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.

Because phonics works?

Where I live - not the UK - teachers have been using Look-say, along with other fast methods, for years. Yes, it gets them "reading" quickly even if they are not developmentally ready to decode.

Then they get to about age 10 and need to read for content in their studies. There are a lot more words, it requires more speed, lots of new words all the time, fewer pictures. And they meet so many words they have not read before and can't keep up. I used to tutor kids at that age, and it was mostly undoing poor reading strategies they had been taught.

You may have heard before about how the invention of the alphabet made reading a much more common skill. This is because most people can memorize twenty-some letters and figure out how to decode. Rather than memorizing thousand of characters, or words - many people will not be able to memorize enough to be highly literate.

Using phonics the vast majority of kids learn to read. Other methods don't have the same results. Getting them to read younger isn't as useful as getting them to read well. In fact, younger is pretty irrelevant.

He's still very young. Not all kids are ready at the same age and boys are often later.

Teaching our dc phonics (during COVID) helped my DH to understand a lot of words better. He's dyslexic and can see he would have been better off with phonics.

DD2 struggled with phonics and it was a battle in reception and y1 as the teachers were insisting that this was the only way. Eventually they backed off when I intervened to show them this was not working for her and it was putting a keen reader off books. With less pressure around phonics she found her way and excelled at school. Not everyone learns in the same way.

I taught DD to read using British synthetic phonics books when she was 5, before she started school in the US, as I wasn’t convinced by the teaching methods used there. The books I chose were very good at creating an entertaining read from limited phonemes/high frequency words.

Phonics isn't really reading. Phonics is de-coding. Looking at a word and knowing what it says is sight reading. The 2 things are different. My eldest dc cannot do Phonics. Never has and probably never will, so, at age 6 when the rest of his class were doing Phonics, he was being sent home with sentence strips for a sight reading approach which is gained through memorising a word and knowing what it says. My youngest ds has thrived on Phonics, he's 5 and a really competent reader because he has been taught to decode the word.

Phonics works well for the majority of children. It's also consistent and easy to teach and great for a variety of learners. Some children do just learn by sight reading instead though..

The alien words irritate me as you are basically teaching children to decode non words which isn't what reading is about as we read in context. So I'd personally scrap the screening test. Especially as it takes up lots of teaching time.

My statement that English is not a phonetic language was short hand to say that there are more phonemes than letters in the alphabet, and many more graphemes to represent these phonemes. English is quite some distance away from languages such as Spanish (which has a transparent orthography).

I think your statement about dyslexia is also problematic. It's a neurological disorder that exists in a person regardless of the language they speak. Prevalence is estimated to be equivalent across languages. While it might be more easily detected in English speakers it doesn't mean that more English speakers have dyslexia.

I agree with you final points that common words should be taught. Which is why I always believed a blended approach would be best.

Enables them to ‘decode’ unknown words as they read more challenging texts going into years 2, 3 and beyond.
I taught two Ukrainian boys to read/speak English and they learnt it so quickly using the phonics method.

What was the method used in the 80s in the UK?

Look and say mostly. There was a greater emphasis on context rather than decoding. Some phonetic techniques eg. Magic 'e', as a pp mentioned.

There is evidence that children with dyslexia don’t ‘get’ phonics. My daughter didn’t.
(An article from the British dyslexia association here, if anyone is interested. https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/news/systematic-synthetic-phonics-ssp-our-expert-panel-discusses-the-reasons-why-we-need-to-make-a-change)

My concern is not that phonics is bad. It’s that we aren’t offering alternatives for those who don’t get it. Our phonics scheme just requires increasing intervention- but if it doesn’t work why keep at it? Do something different instead.

My other annoyance is that it has stretched beyond just teaching phonics into being highly prescriptive with reading books etc. We aren’t allowed to use any of our other books that we have accumulated- they have to read to the scheme. Read the same book 3 times in school and then take it home. We have less engagement with reading at home now as the kids are bored and don’t want to read the same book multiple times, especially the great readers who understood it the first time. They used to be able to choose books that interested them, (which were suitable and decodable) now they have no agency. It’s beyond frustrating. I’ve also been on phonics courses which have given me great ideas to explain some of the rules but I can’t use them under the new system. (We had to change systems because our old one is no longer accredited by the govt. The new one is, and it is so prescriptive it has a script to follow. I hate it.)

The first time anyone reads Harry Potter they have to read lots of ‘alien’ words. Hogwarts, quaffle, quidditch. Context doesn’t help read these, nor will a picture. I suspect the vast majority of English speaking people would pronounce these alien words in the way Rowling intended, because they apply their phonics knowledge to them. Anyone purely dependent on sight words would, presumably, have to ask someone else how to read each of these words.

" Anyone purely dependent on sight words would, presumably, have to ask someone else how to read each of these words."

Not at all! Humans have clever brains which make connections - those of us who learned by sight automatically work it out - we can read DOG and we can read LET, so it's a tiny imperceptible step from there to DOT and LEG even if we've never seen them before.

Or using your Harry Potter example, we know QUID and ITCH, and HOG and WARTS, we know QUAFF and any number of words ending in -le. Not a problem. Most look-and-sayers imbibe the phonetics without being taught.

I've nothing against phonics, since I believe research shows it works for a greater percentage of children than L&S so it makes sense; but it seems very long-winded and complicated to those of us who learnt naturally by following one's mother's finger as she pointed at words in a book.

I’ve taught oodles of children to read using phonics. The early books don’t make much sense, agreed, but they allow children to feel the pleasure and success of independent reading very early on. This is a huge boost to their confidence. Books that make more sense (or are more interesting!) are beyond their reading ability for a good while.

Great for children learning with English as an additional language, too.

Problem is, many parents don’t read with their children and if they do it’s not side by side. I’ve had parents say their child reads so fluently ( in the back of the car) when I know they make it up if they do t know the words. So they need a code they can work out. One that is taught in school every morning.

I'd scrap the phonics screening. What may have been originally intended as a useful check that phonics was being taught effectively is now yet another way to put pressure on schools and on year 1 teachers in particular.

But while the screening is still here, it makes sense to include nonsense words. If you only have real words, then confident readers will recognise many of them and be able to read them on sight. If you include nonsense words, then you know that you are assessing phonic skills and knowledge.

The government posted a report a few years ago that phonics was one approach to learning and it was the one that everyone jumped on. I'm a teacher and while I can see the benefits for many it isn't the only way. However as it is now deemed to be the way that children learn to read mamy are unwilling to try different approaches with those it doesn't work for

My DS (6) hates phonics with a passion because he finds it so boring. He is technically behind with phonics based on the assessments they do in school, but his reading is completely on track. We think he is more of a sight reader.

I think it is a method that suits the majority of children, and he is not one of them. But, such is the joy of mainstream education.

I agree that my statement about dyslexia was poorly phrased.

What I should have written was that while rates of dyslexia are likely to be similar in different countries, the rates of detection are lower in countries like Spain with a fairly simple phonetic code than in those like England with a more complex phonic code as the more straightforward system will cause fewer difficulties when learning to read and to spell.

What you describe is applying your phonics knowledge though. Someone using that method has made the connections themselves, rather than having had it explicitly taught to them. But it is phonics knowledge nevertheless. To me (and the research agrees) it seems simpler to teach children the phonetic code, rather than let them work it out for themselves.

It literally teaches them to read??!! Once they can blend sounds they can read anything. My ds has been able to read complicated words from a young age because he knows his phonics.

Just to say I have an adult child who learnt the old school way and a son who does phonics. Son learnt to read much quicker than my daughter.

Personally as a 43 year old woman I have no idea what a trigraph is

I don't think I need to know.

I can speak English without this knowledge

It's just too granular