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!

I don't remember learning to read. I could read fluently before I started school, Jan 1959 aged 4y 9m. But I know I learned by 'sounding it out' because I can remember reading to myself and sounding out words I didn't know. I remember getting stuck on 'awkward' and 'anxious' and having to ask my mum.

I have vivid memories of looking at the letters of the alphabet and being desperate to be able to read when i was in nursery, so wasn't taught at home by my sahm.There was a girl in my class from another school so said she could already read. In hindsight, she may have been lying!

We had books about the Peg family. Early 80s.
I remember slotting words into some kind of plastic thing, like scrabble, to make sentences.

I used to 'read' my dad's books. Oh how disappointed I was when I could actually read and realised how boring it was!

I was a voracious early reader. Even back in the 80s, my school had a separate phonics class in the early years. It was the only primary school subject where I struggled. I excelled in everything except phonics. I just could not make my brain work that way. I kept trying to argue with the teacher that different accents treated the vowels differently so the set rules made no sense. It wasn’t until adulthood that I got an ASD diagnosis.

I still stand by my childhood objection. The rules of phonics are transitory and thus fundamentally flawed.

They used phonics in my daughter’s classrooms, but thankfully no longer as a separate subject. Her teachers could see that she could already read well beyond her classmates so mostly let her ignore the ridiculous phonics lessons. They let her work in her independent writing instead.

Let's face it, any 'system' that has to be learnt ain't gonna happen with a six year old

Dyslexia specialist by any chance ??😁

I am, and I agree. You are right .

This. My objection to phonics is the view that it helps every child learn to read (an assertion on the website of a well-known phonics programme). I believe research in the future will show that while being beneficial for the majority of kids it delays reading in a minority. My DS is in that minority. The prescription for kids who struggle with phonics is more phonics! I say that as a mum of a child who still has phonics interventions in secondary school. I’m not saying its not beneficial for most, but its definitely not for all. The sucess we’ve had in reading is when weve focused on books with engaging stories. I’m a follower of Michael Rosen’s views on phonics.

I have taught my children to read through phonics. My eldest was a fluent reader by the end of reception. In year 1 she did reading for meaning with an older year group.

We read and I ask questions even before we start. What's the title? What do you think the story is about? Then she reads and I'll ask what the characters feel? What might happen next?

Reading for meaning comes after learning to read.

My youngest finds it much harder. I'm trying different techniques with her. She likes the reading eggs app.

No, plain vanilla KS2 primary teacher. I’ve had an interest in phonics since before I dud teacher training - I bought the Jolly Phonics teachers’ book to make sure I ‘told DS the right things’ when he was fascinated by books and words as a pre-schooler, only to find that he had in fact taught himself to read already….

When your dd is reading Harry Potter and comes across the word ‘quidditch’, or Lord of the Rings and encounters the word ‘hobbit’, or studying to be a doctor and has to read ‘pneumothorax’, what does she do? How does she read them?

You can thank Michael Gove for the obsession with cursive writing. According to his dreadful 2014 curriculum, in order for a year 6 (end of primary) child to be working at age related, they need to have fully cursive handwriting. Teachers have no option but to teach it.

I have three main gripes.
Admittedly two of these may be more to do with how I have to teach phonics with the scheme we currently follow rather than the teaching of phonics in itself.

1. In the scheme we now follow, there is a section where we hold up a word and the children have to sound it out. Even if they can already read it. So a competent reader sees the word, recognises it, says it and has to be corrected. “No, say s-l-a-m. Faster s-l-a-m. Whole word? Slam. Well done. Frustrated child says “That’s what I said” I know you did but in this bit you have to sound it out… utterly pointless and holds them back.
2. The reading books. We have to read them three times in school, in a certain order, and then they take them home to read again! Read it perfectly the first time and understood it? Don’t care - read it again repeatedly. Didn’t like it? Don’t care, read it again. Several times. Like the look of this book over here? Too bad, you don’t think you get a choice do you??! Far too easy because in your spare time you’re reading Famous Five? You’re Year 1 - you should be on these Level 4 books. Far too hard? You’ve worked through the series in the prescribed order so this is where you should be at. If you aren’t then the only option we have is to give you the same books again to read another five times. That will be fun and contribute nicely to your self esteem.

I think both of these contribute to turning kids off reading.

1. If Phonics isn’t working, we seem to just push more phonics instead of having alternative strategies. If you look at organisations like the British Dyslexia Ass. they have research showing that phonics alone doesn’t work for maybe up to 25% of kids including dyslexic ones. But we just keep pushing the same thing and don’t give these kids any other strategies. No wonder reading becomes a chore.

My other issue with our new scheme is it ends up being them chanting rules. So many rules they haven’t a hope of remembering them. There’s a little chant for everything but there are too many.
None of them in themselves are wrong but it’s the volume of them. “Take off the y, add an I and ed.” Fine. But it’s just a chanted phrase which isn’t in itself memorable. I went to a phonics thing a while back and got taught loads of useful tricks to help with stuff like this (grumpy y doesn’t like anyone behind him in the line, so when ed come along he goes off on his own, but I offers to come and help with the ‘ee’ sound. And the kids could act it out. It made it stick. Can’t do it now - it’s off script apparently.
And when they are chanting several rules a week for two terms, nothing sticks.

They also try to make words fit their rules.
We were teaching -ful. Take the root word and then all the variations on what to remove/add on before you add the suffix as a series a rules to chant. And then “awe.” Take off the ‘e’ and add ‘ful.’ They were all supposed to chant it.
No, because even if awful did start as ‘aweful’ with the meaning full of awe, it doesn’t have that meaning no, so teaching it as ‘awe’ is the root word is just wrong.

But that assumes that phonics will definitely help read every word.
Bough
cough
though
through
thought

phonics alone won’t help you read those. You need the skills of understanding and context.
Ultimately you may mispronounce something like quidditch in your head. And then you hear it said, in your medical lecture (although that’s more likely to be pneumothorax!) or in an audiobook, and you join the dots because you’ve been taught strategies beyond simply sounding out.

I ignored it we just read stories together every night. Used to pick them up second hand and new. They loved the library. Left the phonics to the school.

All you are doing is demonstrating your own lack of understanding. Phonics will help with all those words. It is true that, like many languages, some graphemes in English (in this case ough) map to multiple phonemes. That does not in any way invalidate synthetic phonics. Context won't give you the correct pronunciation.

Like every person who encounters a new words, she sounds it out and understands the meaning from context clues. That didn’t require a specific lesson on letter sounds.

my objection to phonics isn’t the concept that letter combinations make sounds. My objection is that it presumes the class is all at the same place and is willing to ignore reality while presented with only the information by the teacher.

Think of a class where a teacher asks first year students if you can subtract 3 from 2. The first year answer would be no. However, there may be a student in the class who raises their hand and says the answer is -1.

That is not an objection to phonics. It is an objection to teachers who fail to differentiate.

If anyone is interested there is an absolutely fantastic investigative podcast into how phonics is absolutely vital to literacy and how education systems who have turned away from this are failing children - it’s a compelling listen podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/sold-a-story/id1649580473

At several points in my teaching career I have found myself asking What Would Michael Say?

<a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.com/sorry/index?continue=michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2025/07/how-do-you-become-fluent-at-reading-ruth.html&q=EgQNKJdfGJynysUGIi0GbyS7w12_SRjcZOV9x858xgYNftpDqfUlslYbIsu27FIVDlWv58-GTbbJ5O8yAnJSWgFD" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2025/07/how-do-you-become-fluent-at-reading-ruth.html

At several points in my teaching career I have found myself asking What Would Michael Say?

michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2025/07/how-do-you-become-fluent-at-reading-ruth.html

Hmm 🤔 I don't know why that post has been automatically hidden.

How does that change though if we change from phonics? Mine are older now but I remember the wordless books at the start and then phonics, I thought the idea of the pictures was to get them to understand what was going on in the story?

plus surely you can still read regular books with your child.

phonics aren’t that new are they I started school in 1978 and that’s how I learned to read and I was (am) an avid reader.

as for “we all managed in the olden days” maybe “we” all didn’t. My grandmother was born in 1920 and to be honest was barely literate. My other gran had better written and spoken English and she wasn’t even a native English speaker

The fact that the same group of letters can produce different sounds is precisely my point.
You won’t know which one to choose without some understanding of context. Phonics can help you identify the range of options but what next?
The point I am trying to make is not that synthetic phonics shouldn’t be taught but that there are other skills to reading which should be taught alongside it. It’s an important part of the picture but not the whole thing, especially in the context of children being turned off reading. And we do need to acknowledge that some children just don’t get phonics and have a plan for them - they are being let down by a system that only teaches them more of the same when they fail to get it.

But the quizzing is to test their comprehension, surely?

Absolutely this.

Phonics doesn’t work for everyone. It might work for a higher percentage than the other methods, but not 100%. The approach was an absolute disaster for one of mine, though the other DC got on fine. He found it far too complex (and boring!!) and developed such anxiety around reading that it took years to come back from. Sight reading with high interest books worked best for him in the end. He’s dyslexic, but they don’t diagnose that until it’s too late imho. The damage was done.