Key Words Rant

[crazygracieuk]

My youngest is in Reception.

At our school they get a variety of reading schemes as their reading book which is good and key words to learn.

Key words are sent home in groups of 10 and the teacher sends home another set once they are mastered.

The problem that I have is, the teacher does not consider the words to be mastered if the child sounds it out. I think that's crazy. As an adult I scan all letters in a word before saying it out loud which is surely a form of sounding things out?

Ds is at pink level reading so (quite rightly!) sounds out most words. According to the teacher he's supposed to recognise the word based on it's "shape" .

My motivation in complaining is that ds is getting discouraged and thinks that he's not a good reader as the teacher has sent home the same key words for the last 2 months and he likes to practice them.

AIBU to think that it's perfectly ok to sound out keywords?

I quoted you directly from your post and as the research indicates the words are processed letter by letter I would argue that is sounding out all be it almost instantaneously.
I thought that everyone already knew that the brain processed letters very quickly in order to read?!
so did I but you appear to think they need to learn whole words

I wouldn't expect a reception aged child to be "fluent" as they are usually just beginning to learn to read but neither would I expect them to be learning 300 HFW by sight. Teach blending until it becomes automatic.

Thought this might interest some people who are talking about reading words on sight...

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

jade80 you might like to see the full piece
it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae... it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place

This is clearly wrong. For instance, compare the following three sentences:

1. A vheclie epxledod at a plocie cehckipont near the UN haduqertares in Bagahdd on Mnoday kilinlg the bmober and an Irqai polcie offceir

2. Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs

3. A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur

All three sentences were randomised according to the "rules" described in the meme. The first and last letters have stayed in the same place and all the other letters have been moved. However, I suspect that your experience is the same as mine, which is that the texts get progressively more difficult to read. If you get stuck, the sentences are linked to the original unscrambled texts.

Hopefully, these demonstrations will have convinced you that in some cases it can be very difficult to make sense of sentences with jumbled up words. Clearly, the first and last letter is not the only thing that you use when reading text. If this really was the case, how would you tell the difference between pairs of words like "salt" and "slat"?

I'm going to list some of the ways in which I think that the author(s) of this meme might have manipulated the jumbled text to make it relatively easy to read. This will also serve to list the factors that we think might be important in determining the ease or difficulty of reading jumbled text in general.

There is still a very real debate in the psychology of reading, however, about exactly what information we do use when reading. I don't know how much of this literature Dr. Rawlinson was aware of at the time of his thesis, but I do think that the jumbled text provides a neat illustration of some of the sources of information that we now think are important. I'm going to review some of the research that has been done to demonstrate this.

the rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm... the rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem

Sorry it comes from
The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition

PhD Thesis, 1976, Nottingham University, by Graham Rawlinson

I disagree that that is sounding out. I know you quoted my post I said what I meant, I haven't changed that
Anyway not all words can be sounded out.
I did not say that I thought everyone needed to learn whole words where did you get that from, I have been talking about the OP asking about HFW and the fact that they should be 'almost' instantaneous and that that is when a child would be considered to be secure in reading them. I did not talk at all about sounding out using phonics for other words. I was offering advice for the HFW for the OP and DS, another way to help him recognise immediately, through repetition in books and not just flashcards, sometimes seeing a word that cannot be easily sounded out in its context in a short sentence can just help to get the word fixed in the brain.

My dd was taught to use phonics to decode the hfw, and alongside this was asked to learn the 'tricky' words by sight eg to I the etc. I believe this is in line with the guidance in 'Letters and Sounds'. I think we do learn to read most common words simply by sight recognition and are NOT instantaneously blending in our heads without knowing. Children do learn to recognise words by sight as well. How else do you explain how a very young child that hasn't been taught to read phonetically yet, can recognise their name and other familiar words?

Anyway not all words can be sounded out.
True there are seven words in English that can't be...

Go on then tell me what you believe are the only seven words in English that can't be sounded out.

yes children can learn to recognise a relatively small number of words by sight and I can learn to recognise a relatively few Japanese ideograms ... and?

Bunnywunny, Letters and Sounds instructs teachers to teach 'tricky' words as partially decodable words, but with a tricky bit.

Mrz, I found all 3 of your sentences easy to read with the single exception of the word 'tageene' which I had to treat as an anagram and ponder over. I think context also plays a stong part here.

There is some fascinating stuff on this thread. Here's my completely anecdotal input: a working vocabulary (speaking and listening to words having never seen them written) somehow helps with the decoding process IYKWIM.

mrz, any science in that?

'Dr. Sally Shaywitz has found a window on the brain through a new imaging technique called functional MRI. These medical scientists have identified parts of the brain used in reading. By observing the flow of oxygen-rich blood to working brain cells, they have found that people who know how to sound out words can rapidly process what they see. a ten year study published 2 years ago.'

How does this work? Don't most people know how to sound out words? Surely, it doesn't mean that they do it for words they have read a thousand times before. While, even at my age, I occasionally have to work out a word, perhaps a foreign name or a medical term.

CecilyP they weren't my sentences I was quoting from the thesis

mrz...what are the only seven words then in English that can't be sounded out?

I know there's a bit of a debate around it- I just thought it was an interesting addition to the post. I found yours interesting as well.

For what it's worth I think it depends on the child. I was good at recognising words as a whole. Some find sounding out easier. A combination of the two in varying proportions will probably suit most people.

I think the issue with phonics for me is that personally I found learning words as a whole quite easy. There are so many rules to learn to use phonics compregensively well that for me, it would almost have been more effort. All the variations of phonemes made by a grapheme and likewise the different graphemes representing one phoneme.

Obviously this works better for some than for others, as with most things in education.

evolucy7 There are only seven HFWs words one, once, two, who, the, are and eye, that may need to be memorised as whole units are true 'sight' words, although no English word is completely phonologically opaque.

I think that is a little different from what you said, you said that there were seven words in English that can't be sounded out. That is not true is it, there are a large number of words that cannot be completely sounded out and have 'tricky' parts.

Having "tricky" parts doesn't exclude a word from being sounded out... which words do you believe can't be sounded out?

Of course it does, you have to remember the tricky part, as it does not follow the rules of phonics, therefore cannot be completely sounded out.

e.g were, here, where, they all have the same last 3 letters, and you can sound out the 'w' 'h' and 'wh' but the 'ere' is different in each one. Perhaps I have missed something but I cannot see it. And how do you explain 'here' and 'hear', they are not spelt the same but they sound the same.

mrz- He has been in Reception since September and started digraphs in January. He has learned "ai" (as in angel) but for words like "was" he would say "Wuh, ah, s , was"

Have just page 2 of this thread and my head is spinning. How have we all learned English???

The pronunciation of all English words bears some relation to the way they are spelt. The only real oddballs are 'one' and 'once' and possibly, 'eye'. I don't think there is anything too difficult about the words 'are' and 'the'. However, in the case of many words, there are several ways the letters could be pronounced, and many wrong pronunciations could still generate an actual word, albeit the wrong word, eg cough would have about 4 phonically plausible pronunciations which would be real words. It is really only with the benefit of hindsight that we know what the word actually says and we do then have to remember.

Well a lot of us I would think have learnt English without such a strong emphasis on phonics and sounding out, and oddly enough we all appear to have done ok. I am sure that there are some adults however that may have struggled with reading when they were children and had they had more phonics teaching it may have helped them. But I strongly believe that it is a combination of the two. There are words that follow the patterns and many that don't, and those that don't are often best learnt through flashcards as well as repetition in various books.