Phonics

[benito]

There was an interesting thread on phonics on here the other day. I then saw this piece on the BBC website and wondered what people thought.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12509477

I absolutely see the importance of phonics but I do have a great deal of sympathy with the view that teaching phonics should not be conflated with the teaching of reading itself.

My 5 year old now attempts to decode every word he sees, even those he knows, and even when he can see from the picture (or would if he lifted his head from pressing his 'magic sounds finger' against every letter/sound) what the word should be.

What are the views of our experts out there?

Once he has decoded a word correctly draw his attention to that word whenever he encounters it the text "you read that word before can you remember what it said?" if he can't let him decode it again then repeat at the next meeting...but please don't encourage him to use pictures to guess

Lots of children continue sounding out each word simply because no one has told them they don't need to

even when he can see from the picture ... what the word should be.

Sounding out is a better strategy than guessing words from pictures, particularly as, at some point in the future, there won't be any pictures!

Children need to sound out and blend words a few times before they become consolidated as 'sight' words (i.e they can be read straight off without any apparent conscious processing). The number of repetitions varies greatly from child to child. Some need only one, some need dozens.

mrz's point is very sound, though. He may just have not been told that he doesn't have to sound out words he 'knows'.

Thanks. I linked to the article above because I thought it had some very interesting points about phonics which were relevant to the point I was making about my son. No one has commented on that though.

One of the things the article indicates is the importance of understanding context for developing reading skills. Of course, books will not always have pictures but at this age, pictures supply that context and help a child to understand the sentence and the story - and thus, the words.

This is not 'guessing' but understanding the relationship between pictures and words - or words and meanings. This seems to me to part of the enjoyment of reading.

Otherwise, there is really no point in pictures, is there? We may as well just give our children sentences to read and decode. That would well and truly kill reading as a pleasure.

Using context to help us understand words is something we all do even as we develop our skills. If we encounter a word we don't know, we can often predict what it means from the context.

So, of course decoding is a very important first step but I worry it is becoming another orthodoxy and used even in place of common sense. A child should be able to use decoding, pictures, memory and whatever other skills they have to read and develop a sense that words are not scientific equations but have meaning.

benito..I've been down this line of thinking here, and got bored of saying it.

Just as you say, it seems that phonics and decoding appears to be considered so very important on its own. I agree that this often seems to be in place of common sense. I believe that children should be using a range of skills in learning to read and comprehend and enjoy.

As for the idea of non-words in tests for 6 year olds, well if the non-words are to be mixed in with the words, that is ridiculous. My 4 year old in reception, who works with Y1 for spelling, phonics, guided reading etc, (presumably this test would be around end of Y1) would say that isn't a word looking confused!

If the non-words were separate to the words, and perhaps it should be made clear that they did not have a meaning, so the children told to just read the word thinking about the sounds, it may test the phonic knowledge better, while the child wasn't searching their brain with no luck, to understand the word. It may also depend what the other words were, if they were words that they were expected to know by sight High Frequency Words, or other words they may already sight read, or more phonics based words that they may still be needing to decode, but could do so from phonics knowledge.

At the risk of being shot down by MaizieD:

The muddle model which Rose used to underpin Phonics teaching does allow for what you are saying, it just urges it is separated from the skills of word recognition. Using context to determine meaning is a very different idea to using context to substitute for working through the orthographic code and determining what the word is.

Similarly, understanding the meanings of words (in and out of context), relationships between words and pictures, between one sentence and the next, and overall meaning are not prohibited by SP or the SVR-it is simply that these should form part of building up language comprehension not word recognition, and that overall comprehension should not be used as a measure of understanding.

Discussions about how to get the balance between the two strands right, communicating to kids that reading is about more than just the orthographic code, and deciding how far listening comprehension and reading comprehension are the same are difficult and, in the context of entrenched oppositions who see old debates revisited remarkably hard.

But, surely, there is nothing intrinsically anti-phonics in what the OP is saying, providing guessing words from context is not encouraged?

Sorry AdelaofBlois I'm assuming you have seen simple view of reading
According to this view of reading, reading comprehension is the product of word recognition skills and listening comprehension skills. Recognising (reading) the words on the page is vital to reading comprehension; if a child cannot read the words, then they will quite obviously be unable to extract meaning from the written word. Once written words are recognised they can be understood as long as they are in the child's oral vocabulary.

I think reading "non-words" is a great way of identifying how children's reading skills are developing and where they are having problems.

I notice with some of the kids I read with, they really struggle with unfamiliar names in the Biff and Chip books eg Mrs Patel, Wilf and Wilma.

Wilf and Wilma should be easy, but some children struggle even after seeing them the page before, presumably because they are not used to sounding words out.

Incidently, I'd like to know how Mr. and Mrs. fit into phonics system.

Mrz? are we allowed to call them tricky words?

I don't see how what I wrote disagrees with this in any way: reading is about more than word recognition, it is about the product of word recognition AND language comprehension. And the post was quite clear about the importance I attached to what you put in bold, and of SP in teaching it, and specifically advocated not using anything but cracking the orthographic code to aid in word recognition.

More critically, the OP is not talking about reading a real book, and this book has pictures. If it's like many other children's books I know, those pictures are giving information to the plot which needs to be understood if the book is to be understood. 'The relationship between pictures and text' does not mean using the pictures to make the text make sense, it means accepting that both are essential for understanding the book, and indeed learning to discriminate between the two. It's for reasons like this I'm not sure that 'reading text' is the same as 'reading books' for young learners, and would wish to recognise that WITHOUT somehow suggesting that understanding the book is a substitute for developing the skills necessary to understand the text, or other texts in isolation.

Perhaps my evil can be explained more fully.

Sorry, should be OP IS talking about reading a real book

I think the proponents of sythentic phonics are giving with one hand (good phonetic knowledge) and taking away with the other (learning whole words, using picture clues, using context). The part they are taking away is an important part of reading and creates a self-extending system of learning. A strict diet of synthetic phonics is merely teaching decoding and encoding and limiting the aims/ambitions/achievement of the children by reducing reading to 'you can't read that because you have not been taught it'.

Children should be given well structured good reads which draw on and develop the many skills of a reader, rather than books that are only exercises in decoding. The argument of not using pictures as a part of becoming a fantastic reader, because at some point they are not going to need them, is, to my mind, strange. As children progess they will build up experience, known vocabulary and their phonetic skills, the text increases and the pictures can no longer tell the whole story. Children are naturally weaned off them without noticing, but in the meantime they have accelerated their reading vocabulary. The illustrations help them engage and deepen understanding of the story/information inside the book - just like adults use illustrated books - and using the illustrations appropriately is a skill in itself.

Some children need to be told not to sound out if they already know the word perhaps from habit/believing that that is what is being asked of them/that is what 'reading' is. Modelling reading with fluency, pace and expression a previously 'sorted out' text, and asking a child to have a go in a similar way gets them knowing what reading sounds and feels like. Then they only need to slow down and work on unfamiliar words.

The new reading test looks like it will be similar to a Read Write Inc Assessment.

Sounds are in groups A-I, and children read through them to find where they will be placed on the phonics scheme. They include non-words.

Sorry but I'm not clear from the OP what sort of book the child is reading but it doesn't really matter as we don't read pictures we read words. What happens when the pictures don't fully match the text and the child is still inserting words that aren't there? I had a little girl
choccypig I call them "tricky" words but explain they are only tricky because they are real words that have been shortened to make it easier to write.

Sorry I lost a chunk in the middle
I had a little girl join my class on Monday and with no records from any of her previous schools I attempted to find her reading level ... she read even very basic decodable texts by guessing at easy words (ducks and ref) by looking at the pictures (quacks and hippo) ...

@zebedeee

As children progess they will build up experience, known vocabulary and their phonetic skills, the text increases and the pictures can no longer tell the whole story. Children are naturally weaned off them without noticing, but in the meantime they have accelerated their reading vocabulary.

The process makes sense and occurs for many readers, but all evidence is that it does not occur as fast and as effectively as when they are taught using systemic phonics. That would include evidence form those who are critical of Rose's reforms.

mrz:

"Sorry but I'm not clear from the OP what sort of book the child is reading but it doesn't really matter as we don't read pictures we read words."

Children and their parents read books. Those books are often composed of pictures and text. My son loves Little Red Train books. In one of them, the driver encounters obstacles placed along the way by the evil train drivers trying to win a race. The TEXT says 'There's oil on the track, I wonder how it got there?'. The inset picture shows the evil guard oiling the track.

Now, if the response to this situation as he starts to decode is to go 'look at the picture, why can't the train go?, who did that?, Does the driver know? What might the driver think?' I have shat all over his chances of developing the ability to decode text in isolation and to understand it (assuming he has all the words in his oral vocabulary-buy no means a given with natural texts children and parents seek).

If, on the other hand, I ask him to work through the TEXT using his phonics rules, and then say 'how did it get there?, 'how do you know', why did the driver do that?' I have actually helped him to understand the difference between reading the book and the text (and hence discouraged guessing), and to develop the language skills necessary to follow more complicated plots as his language develops.

All I'm saying is that there is a world of difference between using pictures in these books as part of a language-rich environment which allows the book to be understood, and as part of a crude and counter-productive guessing game based loosely on Searchlights. And that many of the things the OP thinks of as anti-phonics are so only in the context of word recognition and decoding.

But, as always, I'm probably wrong.

'What happens when the pictures don't fully match the text and the child is still inserting words that aren't there?'

The child is not then word-by-word matching which is a very early reading skill that needs to be taught. If they insert a word that is not there they would immediately know this, slow down, re-read and try again drawing on their all their reading skills (including phonics). So they may say 'stairs.. hmmm or is it steps' then they could be prompted to use their phonic knowledge and eg 'say stairs because their is no p sound'. Then when they get to a formal lesson of the air phoneme/grapheme they can give the example of stairs from their reading.

The type of activity you describe AdelaofBlois is part of learning about how books work not about learning how to read. The problem is when a child who is reading encounters an unknown word and the adult says "look at the picture" rather than "let's work it out"

zebedeee my apologies what I should have said is
'What happens when the pictures don't fully match the text and the child is still substituting words that aren't written there?'

The child in my class read

"Here are the quacks" ...(the word in the text was ducks) she then continued "The hippo saw Fred kick ..." (the word was ref)

I'm sorry I can't understand this thread because there are no pictures.

I am trying to make the point that using picture clues prevents children from being accurate readers not asking how to teach reading...sorry if it was misleading

I agree! I think pictures are a real hindrance. Adults don't use pictures so why should we make children use a tool that doesn't actually work?

mrz..are you saying that the child read all the other words correctly except 'ducks' and 'ref'? That is quite odd isn't it? To know 'here' and 'kick' for example but not 'duck'. I realise that the words she said didn't even start with the right letter, so obviously she was not really concentrating on the words, and too busy looking at the pictures, but I would have expected a child who could read 'here' to at least say a word that began with 'd'.

mrz,

I know that, and agree with you on the 'unknowns'. As to whether learning how books work and learning how to read are completely distinguishable, given we aim to read books, I don't know. But I would accept explicit teaching in how to decode text should be separated from such knowledge for early readers.

It was just that the distinction was pertinent to the OP-in that there is room to do much of what the writer thinks phonics doesn't WITHOUT resorting to guessing words.

There are times when I think I am speaking a completely different language.

The OP said: My 5 year old now attempts to decode every word he sees, even those he knows, and even when he can see from the picture (or would if he lifted his head from pressing his 'magic sounds finger' against every letter/sound) what the word should be.

By my understand of the English language (as native born, aged, English speaker) OP is suggesting that her child use the picture to guess or confirm what the word he persists in sounding out and blending (silly boy...) 'is'.

This is not, in my understanding, using pictures to enhance the story in any way, it is using the pictures to 'guess' a word. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with lovely picture books, I even enjoy 'pictures' to enhance what I am reading (lots of history & biography..) but if you think that pictures are there to help with word identification, why bother with words at all? Why not just have pictures.

The views of people who believe in the guessing from pictures strategy sadden me greatly because I work daily with the victims of this, and similar, strategies.

Are you a Reading Recovery teacher, zebededee? You sound like one with your 'word to word matching'. And with this:

If they insert a word that is not there they would immediately know this, slow down, re-read and try again drawing on their all their reading skills (including phonics). So they may say 'stairs.. hmmm or is it steps' then they could be prompted to use their phonic knowledge and eg 'say stairs because their is no p sound'.

Why do you make the poor child go through all this extra work when all they need to do is use their phonic knowledge to decode and blend the word? The tragedy is that this sort of unnecessarily complex 'teaching' muddles children badly.

It also makes them very prone to guessing most words. This might be surprising to some posters, but none of the children I work with in secondary school ever notice, initially, (things change after a few weeks...) that they have missed a word (or words) out of what they are reading, nor that they are 'reading' something completely different from what is on the page. I dread to think what they make of worksheets and textbooks out in the curriculum; not to mention questions on GCSE papers. I don't believe that they have any expectation that what they are reading should make sense (despite the frantic concentration of their teachers on 'reading for meaning')

The other notable thing about these poor 'reading as a guessing game' taught children is that most of them loathe reading.

I would say that it would do the 'mix of strategies' EY & Primary teachers the world of good to come and see just how their methods have handicapped their pupils. But of course, they would just say that the child was 'dyslexic'...['banging my head against a brick wall' smilie]