced it correctly she knows its meaning without having to be told.

I wish the phonics screening test had been there when she was in y1.

It's the same as phonics. And the phonemes/graphemes aren't really taught in isolation.

Blending and segmenting will happen very early on in teaching. Within the first few days, if not the first lesson depending on the scheme used. As soon as 2-3 sounds have been taught then you can practise reading and writing words. New sounds are then added every day or nearly everyday.

Combining sounds IS exactly what phonics is...

Blending, and teaching the common exception words on sight.

Reading for meaning SHOULD be taught alongside phonics but sadly the pressure of the screen means a lot of schools put more emphasis on discreet word reading.

There shouldn't be any 'pressure of the screen' if the schools are teaching phonics properly though. By the end of y1 passing the screening test should be a no brainer for 95%+ of pupils.

The only reason the screening test is there is because so many schools still are teaching mixed methods and/or bandying about untruths such as 'good readers often fail the test' or 'good readers go beyond phonics' or other nonsense.

When I was st school they would teach word end e.g. A T sounds like a-t at. Then you would pair with another letter. So C sounds like c. c-a-t, c-at, cat!

That's not an uncommon misunderstanding, pengwynn. For some reason there seem to be some people Rosen bizarrely invested in suggesting it. Despite the fact that nobody has ever suggested that phonics is the only part of reading or that it should be taught in a vacuum.

Just looking through the LSE paper, they seem to have made the same mistake.

rafais I agree we don't let children teach themselves when they reach the developmental level required to learn a specific skill. Its very sad.

All those wasted years drilling phonics.

My DD can't quite wrap her head around why 1/3 isn't the same 3/4. I could a) drill her on it b) wait a bit and see if she gets it next time it naturally comes up in conversation (usually when talking about time till bedtime).

Its a very flawed model to teach the same stuff to all children just because they happen to be approximately the same age.

Game:

"Run and touch the... table! Go!
"Run and touch the fridge!"
"Okay, run and touch the sin--k!"

So.... l-a-m-p, ch-air, f-l-oor, w-i-n-d-ow, b-oo-k and so on

Break the word down into sounds. Make sure the sounds are "pure" and do not have random ugh noises stuck on the end. "s" is a hissing sound, not "suh!"; "f" is a puff of air, not "fuh" etc. etc.

Practice this every day and she will start blending (slowly).

Leave the letter names alone. They only confuse kids at this stage. Current good-practice recommendations state that letter names should not be taught at all until children are blending quite smoothly.

There shouldn't be any problem with teaching phonics to the expected level, so that no/few pupils perform less well than the age-expected norm when screened (and any who do fall short can receive additnal support as the school sees fit).

The reading test is in the summer of year 2, so there is an full year of teaching to that test (if you really see what happens in the classroom like that).

Of course, there is absolutely no reason why teachers would go about it in that way. Learning the phonics code to access text is, when handled competently, just one facet of a literacy programme. I think there is a very high level of misunderstanding about this - sometimes stoked by deliberate misunderstanding.

I'd have agreed about the robust research if it was the only error. Not that it matters since it's only part of the background discussion and doesn't affect the results or the conclusion they reach.

Which, as it turns out is not really that teaching through phonics only is a waste of time since all children learn by 11.