Phonics kills the joy of reading

[Alicenev]

I would like to see phonics lessons rolled back to once a week or in schools. Why is the joy of learning to read by sight denied to little minds? Remember’Peter and Jane...Words and pictures? …Isn’t the access to a great story / information sacred above all??! How is making weird noises with your tongue going to ignite ‘yes I want to do more of this!’ … I believe phonics is a skill that comes LATER . Not at yr1. …Let them have real books that have an actual ZING to them…Who cares if they do a lot of guessing getting and whole lot wrong.. All that’s important is that they begin a joyful quest into the world or literature!

OP - with the best will in the world you don’t know what you are talking about.

Sadly many, many children don’t have anyone at home to help them learn to live reading - many households have NO children’s books. Even worse now they are competing with phones! Many children (and adults) are dyslexic. In the past not everyone learnt to read, not everyone loves it as adults either.

If you learnt to read in the 8Os you would have used some phonics,(c-a-t) it just wasn’t called that and we weren’t taught individual word sounds (ou, ow, th, etc) and the letters weren’t sounded properly - muh rather than mmmmm.

The best is a mix - a foundation in phonics, learning tricky words by sight. This is what most schools do. Some kids get it very quickly and fly ahead, for others it is a much slower process. The kids that fly would probably do so either way, it’s the ones that find it harder that need the phonics.

OP - your opinion is based on your ‘belief’ and your own background but the teaching of phonics is based on research, evidence and experience. Giving kids books that they can’t read is not going to make them love reading. At home you probably read aloud to your dc from a book above their level and they will learn a love of books from that. Sadly you are in a minority. Many children find it a very difficult process and need a gentle, gradual approach, the teachers will be giving them books that they can access. Learning to read isn’t primarily about learning to love books and reading for pleasure (as privileged people we often forget this) - its primary focus is to teach literacy so that people can function in everyday life. just giving them ‘fun’ books for them to guess at and get wrong - that really would put them off for life!

Both of mine learned to read using phonics. My older one struggled more with it, because he was really a sight reader and pretty much flew with reading.
My youngest one hated hated, hated reading. And phonics. But the routine of phonics really worked for her and she's a competent reader.

I read with them from baby hood and even when they could read i read harder stories at night to them. Dd didn't really even like that. She's just never liked reading. I have tried absolutely everything with her.

I don't think I can blame phonics for that though. In fact, I suspect they without phonics, she'd have been really struggling.

I’m not a fan of synthetic phonics but saying we all managed in the olden days isn’t accurate. Plenty of people didn’t manage. Different methods of teaching reading have different success rates and broadly speaking the teaching of phonics gets the largest number of kids reading quickly.

But yes I do believe it takes some of the fun out of reading and the current focus on ‘alien words’ 🙄 isn’t great for sight readers imo.

@99bottlesofkombucha just want to say 100% phonics does NOT teach every one to read!

I pulled a child out of the shit RWI as she couldn’t move up as couldn’t ’do’ all the sounds. Since going to a more old fashioned way her reading has come on in leaps and bounds. Parents have commented and good old reading assessments back this up. The phonics books are shit and take all joy out of reading.

I’ve another child who can decode everything but doesn’t understand a word they’ve read. The books were so dull that they didn’t understand you needed to know what you read.

phonics has a place but it really does zap the joy!

My dyslexic child does not understand phonics in the slightest. Her brain just cant decode words using this method. Sight reading has enabled her to catch up with her peers and is now average reading age for her age.

I wish I had started sight reading much quicker than I did, but I had assumed that school knew best on this and went along with it.

Even without dyslexia phonics dont work for all children, just the majority. Audiobooks and comics have helped instill a love of reading here.

I don’t think the issue is with phonics, but the way in which phonics and reading is taught. I think the use of these pre-approved schemes which seem to be teach phonics by numbers are very dull and with the insistence that they’re stuck to rigidly, then that leaves no room for creativity or even tweaking the planning. I feel it was a knee jerk reaction because someone decided reading standards were falling, everyone has to use a pre-approved scheme rather than looking at the bigger picture.

Enforcing phonics has been one of the most successful education strategies England has ever managed, and you’re deluded if you think abandoning it will be a good thing. It does indeed smack of privilege- let’s make everyone do something else that doesn’t work as well because I find the successful approach prescriptive and uninspiring. Followed by the whataboutism from the small minority of people who don’t successfully learn to read using phonics. We shouldn’t abandon a brilliantly successful approach just because it doesn’t work for all.

Education is littered with well meaning catastrophic ideas from people like the OP. Go and have a read about literacy programs in the US if you want inspiration.

But they work. Are you suggesting doctors abandon NICE guidelines because they’d rather offer some more fun treatment than one that works?

Phonics lessons are a fairly small amount of the day and having helped with reading in reception at my DCs school I would say it's an excellent way to learn to read.
I learnt with look and say and I was always a voracious reader but I honestly think phonics would have helped me enormously. I would even say using phonics principles has definitely helped improve my scrabble scores.

@TheNightingalesStarling. Look up Barrington Stoke books, these are dyslexia friendly reading books that are filtered by both chronological and reading age. They are printed on dyslexia friendly coloured paper ( not bright white!) with a dyslexia friendly font! Much better than reading “ baby books” as a teenager.

Phonics works well for most beginner readers. It is a useful tool, but it is only a small part of the process of learning to read. It helps weaker readers and doesn’t hold back sight readers because they just start sight reading anyway. I have observed many phonics lessons and most are pretty fun. They usually involve singing and actions and the children enjoy them. We have a state education system designed for large class sizes, not a bespoke one to one system. There has been a lot of research on learning to read and a lot of data gathered from many countries. That is why we use phonics in school because it is the best system that we have available. Paired reading is probably the best way to teach reading but it isn’t possible with large class sizes.

For my kids it was the very strictly applied reading scheme which dominated their first three years at school - sometimes it did indeed feel like a it was an attempt to put them off reading. One child I read with a school hated it so much he finished it first - hoping to never have to read a book again!

To be fair the school was pushy and old fashioned in their approach and I when moved ds to another school his only question or concern was that they’d make him do the bloody thing again. Says it all really!

@ElBanditoit’s an hour a day in my school and then kids in Y3 who still haven’t got it have to go and work in KS1. How depressing is that!!

Phonics is reading. It’s literally how we decode written text. We can learn to decode text in one of two ways: memorising words until we work out the code for ourselves, or synthetic phonics where we are specifically taught the individual sounds that make up the code.
Sight reading has a success rate of around 50%, mixed methods (search lights) when taught well has a success rate of around 75%, synthetic phonics, when taught well, had a success rate of 95% -100%. Which is why we use it.
Dyslexic readers really struggle with phonological awareness and phonics, but they still need to know them or they will never become fluent readers.
People saying that they didn’t learn using phonics - no, but you were one of the lucky ones who worked it out for yourselves.
Think about it logically. If you can read the words quidditch or hobbit you are using phonics.

I don’t think the joy of reading comes from the method of teaching to read, I think it comes from others imparting the joy of a story, from reading to children. I also think with children who struggle we need to be open to how they can access the story comics and audio books can give them the love of the story till the reading ability catches up.
I am married to a man who struggled to learn to read in the 70s - it was year 5 before he could read. When I meet him in 2016 he would never pick up a book and definitely had no joy from a story. But he did love the Harry Potter films, so I introduced him to audio books - Harry Potter being the access book. Now he listens to a wide variety of audio books and talks about the story lines and plot twists. As an aside I see his spelling is better and his vocabulary is greater. But the best thing is the joy he has from the story.
My own DD has a visual processing disorder and so I read to her each night till she was 12 and now she is an avid reader.

I’m so glad DS went to school before phonics was introduced (also ‘chunking’ in maths wtf??!!) We used to just read together every night and he’d have a go reading instructions on recipes, things like that. He picked it up pretty quickly really and had no problems with it.

I think it’s an excellent way to learn to read but it should not be confused with reading for pleasure. I make a point of reading regular books that interest my son so he experiences enjoyment of reading. But phonics definitely help him to read independently.

I didn't do phonics at primary school (late 50s early 60s) we did Look and Say, neither did my daughter (80s) learned using context, grammar with some phonic knowledge and used 'real books' not reading books. I was a student teacher in the early 80s and my course was very anti-phonics. Phonic rules were taught as and when in school. People still learned to read but weren't tested on it as young as they are now.

I had to teach phonics when it became a requirement and I agree it will work for most children but not all. It didn't work for my dyslexic grandson, it just put him off, he learned to read very well once we abandoned that.

Sorry to be disagreeable, but phonics has worked remarkably well for my DD, she was a free reader aged 6. It’s mostly lazy bastard parents and crappy schools that are the issue - kids should be reading every day at school and at home. If you can’t read then you can’t adequately access the rest of the curriculum. TT rockstars however should be thrown in the sea, it’s unfit for purpose and also means more screen time. Bleurgh.

It is very naive to think that for most children the purpose of learning to read is so that they develop a love of literature.

It isn’t, it’s so they have the literacy skills needed for everyday life.

A love of reading is a wonderful bonus for some, but not essential (or achievable) for all.

People focusing on the importance of enjoying reading are coming from a position of privilege and aren’t thinking about the reality of many children’s lives. It’s a kind of thoughtless elitism/ snobbery.

This is the problem.
It was driven by the commercial phonics programmes-Ruth Miskin etc. They were so expensive that they made themselves seem like 'value for money' by promising that they were replacement for literacy lessons and all the workload involved in planning those separately. Before that, we taught the free Letters and Sounds programme provided by the government after the Rose Review showed the effectiveness of teaching synthetic phonics. We'd do maybe a 15-20 minute session or a few 5 minute sessions, leaving plenty of time for the joy of books, oracy and a rich curriculum. The Y2/Y3 teachers saw a fall in reading comprehension when we moved across to read write inc. This was a school serving a deprived area- we should have been allowed to trust what we could see was working. Letters and sounds could easily have been slightly modified to keep pace with new evidence (e.g. introducing new sounds at a faster pace). Would have saved schools millions across the country too. SSP is essential in my view but it's not enough on its own. And there's a lot of reporting by journalists who don't understand reading instruction that adding comprehension activities to the day alongside SSP is 'mixed methods', akin to asking children to guess words from pictures. It's not.

100% disagree, my daughter learnt to read so quickly with phonics, by the start of year 1 she was reading the books from school and by the end of year 1 she is on full chapter books, she can pick up any book and read it even if it has words she has never read as she knows how to sound it out with phonics

The English language is hard. Let’s switch to Italian and everything is pronounced the way it’s spelt!

I think you need both

This. Phonics was introduced (mandatorily) to the UK years ago because the alternative had caused increased illiteracy/poor reading levels. It was ridiculous.

Children who can’t read, don’t love books. They have to first learn the reading part before they can understand the nuance and the jokes. School is responsible for teaching them the reading part - parents are the ones that teach the love of stories at this time by reading to them and by demonstrating a love of books themselves.

Exactly!

Also, nobody is saying that you only read the reading scheme books. Read whatever books you like at home, go to the library, make it as fun and interesting and exciting as you like. The reading scheme is for practising the decoding and other skills the child has been working on in school. By all means supplement it with whatever other middle class nostalgia reading material you feel more appropriate.