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!

Certainly the only books that came home from school were phonics. I read to her every night, but after I got home, made dinner and did her phonics homework with her (which was every night), asking her to read more herself was a struggle as she just didn't enjoy it.

Out of interest which books do you think the school should have been sending home for her to read by herself?

Mixed views on this one. Phonics has worked very well for my youngest. The method has suited her and her learning style and she’s done very well with it. My eldest didn’t get on with phonics at all and learnt by sight and memory and advanced very quickly. The method of repeating books 3 times took the joy out of reading for her.

However, I think you have to separate method from the quality of books. Some reading scheme books are just awful and also kill a bit of the joy and others are excellent.

@99bottlesofkombucha I totally agree it would be wonderful if parents did this but so many parents don’t. Getting children to read at home in my school is a nightmare. We’ve done so much to try and engage parents but nothing seems to work.

100% disagree. Phonics helps close the gap of the disadvantaged children. It enables all children to access the written word and helps all children read. The lessons need to be daily to ensure all children learn at the same pace. There is no reason why children can’t still enjoy reading- we access lots of books daily and have topics themed around them. My own children are huge book worms and have reading ages above their age and this is mainly down to phonics and exposure to books being read to them.

Phonics should be just one of many different learning tools, not the only tool. Teachers should be teaching in different ways. Same with Maths - my son's primary was obsessed with number lines, year after sodding year, even doing division and multiplication by sodding number lines. They weren't taught any other way. Same with the obsession with cursive writing. Teachers should be free to use different methods and should have the confidence and ability to use different methods. Pupils are all different and need to be able to explore different ways to learn to find what suits them best, not strait jacketed into whatever is the current fad.

I do think that the concepts / vocabulary used (especially in early Phonics schemes such as Jolly Phonics) around so-called ‘tricky words’ has held learning and parental understanding back.

A ‘tricky word’ is NOT a word that is forever not decodable, that absolutely has to be ‘learned as a whole’. It’s a word that contains one or more grapheme phoneme correspondences that a child has not yet been taught, and is thus not fully decodable at this point in their learning. They are only introduced because some are so common that it is hard to write books at all without them.

Think about it like this. At the start of a child’s journey, all words are ‘tricky’, in the sense that they contain no grapheme / phoneme correspondences that they know.

Then they are taught s, a, t, p, i and n, and so words like ‘pin’ are not tricky any more, but ‘fun’ would still be tricky.

Then they are taught the rest of the ‘simple code’ - the most common grapheme / phoneme correspondences. This is the point at which poor phonic teaching used to stop - teachers would say ‘oh, we’ve done phonics, but it doesn’t work for so many words, we’ll teach all sorts of other methods’. At this point, a child could read eg ‘ruff’, but ‘rough’ would still be ‘tricky’ as that correspondence for the <f> sound would not yet have been taught.

Then if the complex code is taught - the less common alternative correspondences - very few words remain tricky, and those only have a small part that is unknown. ‘Yacht’ is a famous example, but y and t are totally regular and the a in fact makes the same sound as in ‘swan’ and many other words - only that ch is genuinely ‘tricky’.

Words like ‘we’ are often included in early ‘tricky word lists’, though it is in fact entirely phonetically decodable once the child has been taught the most common sound for the ‘w’ and the alternative spelling of e for the <ee> sound. It just happens rather later than is useful for writing a book that makes sense!

It is, however, common for parents - and some poor teachers - to say ‘oh, so many words are tricky and have to be learned as wholes that it’s obvious that English isn’t phonetic’, a total misunderstanding of what the term means.

The inclusion of systematic phonics teaching in the early reading curriculum boosts early reading outcomes (specifically in terms of word reading skills). There is a lot of educational and psychological research supporting this. It is the most effective way to teach children how to read words. There are a minority of children who struggle with reading despite phonics teaching. These children will need more individualised and intensive teaching. If we dont incoporate high quality phonics teaching into the early reading curriculum, then this group of struggling readers is much larger.

However, a high quality literacy curriculum should be much more than phonics. Sharing high quality children's literature and non-fiction should be central and included alongside phonics. It is vital to develop comprehension skills and a love of reading. This needs activities alongside phonics not instead of it.
I couldn't agree more with the earlier poster that the move away from the free 'letters and sounds' schemes to the commercial ones was unnecessary and has placed intensive cost pressures on schools (while making some people a lot of money). Letters and sounds and the associated materials could have been updated and developed. Also the key stage 1 curriculum needs to be slimmed down to allow room for a rich literacy curriculum that includes phonics as one component alongside a wide range of othee literacy activities. If we got rid of phonics teaching it would simply increase the number of children who struggle to learn read, particularly among children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Phonics should only be one of many tools if you don't want all children to learn to read. As per my previous post, if you use synthetic phonics alone, 95%+ of children will learn to read, with some studies finding success rates of 99%+. If you use it as one of several methods the success rate falls to 80% or lower.

Teaching reading is embedded throughout the day. It's not just about having children sitting on the carpet and parroting the sounds on flashcards.

When we use the phonics/reading scheme books in class, there is more to it than just sounding out the words. One session focuses on decoding. Another is on prosody (reading with expression) and using the punctuation to help us. Another session looks at comprehension.

Adults read stories to the class every day at set times but also whenever we have a spare few minutes before breaktime, lunchtime or home time. We send home 'reading for pleasure books' alongside our reading scheme books so that children can share them with the adults in their lives. We also listen to every child read individually.

The children in my class last year were/are living in an area where is a high level of poverty and deprivation. Most bring their books back unread. Several don't bring their books back at all.

These children generally have quite a limited vocabulary and so need support to increase that. Many of them have had to be taught how to speak/answer in sentences so that they are able to write a sentence. Their families are often working long hours to make ends meet and just don't have a great deal of time or energy left for conversation. Some of the parents have low levels of education themselves and struggle with these things themselves.

These children need phonics if they are to have any hope of learning to read and to understand what they are reading. There will be no "joyful quest into the world or literature" without it.

That's a good question. We had plenty of books at home like Six Dinner Sid and Snail and the Whale. My point though was that I don't know what she was reading in school as all that came home was phonics.

This x100

My DD is not school age yet but I have heard a few reception teachers saying they wish parents didn't teach their children to read before starting school and that it should be left to the teachers as it messes with their phonics education and as a result they have to have to strip back everything the parent taught them because it didn't coincide with how phonics is taught in school. It made me really disheartened as even though my DD is only a baby at the moment I read to her daily and teaching her to read with me as she gets older was something I looked forward to doing. So I agree with you OP

You can do reading with her. Just read up on phonics and do that.
So letter sounds not names.
Proper sounds 'mmmm' not 'muh'

I've been trying my best with this (I made sure I learnt all the correct sounds!), but honestly there's so much ambient 'wrong' phonics everywhere that my DS already says 'muh' instead of 'mmm' etc. He also knows all the letter names already because the alphabet song is everywhere. Even if I did absolutely nothing towards helping him learn to read, he'd still start school with lots of ideas that don't fit in with whatever phonics scheme they're using. So I decided I might as well just teach him if he's interested. Whenever he has a fit of enthusiasm he asks to read some of the Julia Donaldson Songbirds books, but obviously the ones we've already read, he knows what the words say so he'll do a little bit of decoding, some memorising, and some guessing.

DS got on fine with phonics and enjoyed reading in the first years of primary, but the Accelerated Reader system really killed any enjoyment of reading for him and turned it into a chore. Now he’s at senior school where they use Sparx Reader, which constantly stops to quiz you on what you’ve just read. He hates it and I don’t blame him, it sucks any enjoyment out of reading. I’m a massive fan of reading but I think if I’d been made to use these systems I don’t think I would be the avid reader I am today.

This is what happens when kids aren’t taught phonics. The evidence is overwhelming that it is the best method of teaching reading for the majority of children. There is no evidence that it ‘kills enjoyment of reading’ - on the contrary, kids who can’t read in the first place will never develop this enjoyment. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

Re the move away from Letters & Sounds, I suspect this needs to be considered in the context of experience like mine.

DC’s school used the original version of Letters & Sounds about a decade ago - from what I saw their phonics teaching was fine & did indeed look fun. However, they then sent home a mix of some phonics books & the old ORT “guess & say” books which completely undermined their teaching & encouraged DS1 to guess (as it was the only way he could make sense of words out of his phonics knowledge like “aardvark”). It was intensely annoying as I knew he ought to be getting books within his phonics knowledge due to the exceedingly knowledgeable & helpful threads on MN & set back DS1’s reading.

Eventually, I followed the advice on MN, bought a decent phonics reading scheme (not cheap) & his reading ability & confidence blossomed.

Popular schemes like RWInc might not be as much fun as Letters & Sounds & a properly linked reading scheme - but they do avoid situations like the one that I experienced.

The really sad thing about phonics bashing threads is that they distract attention from real issues in reading - like consistent, research-based & adequately funded support for dyslexia, which at present really varies across LAs & schools. (Although this thread does at least allow me to thank @prh47bridgefor advice on the old threads - advice that was so useful that I can remember the names of the posters over a decade later).

I also really don’t understand the “English needs more than phonics” point. Phonics is only a gateway skill to reading & for most ends in Y1 or Y2. That’s a whole 9 or 10 years of compulsory English to focus on other aspects & even in YR other aspects of English are taught.

@Benvenuto i think we are basically in agreement about the importance of phonics in the first few years. I view it as very important in establishing word reading skills. Developing comprehension skills and a love of reading are complimentary to phonics. Different literacy activities serve different purposes. Sharing stories, books and poems are important in so many ways. It supports children's language development and understanding. These experiences are important for all children's development, but particularly those who start school with less developed language and/or limited exposure to books. We need phonics, but we need other experiences too. These activities dont develop word reading, they have other benefits.
The commercialisation of phonics is a whole other issue. I could bore on about it, but i won't.

Just to add, the best thing you can do for your child to make them a confident and fluent reader is to give them a large vocabulary. Reading to your child, as many books from as wide a range as possible, and talking to them about those books will help them to learn to read better than trying to get them to decode early on.

Thank you I appreciate this, I loved reading as a child and I really hope my DD loves reading too as she grows. I have read to her every day since the day she was born so I really hope it stands to her in the future. She never really looks at the book when I am reading though so I hope she does soon, but she's not even 8 mo yet!

Exactly this.

Dd's teachers often comment that she must be a good reader because her vocabulary is impressive. Nope. She doesn't read a thing, but she lives in a house full of readers with wide vocabularies, which she's clearly picking up.

She's one of those people without an internal monologue or the ability to transform words into pictures, so I think reading is deadly dull for her.

I learnt to read before starting school by flash cards and everything at home labelled. I learned by recognising words, school taught me how to put those words together. No phonics in those days! (1960s)
Janet and John were brilliant (parodied by Terry Wogan) and Dr Seuss. I am still an avid reader 60 years on.