Can someone explain to me the big deal with phonics?

[HowManyDucks]

Why does the UK curriculum prioritise the phonics method for reading over other approaches eg. Look-say? Particularly interested in hearing from the perspective of teachers. Do you think it is the most effective method or would you prefer to use other methods? I have always thought that phonics are a usefulness supplement, important for understanding how to say unfamiliar words. Wouldn't look-say be more effective for early readers, especially given that English isn't considered a phonetic language?

Happy to stand corrected.

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We have spent years trying to help DS get phonics. He is now being investigated for possible dyslexia and the ed psych has recommended whole word learning. DS is finding it much easier. So it definitely doesn't work for all but it probably does work for most.

Well Phonics is never going to be the sole method of teaching. They learn to sound out words alongside the sight vocabulary. Eg they learn to recognise "the" and then the phrases might be "the cat" "the dog". In read write Inc we call these red and green words. Green are the ones you can apply Phonics knowledge to read and spell and red are the ones you just have to learn. Works a treat.

Both my DCs learned to read using Phonics.

DS was a September born, yet arrived in YR class with very little reading skills.
DD arrived the following year - July born, but already had some basic literacy and reading skills in place.

Neither of them had big class sizes, so perhaps that's relevant?
Both of them were in a tiny village school with 4 other classmates.

I don’t know , I did exceptionally well in English and never needed to know any of the phonics terminology. We just got shown a picture of something with the word and repeated the pronunciation!

I’m a phonics teacher. I learnt with the look say method which was all fine and good but when I got to words I wasn’t explicitly taught, I found them hard to decipher. This is why synthetic phonics works better. We teach the sounds and so when children get to KS2 and beyond they use their knowledge of phonemes to read. These days I do believe the way we teach phonics is the best for accelerated early reading.

HOWEVER I feel that it’s had a detrimental effect on spelling as children ‘use their phonics’ which is usually wrong! It also does not work for some children and I have had to revert to ‘look and say’ teaching for those odd few in interventions who can’t grasp the concept of synthetic phonics. This isn’t very many though.

If you want to understand why phonics became the method for teaching reading, search on the Rose Report as that was what established the effectiveness of phonics as a method of teaching reading. It was controversial - my DC's school were good at teaching phonics but didn't always match their reading books to the phonics phase. We had a lot of old Oxford Reading Tree & similar books sent home. This might have been ok for children who found reading easy, but for it didn't work for us as my DC couldn't apply what they had been taught in school so had no method to work out the words. Thankfully there were some very knowledgeable & generous posters on MN who spent a lot of time explaining good phonics teaching (& what to do if it was lacking) which really helped us.

This is the worry I have about learning through phonics exclusively

Phonics is never taught solely during a child’s early years. In reality few parents can support phonics at home and little ones start picking up whole words before phonics fully understood.
My toddlers knew stop, open, closed, exit, just from street and shop signs long before starting school.

On the whole, I enjoy teaching phonics. Most pick it up incredibly fast and it's an easy system to learn.

My own daughter had a phonological processing disorder though, which wasn't great for learning phonics... I definitely filled in the gaps by sight reading with her. Happily, I haven't had to deal with that professionally yet, as it was bloody stressful.

We found look and say didn't work with DS1 so unbeknownst to the teacher and the help of DM and DMIL we went back to phonics which was how DH and I learnt.
When youngest DD joined reception phonics had been reinvented but once DD had cracked it school was still insisting she used phonics.
I wish there was more flexibility when a child is reading fluently or is struggling with a method

Yes, their spelling starts off awful (phonetic). But once children have learned one spelling for each sound (which I think they have by the end of reception) they can attempt literally any English word in their writing. It won’t be right, but that doesn’t really matter at age 5. They’ll get there in the end! Most adults don’t continue to spell phonetically (and those who do probably would have struggled to learn spelling via any method, not just phonics).

I remember learning to write (in y1) by first telling the teacher what I wanted to say and she wrote it, I copied it. Then later (y2/3) I wrote on my own and if i didn’t know how to spell a word I had a little book and I’d tell her the word I wanted and she’d write it in the book for me. Obviously there were 30 children all doing this, so often there was a wait, or I’d just decide not to write ‘delicious’ and write ‘nice’ instead. Surely much better that a young child writes ‘delishus’ and carries on than waits 5 minutes to get the spelling or dumbs down their language?

Later on in primary more advanced patterns are taught and some words are rote learned (there are word lists for y3-6 of words they just have to learn the spelling of). But for beginning writers, phonetic spelling is fine.

Not a teacher. I think is more of a supplements. naturally my kid started to learn by look and say and memorizing words. As books/ reading became more advanced phonics helped with reading words that aren’t used very often.

Phonics fast and first.

As others have said, progress is rapid and children become ambitious writers because they're not always asking for spellings.

Those phonics readers give kids a real sense of achievement. Reading is a skill that needs to be practised, extended and refined. If you don't have phonics skills, when you're faced with a new word, all you can do is guess.

Ideally, those children who have difficulty with phonics should then be assessed for dyslexia/phonological issues but this rarely happens.

I was sceptical of synthetic phonics initially but it is easily the best way to teach reading to the vast majority of children and the research supports this.

Different childen do learn in different ways - phonics gets most children well enough

i would prefer if schools had the time and flexibility to match method to child

This isn't natural at all. It might be the strategy that your child used but it is not true for most.

Most children come to school recognising few or no words and phonics is the fundamental method be which they learn to read.

DSs didn’t manage phonics at all. They still can’t tackle unfamiliar words, but have a huge vocabulary so it doesn’t hold them up. They read a lot, so have built up massive sight vocabularies.

DS2 literally doesn’t use phonics in any way, at all. He’s a high flyer, accountant, doing incredibly well, but clueless when faced with saying an unfamiliar word.

DS1 also doing well. He leaves whole syllables out with saying unfamiliar words.

Both of them swap the order of syllables or skip them. It’s totally random and weird to see.

Primary school was stressful. DS1 didn’t catch up academically until he was 17. DS2 was earlier- did well with GCSEs as well.

I was volunteering to help in a school and they put me on listening to reading - I can’t do phonics I soon discovered. Because there are so many exceptions that I couldn’t work out what the expected sound was for anything and then there were a host of words that actually were not phonetic - as they explained later the childen just need to learn them - dreadful experience

Such a waste of time sorting children into different types of learner. And hkwnwoikdbthjs be assessed?

Phonics works best for most children. Only a small number will really need anything else. Just use the most effective method for everyone and then target help at the children who need it.

That’s interesting.

Genuinely curious and I don’t mean to be insulting but what do you mean when you say you couldn’t work out the expected sound? So if a word you are trying to have a child read is ‘play’ for example, you would surely know that the sound is ‘ay’. Or am I misunderstanding?

There’s some research to say that even if you think you’ve taught children using a whole word approach, they’ve actually used phonics. We all use phonics and chunking when we meet new words, even if we don’t realise it - morphology and etymology help too, but only when we understand the phonics basics.

I am in the US and my brother and I went to two different elementary schools because my family moved in between the time that I started at the time that he started. Where I started school they taught reading using phonics. The school that we moved to, they used what they called sight reading. So that's how my brother learned. And now as an adult if he sees a word that he doesn't recognize he doesn't have any idea how to read it. To my family always thought that phonics was superior because of the way that I was taught to read if I see a word that I've never encountered before I have an idea of how to read it.

Not every child will notice the pattern and be able to apply it if hasn’t been pointed out to them.

I agree and ....not every child will notice the pattern and be able to apply it if it has been pointed out to them. As others stated, one size does not fit all and there is value in different approaches.

HOWEVER I feel that it’s had a detrimental effect on spelling as children ‘use their phonics’ which is usually wrong!

Thank you! Children’s spelling has deteriorated IMO. They write words that most used to know wouldn’t exist eg ‘tighnee’, because they sound it out using their phonics. They even misspell simple words because of this. This isn’t just children who are struggling, it’s average children and even more able children. They seem to have little concept of words and the English Language.

I teach Phonics but none of my children learnt to read with it. One taught themselves before starting school; another used old Look and Say books; and my 3rd DC was one of the small percentage of children for whom phonics doesn’t work. So I taught them using Mixed Methods - which is best IMO as it can be adapted as needed. But, that’s trusting teachers to teach - which will never do 🙄