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.

Nor do I but the national curriculum decrees that phonics, and only phonics, shall be taught using government approved schemes.

I learnt using look say & even now as an adult struggle to pronounce some words I don't know as I was never taught how to blend the sounds, but I could read & write them - just not say them correctly (my family laugh at my ridiculous pronunciations, especially of place names).

My older 2 DC learnt using phonics & look say & did OK with it. But DC3 is a lot younger & learnt just using the new phonics curriculum & it's like night & day. Their reading it so much more advanced than DC1 & 2 & it's clearly down to phonics - I've been blown away how much better it is than the way I was taught as well as DCs 1&2.

I can't fault it - it's really worked for dc3.

Yes, I think most of the research indicates this.

Eg what's this word? Delumpification

Doesn't exist, but most posters here could read it fine and have a guess at the meaning, because we're using phonics skills ie chunking. We just don't realise or think about it that way as it's become so natural we don't think about it.

There's very good evidence for phonics, and poor evidence for any other system (or actually evidence against systems like look see). Yes, many/most of us learnt that way. Doesn't mean it wouldn't have been much easier if the skills we actually needed had been made explicit rather than us having to work them out ourselves.

Yes maybe you are right. I do get the point of some nonsense words- I just think they have too much weight in the screening. Probably I am biased as I had to get a class of Year Twos through the screening in covid (as they had missed it) and lots of the completely fluent readers couldn't do the alien words anymore. So I had to go back and re-teach them how to read alien words. Which just seemed like a waste of time when they could read well and could have been doing comprehension skills.

I'd scrap the screening though and let teachers internally assess based on reading a short text.

I am a Reading Coach and teach adults to read. Our ‘readers’ come to us with multiple reasons for not being able to read. My reader attended school sporadically with little parental support. He has tried various classes over the years but made no progress. Our system is to have 1:1 sessions, starting right from the beginning with letter sounds, then building them into words, then simple sentences. We follow a programme with 5 manuals and related resources - small steps using phonics, with activities to learn ‘sight words’ at regular intervals. Reading books to suit the reading level - difficult to match with older learners but it’s been done!My reader is dyslexic and is slow at processing what he reads. He is an intelligent man - late 30s with teenage children. Using the phonic approach, learning the rules and the exceptions has worked for him. He is now reading. The 1:1 system builds confidence and coaches can make lessons pretty much bespoke, something not possible in the primary classroom……. but it works!

I'm not sure that place names is the greatest example. I think sometimes they are designed to test local knowledge rather than phonics awareness.

Some London examples:

Grosvenor square
Holborn
Marylebone
Chiswick
Borough Market
Leicester Square

I also wonder how much actual comprehension is going on during the early reader stage when the effort is being made to decode individual words rather than appreciate the wider context.

I think phonics maybe a better approach for children who have not been read to a much with their parent or carer. For children that have seen words, and heard them in context etc. it I probably easier (and more meaningful) to learn those familiar words that keep cropping up. The advantage of the look say approach is that it teaches 70% of our everyday language, opening up a greater variety of texts from a younger age.
Phonics naturally has a place, but i can't see why it should be the only method.
Context is so important when reading, even down to emphasise. Eg. We are going to reCORD "ree-cord" a REcord "reh-cord" at the studio.

This is my age-group, and honestly, you can spot the legacy of the look-and-say method by looking for the most frequent types of error in our cohort's spelling today. Social media provides great insights here.

As covered in this thread, children brought up on look-and-say whole-word reading find the strategy falls down when the words in the texts get longer; it's simply too many letters to look at simultaneously! So they develop a work-around of only fully looking at the first few letters and the suffix, and taking a guess. They skip over the middle syllable altogether and at best they only retain an impression of the middle's shape.

For example, they can read polysyllabic words like femininity with apparent ease, but when asked to spell such a word, they characteristically spell it feminity.

I understand your point which is why I think a mixed approach is best. There is definitely a place for phonics. However spelling can be terrible with phonics, especially at the beginning. As a previous poster said... Is it 'cake', 'caik' 'cayk' ?
We learn to spell base off exposure to the words not through phonics (which can actually make it even more difficult as we have different ways to write the same phenome eg. 'ph', 'f' - graphical or grafficul.
Phonics knowledge is useful for deciding unfamiliar words but I see it as a reading skill rather than the foundation of reading.

We do take a mixed approach when listening to children read. A minority of chn don’t respond to phonics so that’s why we practise spellings and use picture clues and context in reading to help.

“Phonics knowledge is useful for deciding unfamiliar words but I see it as a reading skill rather than the foundation of reading.”

This doesn’t make sense. You can’t read without a foundation.

One of my reception aged twins struggles with the use of phonics books because he has preconceived ideas of what the images age so will sound out the words then state it’s what he has determined from the image.

So, when they gave them the sound blending books, he would look at the page with word cap - sounds phonetics c-a-p has no idea what the blended sounds make - turn page over where word has a picture of a baseball cap - sounds out the letters again - looks at picture and says ‘it’s a hat, mummy’! Similarly, hut - no idea without the image but add it - he sounds h-u-t - says ‘it’s a shed mummy’!

Also, when both twins where given the sound blending books at school in November, they were both started on book 3; then, after 2 weeks with that book, one then went backwards to book 1 while the other went on to book 4; by the time they went from sound blending books to the little story books, they had just been given book 2 and book 5 respectively (so one had had books 1, 2 & 3; the other had had books 3, 4 & 5 but not for a consistent period of time) and suddenly came home with the same reading books. Other children in their class had had 7 different numbered sound blending books in that time.

It gets better, after 5 weeks of the reading books and getting 2 new books each week (a ‘ditty’ book with 3 mini stories and a ‘reading bag book’ with a single story linked to the ‘ditty’ book) the teachers swapped the class around for who was in each phonics group and both boys went back to to book 1 that they’d already had; we’re still getting the same 5 books they’ve already had. Result is neither child wants to read these books as they’ve already had them and so school reading time is just spent messing about, interrupting each other and making out every word is somehow connected to toilet humour! I’ve taken to reading Julia Donaldson books with them to expose them to something new!

It does make sense. You don't need to have learned phonics to help able to read. Ask many parents who have had to learn phonics at the same time as their children.

Its the same as learning to speak your mother tongue. You don't need to know the 'rules' before you can speak, it comes naturally with exposure.

Around 6 - in Year 1 - they should be able to read age appropriate books then by mid Year 2 be reasonably fluent.

I'm in Ireland so not familiar with the books - in what way do they not make sense?

Brain scans suggest, iirc, that we all use phonics automatically, even if taught by see-say. People may think they have memorised every English word by its “shape” but their brains are reading the words left to right by letter or letter group. Teaching synthetic phonics provides the tools to accelerate this instead of having to stumble into it.

And there is huge pressure on schools/teachers to get the maximum number of pupils to pass the phonics screening at the end of Y1.

It’s a statutory requirement for schools to report their phonics results, and if numbers are low - even if you have a class of fluent readers using other methods - alarm bells will be raised.

I know phonics is a good approach but the lack of flexibility that teachers have is ridiculous.

I’ve raised it every parents eve and written billions of comments in her reading record but nothing much has been forthcoming. Mostly just to keep practicing. I don’t know if I’m expecting too much because I never had these problems - I was consistently reading at a higher level than my class at that age.

As a trainee teacher in the 70's we were taught to teach reading using look and say. It was rubbish, didn't help with decoding complex words and was soon discredited in favour of phonics [which is how I had learnt to read as a child] Yet another failed experiment on children, seen a lot of them in my career.

This is a really good point. I don't think many people believe that they have memorised the shape of every word - that is an oversimplification. Instead we learn the rules of reading intuitively like we learn grammar rules intuitively when we learn to speak.

I believe the advantage of using look say at the beginning is that it gives children an opportunity to read proper stories early on. Many of the commonly used words are exceptions (think 'said' Vs 'raid').

Some of the phonics books sound more like a bunch of onomatopoeias bundles together rather than a coherent story. Look say (while the stories may be bland) are at least a stories. There is a plot and a context. Apart from reading they are also subtly introducing correct grammar and common phrases for specific contexts. I think the look-say approach is arguably better for early readers. It can be supplemented with phonics to help with decoding longer and complex words.

Like most things...I strongly believe a blended approach is best.

If anyone is interested and geeky like me, here is a great article. It's quite long, but the conclusion has a nice summary of the position I am advocating. https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/rev3.3314

I guess with any research people find better ways of doing things. Probably also to accommodate a wider group of people who don't learn as easily from a more traditional method

This makes alot of sense with English, because English is such a bizarre language made up from so many languages. Phonetics doesn't work in so many cases. Will be interesting I suppose what the outcome is with this generation learning this way, hopefully 'they' don't screw it up, although I guess by about age 6/7 when you read it doesn't really matter anyway

My concern is that in order to score highly on the phonics test, schools are prioritising phonics over other important literacy skills.

I'm not sure which method you are saying is rubbish. Neither method is rubbish. But the phonics 'first and foremost' approach is a mistake in my view.
I started reading with the ladybird read with me (look say and analytic phonics) and was reading chapter books in reception. I can understand how and why synthetic phonics may help the greatest number of children to read fluently, but educators should really ask the question 'at what cost?'.

Another thought...
In the biff and chip books the questions at the back uae words that the children won't be able to decode - they must have adult support. In comparison the look say books, ask children questions using words they can read allowing them to complete the tasks independently.