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.

Irish teacher here. It seems bananas to me that the teachers in England (all of the UK?) have such little agency in their classrooms!! The description above of slides telling you how you must teach? Seems crazy. Teachers are trained professionals. Why are they not trusted to do their job using whatever tools may work. We use phonics here too but also sight words, tricky words etc and if it suits a child better to learn by sight, great. Reading for pleasure is No. 1 in my class. The students get time to do so daily, I also read aloud at a higher level each day, again for pleasure and we visit the local library multiple times a year so the children have plenty of reading material. Time for discussion, oral and written comprehension in groups where appropriate and reading aloud on top of this. Phonics can't be everything.

It shouldn’t do that as children should always still be reading/ sharing other books which if children are naturally spotting patterns would mean they can apply them. Reading and books should be the centre of a schools curriculum so children are exposed in many ways and developing reading skills . I do however accept I have been teaching along time and so experience has taught me that. I do think those disagreeing with phonics are actually disagreeing with the school system rather than phonics. It is effective for most children, we can’t dispute the evidence, but until schools are better funded schools are always going to have to go with the approach that best fits rather than having individual approaches.

My child’s experience was in Ireland though @mikado1. There did seem to be a huge reliance on phonics and that system didn’t work for him. It was too complicated and for him, boring, so no motivation to learn. He developed a phobia about learning to read tbh. Even when he dropped out, someone approaching him with a book or folder meant he’d run away.

It might depend on the school of course. Maybe we were just unlucky 😢

Irish was another disaster for him.

At Y1 level, spellings are considered "correct" as long as they are phonetically plausible in line with what the child has been taught in phonics, so "cayk" and "caik" would both be fine, but "cak" would not.

Children eventually complete the learning of the 40+ graphemes and a lot of phonics lessons from that point onwards focus on sorting words into the correct spelling (e.g. ew/ue). When digging a bit deeper it turns out that there are rules to most spellings, but we were never explicitly taught them and therefore rely on having read widely enough to notice when a word "looks wrong". Spelling is taught more explicitly now.

Oh no.. the teacher didn't use the agency they had then, or maybe didn't have the skills or foresight to 😏 I'm sure Irish was tough going for sure, I assume he got an exemption.

He did get an exemption yes, but I think help comes too late for some kids. He was very badly affected by his failures (as he saw them) both in Irish and English at that stage.

The teachers were young and fairly newly qualified, as they often seem to be for the infant classes ime. I do think having more experienced teachers early on would have helped in his case.

I agree. So important. That said, I had a 9yo with dyslexia in my very first class and his mum told me he said he didn't feel like he had dyslexia anymore in my class and he came on so well. I knew it was confidence and happiness that needed building first. Later I did a course with Dyslexia Ireland, all teachers should.

Later I did a course with Dyslexia Ireland, all teachers should.

Yes, it would be great if they did.

What literacy skills do you feel that they aren’t spending enough time on? Curious because my child is learning phonics and I have been impressed with the school so far. If there are gaps that might show up later I’d like to know.

I think this only really applies to children who are struggling with literacy any way, and it's unlikely to be literacy that's impacted.

DD is 5 and in Reception, I was curious about where she was up to and ran through the Y1 phonics screening with her the other day and she was fine with most of the words. They haven't started looking at it at school yet, it's just what she's learned through her phonics sessions. Her reading is very strong and she really enjoys reading.

SD doesn't like reading, is dyslexic and AuDHD, and struggled quite a bit with literacy at the same age. Like a lot of autistic children, she learned to read in whole words. She didn't pass her phonics screening and ended up being taken out of other lessons in Y2 to work in small groups so she could pass it. :(

It is a money maker. The Read Write Inc company which led the phonics push has assets of over £17 million. The woman who started RRI was friendly with the head of Ofsted just before RRI took off. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/415463.stm

@Snowdrop98 A PP very helpfully posted posted the reading framework earlier. Here it is again:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/664f600c05e5fe28788fc437/The_reading_framework_.pdf

Page 18 discusses one implication. With a phonics-led approach the focus on reading is decoding. It isn't until year 2 and into key stage 2 that schools start to focus on meaning/comprehension. A child maybe able to read out loud confidently but it is very important to check how much they have taken away from the text. A lot of mental effort goes into sounding out each word, it's very easy to lose track.

Think of it like this. You could, with good phonics knowledge, be able to decode a page of Spanish with a fairly decent accent, but without understanding the meaning of what is being read.

Phonics doesn't teach the meaning of words, how to analyse words, or vocabulary. In fact, the vocabulary a child is exposed to is limited by the sounds they know. A phonics led approach depends on parents and teachers talking through the books with the child to broaden their vocabulary etc. In reality, if schools are under pressure to perform well in phonics tests, they may neglect this crucial part of the picture. I'm sure some schools get the balance spot on, but for many I imagine that is not the case. It's not surprising that reading for pleasure has declined dramatically in recent years.

i believe the most important part of reading is comprehension. Other approaches start this much earlier.

Again, just to reiterate, I'm not anti-phonics. Phonics are an essential skill, but they are not the only one.

I think thile best way to support a child as a parent is to read with them, talk about books, what's happening in the pictures. What do they think will happen next? The first phonics books with no words are some of the most important.

This is sadly unsurprising.

It is also a huge slap in the face to teachers with a degree and years of experience. Forcing teachers to follow a script means that anyone can teach it including 16 year old teaching apprentices.

That’s interesting as in our experience they have focused on skills like comprehension and reading with expression even in reception.

That's great! Sounds like a good school😊.

The vast majority of children will learn to read using any method. Phonics catches virtually everybody.

I feel, OP, that you tend to respond to the posts referring to the excellent evidence for the efficacy of phonics as somehow supporting your view that blended methods are better. That's not what people are trying to say. Permit me to clarify/summarise.

1. English is phonetic. All fluent english readers are using the phonic code when reading. We do not read by recognising shapes of word or interpreting the meaning from the context.
2. Some very capable early readers pick up the phonic code without needing to have it rather explicitly taught. These are the children like you, who grasp reading intuitively and rapidly move to chapter books at age 5 or 6. This can be confusedly interpreted as "look and say" or mixed methods being effective. They are not for most readers, who do not intuit the phonic code as effectively without instruction.
3. "Look and say" methods tend to hide poor phonics understanding, and lead to issues later on when readers come across broader vocabulary they do not recognise and can't read. It also teaches bad habits of guessing words you don't know or working out the story from the pictures, which does not provide true reading skills.
4. Phonics is not taught without comprehension. Comprehension, meaning, context, inference & expression are all taught as part of reading in schools.
5. Reading fluency does not come from "remembering more words". It comes from something called "automaticity". This is when you blend the letters extremely fast, unconsciously, as you read. Brain scans have shown that we blend in this way when we read.
6. Good spelling comes from reading a lot and thus picking up the more complex yet subtle alternative spelling rules and patterns in English. Good schools structure spellings lessons/tests in KS1 KS2 around these advanced phonics rules and not around rote memorising lists of unrelated words.
7. Early look and say books are every bit as dull and repetitive with limiting vocabulary! For example - compare a pink level reading champions look and say book eg "I like red" to a pink level phonics books eg phonics bug "Sid's pet rat". All beginners have to read these sorts of simple texts at the start. They are exposed to more interesting things by having books read to them and most children learning via synthetic phonics move on to much longer and more interesting stories by the end of Reception.

What would you recommend for a bright child who does very poorly when taught using the phonics system @0ohLarLar?

Oh and I forgot!

1. Some teachers like look and say because the age at which children "get" phonics can vary. It will "click" for some children aged 3 (both mine were blending cvc words at 3) but others it will only "click" at 6 - no matter how much phonics teaching is provided. "Look and say" buys a teacher time to wait for a child to grow into understanding phonics. It gives a child for whom phonics has not clicked a means of engaging with text in the classroom - so that they can read a maths question, understand a task written on the board, follow a science instruction, read a worksheet etc (albeit possibly at the expense of consolidating phonics for a better foundation). It also relieves the frustration of sounding out for years and years because automaticity hasn't developed.

Gettingcoffee

Its really very rare. Most have got it by the end of y1 - many schools get 100% pass rates on the phonics check.

I'd recommend patience. If they get to 7 and really aren't getting anywhere, a dyslexia check.

My child didn’t get it though.l @0ohLarLar.
7 was too late tbh as he’d developed a learning phobia instead by then. Literally ran from books. Subsequently diagnosed asd, adhd.

I wish I had that time back. I’d do things differently, including keeping him away from the phonics approach to learning to read.
I appreciate he is not typical.

Just as some children will learn intuitively by any method, some will struggle via any method. I'm sorry your child struggled so much.

Look and say works for a minority but doesn't work as well for most.

The current approach is to take the method proven to be most effective in the long term for those struggling to learn to read (phonics) and focus on that.

When you use a phonics method children naturally also memorize high frequency words, because they are just seeing them a lot. Most kids will also naturally use clues like pictures and context.

But in my experience, kids who are taught to rely on those methods have two possible outcomes. One is they are naturally able to intuit the phonics rules, and they go on to be good readers.

But the other is they don't intuit those rules and develop bad habits, and it's very difficult to correct them once established. Guessing being the number one problem. They often guess incorrectly of course, and that means they find it all frustrating.

You need to be able to read before you can comprehend what you read. For some children these things come close together, for others you need to work at them longer, or even separately. If a child has learned to decide but not comprehend, there are a number of possible problems, but working on them is the answer. Sometimes they just aren't really reading well enough yet, they need more practice. (Which IMO is one of the main problems now in teaching reading, children don't spend enough time reading rich texts.)

Similarly, most children can understand texts that are much more complicated than they can read, and can compose texts at a much higher level than they can write. So at school they should continue to be ready to, and should be doing oral composition, at the same time they are working on things like reading, spelling, and handwriting.

That's happening to in places that don't use phonics based teaching. I think it has very little to do with teaching methods as such. More to do with kids spending 5 hours a day on devices so they are never in need of something else to do.