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!

True, but it does seem like schools are, in practice, simply abandoning that one child per class.

No, I’m afraid not - it will depend in the nature of the underlying difficulty so there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’.

Okay, thank you.

Not in my experience- as in such a child would almost certainly be on the SEN register at some level, with specified targets and interventions. However, whereas when I first started teaching, an advisory teacher / LA reading lead would advise, then an Ed Psych might do a battery of tests and recommend the best intervention and provide resources for someone to deliver it, those external resources just aren’t available /affordable any more. And interventions (often from something recommended by an Ed Psych a decade ago and handed down in multiple photocopied) may not be delivered if instead the member of staff delivering them is containing a child with a meltdown or dealing with complex in-class behavioural difficulties or changing nappies.

Yes, that’s what I meant by ‘in practice’. For DC, it wasn’t much good getting SEN support for difficulty with phonics when in reality that just meant extra time spent doing phonics. More time spent on an approach that didn’t work for him, with his self-esteem plummeting even further.

Dyslexia diagnostic tests are from age seven, which meant a couple of years struggling first, ultimately leading to school refusal.
Seven is too late.

My daughter nailed phobics at nursery, she’s reading Roald Dahl in Year 1. Phonics hasn’t done her any harm and she didn’t need to make any weird noises either. She adores reading!

Interestingly, the ‘first line’ interventions for dyslexia are all phoneme - grapheme (phonics) linked.

What they are not - and this is where schools can go wrong due to lack of guidance - is the same material from the same scheme over and over.

However, what they are not is ‘not phonics’. Just ‘differently packaged phonics’, in the main.

Phonics works. It doesnt work for everyone. Until children/young people master the basics they stay at that stage in my DS school. The system of phonics “works for every child” apparently, so no changing of gear! My DS has 98% attendance through school, is in his 8th year of phonics interventions, and its killed his love of stories. The books he brings home are for year 2 children. He’s in Year 9. That’s my objection. I’m told without a grasp of phonics he wont have strategies to spell. So repeating year 1 phonics is his groundhog day. The most progress he made was in lockdown with whole word reading. I get that the majority of kids benefit! But the system needs to change for those that don’t.

@Parkhotel

This website https://interventionsforliteracy.org.uk may be useful for exploring the range of interventions available. Searchable for those that parents can deliver.

That must be soul-destroying. There are ways to continue to deliver reading and phonics instruction that absolutely do not entail endless repetition of the same curriculum with the same materials.

Thank you, much appreciated.

Interestingly, DD struggled to learn to read with phonics (dyslexia) does use phonics to spelling. Which creates some interesting spellings at times.

That is ridiculous, your poor son. I would put money on him having a phonological awareness difficulty that has never been recognised or addressed.
There are different approaches to effectively teaching phonics. Simply repeating the same thing over and over again is not one of them.

Phonics was probably brought in as a way to teach a large amount of children to read at once (i.e. in a school setting). While it will do well for some children, and probably helps children who don't come from families that read with them, it can be very boring for those who are sight-reading and are at a more advanced level.

The bit where phonics falls down is that not all English words are phonetic, and some words sound the same but are spelt differently. I remember being bemused as to why a TA was penalising a child for spelling 'sachet of cat food' as 'sashay of cat food'... and when a teacher told a child from a farming background that 'sow' wasn't a word. Actually, it's an adult female pig that's had a litter (the child's family had pigs)... and, come to think of it, you also sow seeds.

Also, the phonetic books are very boring (even more boring than Biff, Chip and Kipper before The Magic Key revolutionised the series).

However, even those of us who learnt to read without phonics have different opinions on whether reading is a joy or not.

Yes, but the point some of us have been trying to make is that for some of us with a particular variety of ASD, doing this as a separate task simply doesn’t work. We pick it up so easily that trying to go back and break it down into rules is next to impossible. It is an unnecessary and incredibly frustrating step backwards.

These are not students who are likely to have a diagnosis when they enter school. They are doing well academically.

We got very lucky with my DD and she did get differentiation from her absolutely amazing teacher. As I mentioned in an earlier post, her teacher let her work on her novella during most of the phonics and reading lessons. This isn’t even something I asked for. Her teacher was just fantastic and realized giving dd time to write and then read excerpts to the class on occasion was a better education for her.

So as I understand it, your objection is not to the teaching of phonics - because, as you acknowledge, your child does use knowledge of grapheme / phoneme correspondence to decode words - but to the undifferentiated use of prescriptive phonics teaching schemes regardless of a child’s needs?

I think I’d be with you for that. DS was a self-taught pre-school reader, in an era where phonics was taught from less prescriptive schemes - so he was taught phonics for encoding not decoding, and given books matched to his reading ability and interests.

I completely understand why prescriptive schemes were brought in - half-hearted teaching of the simple code only, and unmatched reading schemes, were diluting the benefits of phonics by effectively teaching mixed methods. However, the resulting removal of freedoms to adapt for outliers is absolutely a disbenefit.

Yes, but the point some of us have been trying to make is that for some of us with a particular variety of ASD, doing this as a separate task simply doesn’t work. We pick it up so easily that trying to go back and break it down into rules is next to impossible. It is an unnecessary and incredibly frustrating step backwards.

I’d agree with this. DS is also autistic. It was learning and re-learning lists of sounds and rules that over-complicated everything for him. It never ‘clicked’ for him as it did with the others and he too found it impossible. Maybe for different reasons though as he struggled to read?

The emotions that went with failing all the time also had a terrible impact on him.

The teachers simply thought he was ‘weak’ at this stage of his education. He’s not.

But phonics is not new. I learnt to read with phonics in the early 1970s and it has been around in some form as a system since the seventeenth century. I didn’t love reading until I could do it fluently and efficiently but I did love books because my parents and primary school teacher read them to me. My sons learnt in the early 2000s with a very boring and no more efficient system of encountering the same words repeatedly (‘here’ - ‘now’ -‘where’). All three of us read English Literature at university. Learning to read was just a dull gateway we had to pass through to find something more interesting.

This is something that really stood out to me through years of studying various languages with fellow adult learners of all ages. You can distinguish straight away between people who were taught to read with phonics-based methods and those who were taught with ‘look and say’, ‘whole word’ schemes. People with a grounding in phonics tend to focus on learning the sounds that groups of letters make in the new language then start to blend them, sounding out unfamiliar words. ‘Look and say’ readers seem far less confident with tackling new sounds and words, and need to ‘know’ a word before they’ll happily risk saying it aloud.

Yes, the problem is that some
schools and teachers emphasize phonics to such an extent that it hurts some students. There is no teaching method that works for everyone.

In helping my dd with her homework over the years, I have noticed that schools now explicitly teach many of the patterns that ASD students see implicitly. This works well for things like math because the rules are strict. It works less well for language because the rules are not as hard and fast, but phonics tries to teach them as such in the beginning.

I think it is not ‘phonics’, but ‘excessive fidelity to phonic schemes’ that it is wrong to emphasise, and which limits the ability to meet children where they are in their learning.

Even in Maths, you get weaker teachers teaching ‘limiting rules’ (eg ‘put a 0 at the end if a number to multiply by 10’) that impact future learning. Or ‘don’t worry about that, that’s not in the curriculum’ (or worse ‘you can’t do that’) when a child learning subtraction asks what 5-7 is equal to. So I completely understand the risk of teaching rules that a) a child doesn’t need - because they are already beyond that point or b) are not really rules at all, just the most common correspondence.

Why on earth have you kept your child in such a shitty school?!

It’s not like that everywhere.

My DD has amazing sight word memory so apart from doing the odd test she doesn’t do any formal phonics and she’s only in Year 1 (but with a reading/writing age of 8). She fully understands phonics but doesn’t need to use it to spell. Her teacher has tailored her learning as she is way ahead of her class. It’s a lovely little village school with mixed age classes so they teach the child in front of them and don’t worry about frameworks. Move your child to a better school!

But you’re describing a child who can read fluently, not one who can’t. They keep trying to teach those who can’t.

Nonsense. Look and Say has an 80% success rate. Synthetic Phonics has a 95% success rate. Reading is the greatest predictor of academic success we have.

What is missing now, is parents doing their part. Fewer than 60% of children get a bedtime story. God now how few see parents model reading other own.

We didn’t all manage in the olden days. Many of us did, including me. Some of us would have done better with phonics. Some people struggled very significantly. Phonics is taught because it’s been shown to be better and improve outcomes and if you talk to an early years professional they will hopefully explain why much better than me as most have read the research. (guess who explained this to me lol).
I did find the phonics reading books boring but there’s nothing stopping anyone buying other books or going to the library and getting other books to read with and to their children to encourage a love of reading. We can’t get enough of books in this house.