Phonics? Dc can learn to read without it? Surely? Those that don't get it.. ANY positive stories?

[Imnotthrowingawaymyshot]

My dd doesn't get phonics.
She just reads the words.
The school is still plugging phonics. Could there be an issue with my dd ie dyslexic? Or something else if she doesn't get phonics?
I just read the old fashioned way. Anyone else have dc who are fine but didn't get phonics? My older dc has very different brain, very ordered she got phonics and it helped her read like formula... Younger dc just bumbles along.
Year 2

So she is using phonics then. She can say a word that she’s read but isn’t in her oral vocabulary out loud even if it needs tweaking and that is the spelling of a child spelling mostly phonetically.

Wetn is an exception but it’s a high-frequency word so guessing it was taught as a sight word at some point,

Elisheva it's so frustrating to see how little phonics is understood by parents, and in some cases, teachers.

European people have learned to read for millennia by starting with the alphabet and working up from there. Otherwise known as phonics. You only have to look at Shakespeare’s spelling to realise that he hadn’t learned to read by memorising whole words.

It’s so frustrating to see how little phonics is understood by parents, and in some cases, teachers.
Absolutely, and I don’t even understand why people are so resistant to it. When done well it is such an effective method of teaching decoding, and the impact on children who do not learn to read is devastating.

There are very few words that need to be taught as sight words. Off the top of my head, the only one I would usually teach that way is 'one',

DNiece’s school reckoned there were 9 words that needed to be taught. Off the top of my head I can only remember one, two, eye. Possibly once.

European people have learned to read for millennia by starting with the alphabet and working up from there. Otherwise known as phonics

That isn’t phonics though.

Otherwise how do deaf people learn to read?
Profoundly deaf children struggle with reading precisely because of the difficulty with mapping phonics to print. However Deaf people who are fluent readers use phonics to decode.

@Imnotthrowingawaymyshot
I do understand why you are concerned. What support are the school actually offering your Dd?

The point was that phonics doesn’t help them in learning to read (or spell) because the “code” makes no sense to them. They cannot distinguish between the different sounds in phonics for each letter. So they guess and they are not consistent.
She might write heavy as hebby , but then three sentences later, it is spelled hedy, and later on as hebee.

However Deaf people who are fluent readers use phonics to decode.

No. Its not phonics that deaf people use to decode because phonics are by definition the relationship between the letter you see and the sound you hear when it is said. Deaf people use visual phonics, which is a misnomer in a way because it is entirely sight based using hand cues with no sound.

That’s not phonics, that’s phonological awareness. She’s actually using phonics pretty effectively to write a plausible version of the word.

I've never mentioned phonics to her or said the words..

You cannot sound out some words!

I've just held up flashcard and she said word!
She's guessed since starting to read.

I've always carried on normal school books as well

I honestly think we would still be on stage 2 if it wasn't for my intervention.

The school also forces every singel book to be read before moving up.
My older dd was on reading level that was not matching the books she read at home by a long shot

Elisheva someone's reads with her every day

I'm not agaisnt phonics, I was in awe of my first dd and how it taught her to read.

But I also see now she's actually a very bright solid student who also gets maths, amazing speller way above her age, same with reading. She has that type of brain.

Other dd doesn't get it.

someone reads with her every day
And that’s probably one of the best things you can do for her. She is fortunate.
But what are the school doing? Are they just complaining or are they trying some sort of intervention?

Elisha someone at school reads with her everyday. But only maybe 3 pages or less.

She's finally into habit of reading at home and she can read the whole book quite quickly now. She can finish it in one go easily anyway.

That was stage 4.
So they do a page or so and we read whole book each night.

Sometimes she'll let us read longer books eg Roald dhal. But not usually.

This is from dyslexia.com

Why Dyslexic Students Struggle with Phonics
Most teachers agree that difficulty with phonetic decoding is a hallmark characteristic of dyslexia. That is the reason that most dyslexia remediation is focused so heavily on phonics. It seems to make sense to intensify instruction in the area where the student seems to struggle the most.

This teaching strategy will often work well for students whose reading delays stem from poor preparation or inadequate exposure to reading before entering school. But children with dyslexia are often labeled as treatment “resisters,” as they do not seem to progress with even the most intensive and careful instruction. Researchers report that that 30-50% of children with learning disabilities fit this category.(2, 3)

The failure to respond to traditional intervention is so common among dyslexic students that it is now accepted as a valid alternative to formal diagnostic testing.(4)

Of course, these children are not willfully “resisting” anything. They struggle with phonetic strategies because their brains are wired differently. They simply are not able to categorize the sounds of language or connect sound to meaning in the same way as other students. Researchers now know that this difference is probably inborn and can be detected in early infancy.(5,6)

Additionally, research suggests that about 15% of children with dyslexia do not have the characteristic difficulties with phonics. Rather, if tested and diagnosed, they will be found to have a different subtype of dyslexia. They do well on tests of phonetic decoding, but have difficulty with irregular words, indicating a visual or surface type dyslexia. Phonics-based teaching won’t help that group because their reading barriers lie elsewhere. Almost two-thirds of children seem to have a mix of both types of dyslexia; for them, at best, phonetic instruction is only a partial solution.(7)

“Despite early difficulties with reading, some dyslexic children become proficient readers as teenagers or young adults. Brain scientists who have studied these late-blooming readers have found a surprising but consistent pattern. The dyslexic students who become good readers develop alternative mental strategies, relying more heavily on right hemisphere and frontal regions of their brains.(8, 9)

One long-term study of teenagers found that development of such “compensatory” brain pathways was the only distinguishing characteristic that could accurately predict which students would later become capable readers. (10)

In short, dyslexic students become good readers when they learn to use mental strategies other than phonetic decoding to gain reading proficiency. These strategies build upon the natural abilities of the students, teaching them to harness their strengths and use them to become accurate and efficient readers.”

References

2.Torgesen , J.K. (2000) Individual Differences in Response to Early Interventions in Reading: The Lingering Problem of Treatment Resisters.Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 55-64; Al Otaiba, S., and Fuchs, D. (2006)

1. Al Otaiba, S. & Fuchs, D. (2006) Who Are the Young Children for Whom Best Practices in Reading Are Ineffective? An Experimental and Longitudinal Study. Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol 30, No. 3, pages 414-431.

1. , M. J. (2012), Early identification and interventions for dyslexia: a contemporary view. Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs. Vol 13, Issue 1, pages 7-14.
2. Van Leeuwen, T., Been, P., et al. (2006). Mismatch response is absent in 2-month-old infants at risk for dyslexia. Neuroreport. Vol. 17, Issue 4, pp 351-355.
3. van Leeuwen, T., Been, P., et al. (2008).Two-month-old infants at risk for dyslexia do not discriminate /bAk/ from /dAk/: A brain-mapping study. Journal of Neurolinguistics. Vol 21, Issue 4, pp 333-348.
4. , D. & Hanley, J.R. (2012, August). Subtypes of developmental dyslexia: Stanovich et al. (1997) revisited. Talk presented at BPS cognitive section conference, Glasgow.
5. Shaywitz S.E., Shaywitz B.A., Fulbright R, et al (2003). Neural Systems for Compensation and Persistence: Young Adult Outcome of Childhood Reading Disability. Biological Psychiatry 54:25-33.
6. Horwitz B, Rumsey J.M., Donahue B.C. (1998), Functional connectivity of the angular gyrus and dyslexia. Neurobiology: 95: 8939-8944.

10. Hoeft F., McCandliss B.D., Black J.M/, et al (2011). Neural systems predicting long-term outcome in dyslexia. PNAS, Vol. 108, No. 1, pp 361-366.

If the ‘d’ is a letter reversal for ‘b’ then I’m not sure I see what your point is.

There’s a hearing/discrimination/pronunciation issue with b/v. But it’s consistent and otherwise she’s segemebted the word into it’s constituent sounds and picked a phonetically plausible spelling for each sound. It’s not the right spellings for that particular word but that doesn’t really indicate an issue with phonological processing or phonics. And inconsistent phonetically correct spelling is fairly typical of most children at some stage.

@Elisheva
The Oxford dictionary disagrees with you. Phonics is exactly what I said: “a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with symbols in an alphabetic writing system“

No sound = no phonics.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay
You don’t seem to understand that she can decode letters and words but that she is not doing it phonetically. So every evidence you see of decoding, you are assuming must be done phonetically because that is how your brain is wired.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay
In other words, because you decode words phonetically yourself and that is how you can tell decode what word she has written you are assuming you’ve reverse engineered how she encoded the word.

You don’t seem to understand that she can decode letters and words but that she is not doing it phonetically
Yes she is, her spelling clearly shows that she is using the sounds in words to spell them.

Well that’s what I’m trying to work out. I’m quite happy to accept she can’t use phonics at all. There are always a small number of children who can’t. But how is she getting from seeing the word ‘flubwump’ or ‘poikilotherm’ on the page if she’s never seen or heard them before to pronouncing it (even if it needs a bit of tweaking)?

Elisha someone at school reads with her everyday. But only maybe 3 pages or less.
Then the school are failing her. If she hasn’t ‘got’ phonics then just making her practice reading will not help. It’s like giving someone a flute and telling them if they practice for 10 minutes everyday they will learn to play, but not showing them how to play it.
Are they doing any reading recovery type interventions?

@DrAllcome Sorry, when I talked about phonological awareness I was referring to this sentence They cannot distinguish between the different sounds in phonics for each letter