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!

Whereas my dyslexic DD learned well with phonics and only slipped behind as sentences got more complicated and paragraphs more dense and she couldn't hold the sense.

Learning with phonics. I learnt to read in the 1960s with phonics.

Phonics has been used for centuries, albeit not called that - it is the natural way to "crack the code" of reading.
Look-and-say methods became popular in the mid-20th century but were a pedagogic disaster - they were quickly found to fail many children, leaving them functionally illiterate. See e.g. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/why-johnny-cant-read.
If you want half the population to struggle with anything more than very basic reading, and 20% to be functionally illiterate, sure - ditch phonics, and bring back look-and-say.

It is also worth saying anything can be taught badly. A friend's daughter was not progressing well with reading, and her (incompetent) teacher was pushing for a dyslexia assessment. With a change of school and teacher, her reading "problems" disappeared with competent instruction. Both the old and new teacher were using phonic schemes, but with different degrees of competence. It would have been spurious to conclude that phonics didn't work for this child. Anecdotal evidence about the efficacy of one approach don't count for much - rigorous statistical analyses of large numbers of kids show that for the vast majority of kids phonics works, but look-and-say doesn't.

Keep your views about my parenting to yourself, I'm not interested in the 🙄

I am interested in how all the people who claim they don’t use phonics to read know how to spell.

It might be worth mentioning that although all children need to know phonics in order to be able to read, some of them struggle because they have difficulties with phonological awareness - the ability to hear the individual phonemes within the words. This is the case for all dyslexic children and several others. It doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be taught phonics, just that these underlying skills need to be put in place first.
Most parent and many teachers (and some EPs) are unaware of this and so decide that phonics are not working for this child or the child ‘can’t do’ phonics, where in reality they just can’t do phonics yet.

Agreed.

I don't know why my post wasn't allowed but I linked to Michael Rosen's blog where he makes an interesting observation about all this.

Multiple posts to reply to, so won’t quote, but would agree that

• stultifyingly dull phonics teaching schemes and processes (eg rereading same book over and over a prescribed number if times, explicitly sounding out when it’s no longer necessary)
• poor teaching
• lack of differentiation

are all problems, but they are not problems with synthetic phonics as a concept and way of teaching reading. They are ‘phonics teaching done badly’, not a reason to ditch phonics.

On ‘look and say’, as I said earlier, DS taught himself to read, and I was able to observe what he had done. He had a retentive memory, and I read to him a lot. He would recite his books word for wird, pointing to the words as he did so (essentially self-driven ‘look and say’). From that, he worked out the phonic code so he could read unknown words - abd that’s the part of ‘look and say’ that most people fon’t acknowledge. To successfully become a reader using the ‘look and say’ method, the child has to ‘crack the code’ themselves, and then apply that inferred phonic knowledge to new words. Teaching the code directly is obviously more efficient.

When DS started Reception and was tested on his phonic knowledge, it turned out he did in fact know - having worked out - the grapheme / phoneme correspondences, though he didn’t always segment the words into absolutely standard graphemes. He was taught phonics with his class, with a focus on spelling / writing instead of decoding / reading, and remains excellent at spelling.

And phonics should never form all of a child’s ‘book and reading and stories’ diet in school, but I don’t know any schools where it does - picture books, home-time and assembly stories, songs snd rhymes, all form part of the school day. Just not the explicit ‘phonics’ lesson.

Read at home, my daughter loves reading and can read fluently at the age of 5.
finished phonics midway through year 1 and then has access the whole school library’s
My niece on the other hand was frustrated that she had to learn to read….didn’t really enjoy it and now loves to read for pleasure.
I find it’s what the child is interested in/strengths and weaknesses.

when I was young, lots children were left behind if they could catch up.

@babybytheseaI totally agree that they keep pushing more phonics regardless!!

I find that sometimes they need the other strategies and when they are a bit older the phonics tends to slot into place, just doing more and more blending etc leads to dullness!!

I wish the books were more interesting too, all contrived stories to work with the sounds! Hate it.

I 100% disagree with you. My child learned to read by sight, as many children do, as ‘sounding out’ words made zero sense to her. So many words in the English language are impossible to ‘sound out’.

Phonics do help some children to learn to read but shouldn’t be the only way that children are taught to read.

My child could read from a very early age and loves reading. We read together a lot when she was in primary school and any word she didn’t know I pronounced for her and that’s how she learned. She’s in secondary school now, still loves to read and has great vocabulary and spelling.

My child could read from a very early age and loves reading. We read together a lot when she was in primary school and any word she didn’t know I pronounced for her and that’s how she learned. She’s in secondary school now, still loves to read and has great vocabulary and spelling.

What does she do now if she encounters a new word when reading? Does she still bring the book to you so you can tell her how to pronounce it?

I think the point is that it LOOKS as if a child is learning to read by sight - and to start with, in books with limited vocabulary, that may be what they are doing , memorising words as wholes.

However, to properly read - attack an unknown word with confidence- anyone HAS to break it down. Whether that ‘breaking down’ is into smaller words, syllables, graphemes, that breaking down has to happen, and has to match with the reader’s ‘stored set of knowledge about what those bits sound like’. So faced with a word like ‘quadratic’, a reader may break it down ‘quad’ ‘rat’ ‘ic’ or ‘qu’ ‘a’ ‘d’ ‘r’ ‘a’ ‘t’ ‘i’ ‘c’ - and sound those bits out.

’Look and say’ requires a beginner reader to infer the breaking down process and what the ‘bits’ sound like. Synthetic phonics teaches that process explicitly - and is therefore successful for more children IF DONE WELL.

It’s worth pointing out that no process will yield anything more than a ‘best estimate’ unless the word is in the reader’s known vocabulary (ie they have heard it, or a word sufficiently like it to home their ‘best estimate’). I still remember the agony of being corrected by an infant teacher for reading ‘automobile’ as ‘auto’’mobile’ (as in above a baby’s cot).

This is one of the reasons why for sone children entering Reception now, the phonics-for-reading process cones too early. Some do not speak well, and have never been talked to. Many have very limited exposure to vocabulary. A lot are not able to actively listen precisely. The Phase 1 of the old Letter and Sounds is ignored at our peril - it focused entirely on listening and sound discrimination, without which teaching phonemes snd graphemes is premature.

Just seen that my link has been allowed now.

@Chinyreckon I saw that you wrote that you're a fan of MRs view too.

We’ll have to agree to disagree. My child is ASD and ‘failed’ every phonics test but can read perfectly. She learned by sight and never, ever sounded out or broke down a word. It made zero sense to her. She simply could not do it.

How would she read an unknown, long word? And how do you know that she us not mentally breaking it down?

IIRC, Look snd Say was based on incorrect beliefs on how adults read. My understanding is that eye and brain scans show that adult readers are in fact scanning, breaking down and blending, but so fast and so unconsciously that we would describe ourselves as ‘recognising the whole word’ as we are not aware of what our brains are doing.

@JustGotToKeepOnKeepingOn As a matter of interest, how does your DD approach new words now? Can she read words she has heard but never seen written? Can she read made up words? If so, how?

I think it is worth thinking about what that would look like, if true. It would be like a Westerner reading Chinese characters for the first time - absolutely no idea how to read or say anything until explicitly taught that exact character - word correspondence.

If a reader never breaks down or uses inferred phonics, it would mean that, given a made up word like Horcrux, they could say absolutely anything - from Piffling to Flinbertygibbet, with any initial sound, any number of syllables, and no sound correct - until someone explicitly says ‘that says Horcrux’. Which would not be ‘a fluent reader’.

What is more likely us that the initial teaching of phonics did not make sense, but that through exposure to whole words, links have been made from letters to their most likely sounds (so my guess is that this poster’s daughter would know that Horcrux started with a <h> sound, and ended with <ks>).

So how does she read new words?

Of course she is applying knowledge of phonics - just very quickly and easily and without being conscious of it.

It enables all children to access the written word and helps all children read.

No.
It doesn’t.

Sure, it works for more people that the other methods do. And it does work for the vast majority. Which isn’t a lot of help if you or your child are part of the small minority for whom it doesn’t work. The reliance on it actively causes damage in some cases —because there can be a of loss of confidence and self-esteem when you’re the only child in a class who just can’t get it.

I am glad to hear phonics worked for your children but you were among the lucky majority. It doesn’t do to forget that.

What happens to the 1 - 5% for whom it doesn’t work? They’re small in percentage terms but the figures translate to a lot of children, perhaps one in every classroom.
In my experience schools are much too slow to implement alternatives for this group.

I do think that the extreme prescriptiveness of many of the current crop of phonics schemes is an impediment to some children (at either end of the spectrum of ease of learning to read). DS, who exhausted the school’s KS1 reading scheme well before leaving Reception, would have hated it, and it is also difficult for those who find learning to read difficult.

IME, the very small percentage who do not learn to read when taught phonics well, including after intensive 1:1 or small group tailored sessions from well-trained professionals (not necessarily an untrained TA with a photocopied scheme), are also members of the much larger percentage who would not have learned to read via Searchlights or pure Look and Say. They are those with specific or general learning difficulties that make acquiring the skill of reading hard.

Knowledge amongst schools and teachers (and regrettably, modern Ed Psychs etc) of the very best, most effective alternative catch-up methods and programmes is not yet good enough, and in some schools ‘fidelity to scheme’ has become such a watchword that they do not adapt well.

Regrettably, I can’t see that changing anytime soon, with funding and teacher retention the way it is. Nor, though, do I see the difficulties faced by this small percentage as a reason to avoid or change the provision for the vast majority to an alternative (including adding mixed methods) that actually creates a larger proportion of failures.

It is counterintuitive, perhaps, that adding in a range of strategies that might help a tiny minority actually creates a larger number of initial failures. It is also true that badly-taught phonics has a lower percentage of success than well-taught phonics.

Can you recommend any of the best catch up schemes that a parent could use @cantkeepawayforever?