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!

All my 4 found phonics useful. They could sound out cat, dog, frog before they went to school. The lessons at school were fun with hand signals and mouth movements to help them remember them like sh being put finger up to your lips and saying sh out loud

Phonics is brilliant.

Some of the current schemes are dull.

Both of these things can be true. I think the issue is perhaps with the ultra-crowded ‘content rich’ post Gove National Curriculum, where there is much less time for sharing books and stories within the school day, especially as the materials for this curriculum become increasingly standardised from big content providers (Twinkl, Kapow, White Rose etc etc).

I remember mrz, a long-time poster on here, saying that their school had a ‘5 a day’ - or even more - principle, in which every child was read aloud to / exposed to books multiple times a day (through English lessons, assembly, class reading times, in different lessons such as History, Geography and RE).

A child develops a love of books through a) being able to read them well (phonics) AND b) being exposed to good books by teachers and other adults who love books too.

If you as a parent find phonics books dull, read them AND stacks of books from the library / your own collection. No school tells you that you must read ONLY the phonics books at home.

I was sent to a local country school for a year to make up the numbers - the teacher was told not to teach me as I was too young - but some how I managed to learn how to read! They thought I must be a bloody genius - they were wrong!🤣

Learning to read in English cannot be done purely by sight words or purely by phonics. If you only do sight words you can't ever read a new word. But if you apply pure phonics it doesn't work because English breaks its own rules so much. (I've no idea how they teach reading in Spain but I imagine phonics works better with a language like Spanish where once you've learnt the sound a letter or combination of letters makes, it always makes that sound)

In English you have to use a combination of decoding using phonics, recognising sight words, getting clues from context and illustrations.

I do think there is a bit too much emphasis on phonics, and the alien words thing is just ridiculous and pointless. There definitely should be more emphasis on a love of literature for pleasure but without support from home it's hard for schools to encourage that, and huge numbers of households don't have books or encourage reading, or read stories to children.

My children were read to constantly, not just at bedtime but frequently through the day too from babyhood. And we carried on reading them bedtime stories long after they learned to read because that's how you access more complex vocabulary and interesting stories. (Plus it's so lovely to share a book!) I remember my daughter aged 7 going for a sleepover and coming back horrified there was no bedtime story.

I can’t disagree more. Having been a teacher for 35+ years, I’ve seen many different models of teaching reading and by far the least effective model is whole word reading whereby children were expected to just immerse themselves in books and magically learn to read.
Phonics has structure and rigour - I see little children practice their phonics skills in the book corner reading stories to the teddies and their friends, I see them immerse themselves in picture books and traditional tales and stories from other cultures. I see children reading their own writing - don’t forget that phonics isn’t just about reading, it’s about learning to write too. Taught well, systematic phonics has raised the reading and writing levels of whole generations of children.

There are words that have to be learnt by sight, but learning to sight read every word would be hard work and children would pick it up at very different rates. Also how do you learn to spell? If you want to write a word that you haven't learnt to read, how would you do it if you couldn't sound it out with phonics?

Phonics is a great system to teach a large group of kids all how to read and write at the same time. I must admit I prefer the old system of 'muh' and 'nuh' to the new mmm and nnn as I find those sounds aren't as easy for kids to say - try sounding out mum with a mmm at the beginning and end! I also loathe the books with no words that school send home first, they really are boring.

Learning to read is tedious whatever way you do it though - and some of the books are uninspiring - but you make it worthwhile by reading them wonderful picture books yourself, that's how you give them a love of reading while they're still learning. While they're still working hard on decoding they won't always be able to also keep up with what is happening in the book (or quite possibly the book is too hard for them) but if they're still at the slowly decoding stage then the books probably don't have too many words and can be read lots of times to up their fluency and comprehension.

(Oh, and in EYFS / KS1, there is also a kack of time because of all the things that are ‘schools could just….’: supervise tooth brushing; organise food and teach the use of utensils; toilet training; dressing themselves; teaching basic social norms; speech; etc etc etc. A return of some of those to the full responsibility of parents except for extreme cases of neglect would also free up time.)

I remember doing it at school and hating it, but I was an intuitive reader and picked it up almost without trying. Not every child is like that. I have older family members who struggle to read as adults and if they had been taught phonics instead of being left to flounder, it might have been very different for them.

This! Well apart from the last paragraph - sadly that's not my current experience in schools.

I trained as a primary teacher at a time when it wasn't all about phonics. We knew children needed more than one method. Sadly now many schools are still so locked in to phonics and it literally doesn't work for everyone. I am an advisory teacher and I have tried to get some schools to use a different approach for certain children and you wouldn't believe the resistance I have had from some head teachers who are absolutely embedded in phonics as the only way.

So many children have no love of reading because they're forced to spend an entire week on one deadly dull book covering one piece of phonics. Awful.

Edited to add that it's another big mistake I blame the coalition government for.

If we want more children to enjoy reading, we could start with getting rid of the horrific Michael Morpurgo misery lit that seems to infest every KS2 classroom.

Steph - they send books with no words home first because sadly many children aren’t used to holding books or sequentially turning the pages.

Yeah, that's shit tbf.

My kids school it was about 30 mins tops, and most of that seemed to be herding them into the right groups in reception. They got good results and this was a standard primary, nothing special. I can't see kids that age paying attention to any lesson for an hour.

It is also worth remembering that any method of learning to read requires good teaching from expert teachers. I remember talking to an advisory teacher sone time ago, who said that when she went into schools with low reading results, she always found that there was a teacher who ‘did’ phonics but ‘didn’t really believe in it so just did the basic letter sounds then did a mixture’. My son had this experience but were lucky enough to have learned to read anyway.

It’s to try to eliminate such variation that there has been a move to such prescriptive schemes.

Yes, there are a small minority of children with specific SEN who, after phonics has been very well and thoroughly taught, may need additional support to learn to read well. That doesn’t mean that confusing, less efficient ‘mixed methods’ should be used for everyone.

So many children have no love of reading because they're forced to spend an entire week on one deadly dull book covering one piece of phonics. Awful.

This was my experience with DD, now 13. She hated phonics, it was a chore to decode every word. She was a very obedient child so faithfully deconstructed every word, but had no idea what the story was, and anyway, the stories in the phonics books that came home from school were painfully dull. Now 13, she would never read for pleasure, which I am so sad about, I lived in books as a child.

DS is younger and was home schooled in reception and year 1 due to COVID. I didn't understand phonics so just read with him every night. He still isn't a great bookworm but does enjoy reading, especially non fiction.

There needs to be a balance.

But surely the book to practice their phonics decoding is only one of the books they are being exposed to each week? Yes the phonic book can be dull, but learning any new skill is dull until you have mastered it. Playing scales on a musical instrument, swimming up and down the learner pool, doing drills in football or netball, doing the same thing over and over again in gymnastics. Small steps to lead to success.

Exactly. I would hope that the teacher had time to read a story every day as well, or they were reading books in other subjects, and also that you were sharing books every day?

If the phonics book was their only exposure to books at all, that would indeed be dull - however necessary. But to claim that a whole system must be abandoned because one aspect of the scheme is dull seems ‘baby out with the bathwater’ territory. Like deciding to learn to swim by dropping a child in to splash about, because ‘widths with a float is boring’.

You may have no idea how, but it works. Millions of children have leaned to read successfully using the look-say method . It's time-tested and it works.
Maybe phonics works better for some children, but that doesn't mean look-say doesn't work or that it's not preferable for some learners.

ok fine not every student- let me rephrase to ‘more students than any other method’. In Australia it is referred to as the science of reading, and phonics and phonemes are 2 key pillars of it. My children are intuitive sight readers, this is common in advanced readers which they are. These children need phonics teaching less as they learn it more intuitively.

I still wouldn’t sent them to a school that doesn’t do best practice reading, as what kind of pedagogy is that? How does that leave their friends behind? It is the fundamental responsibility of an education system to cater to the widest body of children they can, and that’s the science of reading.

also, phonics are not why your children hate reading. That’s just abdicating responsibility as a parent frankly.

Bit of both? Some decoding is handy (I learned to read by sight at preschool but I DO remember sounding out tricky words so I must have been taught some phonics, albeit not so rigorously)

Phonic approach doesn’t work for every child, but it does for most. Ds1 couldn’t read at all start of YR, but now end of Y1 is reading well, and definitely by sight (I can tell as he will make a guess at a word sometimes which is totally the wrong one!)

Ds hates reading and it will always be chore for him I suspect. Unless it’s an instruction manual…

But as a parent at home don’t you pull out more interesting books and point out the words they can read and engage them that way?? I dont bother with school readers for my 7yo and as he’s an advanced reader nor do his teachers.

I have amended my comment in an earlier reply to change ‘all children’ to the method that’s demonstrated to be effective for the most children’

Phonics is important, but there has been such a sway towards 'only' using phonics, that this has become rather damaging.

There was a good (Labour introduced) phonics scheme sent to all schools in about 2006 which I thought was great, and after that we did phonics 3 times a week. The phonics screener came in so we did phonics daily, then the government decided before lockdown that the free phonics scheme just wasn't good enough, so rather than withdrawing it and replacing it with something new and better and free, they simply published a list of state approved schemes that schools could buy. They wanted from expensive, to eye-wateringly expensive. Ofsted start demanding you need 'fidelity' to a scheme and all your reading books must match, and all your fonts and display text must be identical. We had to lose a TA to pay the £11k we had to spend on new books throughout the school and pay for the new phonics scheme. We now have a new head who was trained in a completely different scheme and hates the one we bought so wants to change it. That will costs thousands. It is such a waste of money that could be spent on staffing or the building which is falling down!

I am all for phonics, but alongside teaching sight words and real books (I liked the searchlight model of the late 90s, which covered lots of strategies and didn't put people off reading). Children who don't get phonics shouldn't be forced into just doing more of it-other alternatives should be encouraged, but that is not what is happening. Our LA advisers and Ofsted are focused only on doing yet more of the same.

What we have now is phonics being a huge money-making industry which is making particular people and publishers very rich. Ruth Miskin, for example runs a hugely profitable phonics scheme. It's worth reading up about who she has been in a relationship with and how she got where she is...!

Learning to drive isn't about the enjoyment of driving but mastering the basics so you can enjoy the freedom of driving thereafter. Phonics is about the technical understanding of how sounds work to create words. It's not the only method used in schools but it enables teachers to recognise which particular blends are causing difficulties and which needs revision. Enjoyment comes from the teacher reading stories to children and using a range of activities which encourage independent reading. I'm currently volunteering in a primary school where the children mostly are engaged with texts in the classroom and the library.
Of course people learned to read before phonics, but not everybody did. And not everybody understood why words worked.

It works for approximately half of all children, which means that it doesn’t work for the other half.
Synthetic phonics was introduced to school because look and say is not an effective way to teach reading.

I learnt phonics as a teacher, I make more mistakes and have to correct myself more as a reader now.
There is a problem with younger generations comprehension and enjoyment of reading as the focus has so heavily been on decoding. English isn’t phonetically standard and that becomes a bigger problem later on if you have only learnt to decode and not developed as a reader - which happens more often than you might think.

I couldn't disagree more.

Children can only enjoy reading if they can actually read. Study after study has shown that, if synthetic phonics is used as the only method, 95+% of children will learn to read. Some studies have success rates as high as 99% or higher. No other method achieves a success rate higher than 80%. Even mixed methods where one of the methods is synthetic phonics (which appears to be what is being advocated by OP) doesn't get beyond 80%.

What that means is that, in a class of 30, on average at least 28 or 29 of them will learn to read if synthetic phonics is the only method taught. However, if you introduce other methods, either as well as or instead of synthetic phonics, on average only 24 of them will learn to read. So 4 or 5 children who could have experienced the joy of reading will be unable to do so.

For hundreds of years, synthetic phonics was the only way children were taught to read. It wasn't called that - it was just the way it was done. Then, in the mid-20th Century, other methods became fashionable, based on ideas as to how adults read that we now know to be false. Brain scans have shown that adults reading use the same parts of the brain used by children when they are sounding out and blending. Methods like Look & Say encourage children to use primarily the parts of the brain used for processing vision, which are in the opposite hemisphere to those used for reading.

Written English is a code, where each letter or group of letters (known as a grapheme) represents a phoneme (i.e. one of the individual sounds that make up words). Synthetic phonics teaches children the code, so that they can decode words, including words they have never previously encountered. Other methods rely on children working out the code for themselves, which is why their success rate is poor.

Yes, reading primers are dull. They always have been. When children have a limited reading vocabulary, it is difficult to make reading books exciting. Any reading primer will use the child's existing reading vocabulary and introduce a small number of new words that will be used repeatedly. That is not a recipe for an exciting story. The important thing is to read other books to your child so that they will want to be able to read these books themselves.

If your child is being taught to make weird noises with their tongues, something is seriously wrong. English has around 40 phonemes (the number varies a little depending on regional accents). Those are the only noises a child should be making when reading using synthetic phonics.