Another sight reading problem...

[SpiderManMum]

Hi, I have read other threads with interest and didn't want to hijack so if anyone has any advice I'd be very grateful..

DS has just started Reception and knows all the letter sounds from following Jolly Phonics in nursery. They have now moved on to blending sounds and decoding words all of which DS is struggling with. The teacher even called me in to see her the other afternoon to ask if we could have a hearing test as she wasn't sure if he can actually hear the sounds that make up a word. For some reason he has no problem hearing the first sound in any word, but cannot get the others (or if he does, can't put them in the right order).

The hearing test results are all fine but I'm at a bit of a loss of how to help. He has a very good memory so can sight read quite well which isn't helping matters.

Is the Sound Reading Solutions the way to go? I see that it is a US product, is it available in the UK and are there any problems with children understanding the American accent?

I'm already starting to worry about dyslexia, which deep down I know is a bit silly at this stage but I can't for the life of me understand why he just isn't getting it!

I don't think breadandbutterfly was talking about other countries but I may be wrong ... perhaps they could enlighten us

A cross-European study by Seymour et all published in the Brit. Journal of Psychology in 2003 concluded that English-speaking children needed an average of 2 1/2 years for basic literacy acquisition (i.e. to achieve the proficiency expected of a 7-yr-old) while other European managed it in less than a year, irrespective of differences in starting ages.

I would be very surprised if any of the children studied by Seymour et al had been taught to read with a good, structured, systematic synthetic/linguistic phonics programme. And if they had, there would have been so few of them that they would hardly have made a difference to the figures.

As for your 'graphemes' - don't you know that a grapheme is the letter or letters which represent one phoneme? Some of your so called graphemes represent at least 3 phonemes.

Please masha take the advice!!!

masha I know the ways of spelling I teach them

and your lists don't make sense to anyone who actually teaches young children to read so goodness knows what misconceptions you are creating among those who aren't familiar with GPCs

Masha, what are your objections to the way mrz and others like her teach children how to read? They use a comprehensive approach that attempts to account for virtually all of the irregularities you present as stumbling blocks and they help young people to become proficienct readers, spellers and 'comprehenders'. For the small percent of children for whom their method does not work there are other systems in place with varying levels of success.

masha has a personal agenda here ...she believes we should change the English orthographical system so we all write U instead of you [rolls eyes] so continually tries to convince everyone that reading and writing in English is beyond most people

But, but, but.... You makes more sense phonically anyway! What is to say that U shouldn't be pronounced uh?

Phonetically

masha says we use I for first person so why not U

U have not given any examples of my failure to understand this.

Some random ones:

quar = /k/ /w/ /ar/
tious = /sh/ /u/ /s/
tion = /sh/ /o/ /n/
able = /ay/ /b/ /l/

In fact, at a conservative count (I've given you the benefit of the doubt in a few cases) 65 of your so called 'graphemes' aren't graphemes at all, just spellings of two or three consecutive phonemes (see examples in my previous post)

I confess I glaze over when I look at masha's lists. I have visited her blog. I have tried ... honestly! But it just doesn't make any sense.
Masha could it be you are trying to explain English using "rules" that apply to your first language that just don't exist in English and in doing so confuse to issue further.
I do worry about your self styled status as Literacy expert

quar = /k/ /w/ /ar/
tious = /sh/ /u/ /s/
tion = /sh/ /o/ /n/
able = /ay/ /b/ /l/

and is how /kwo/ and /kwor/ are mostly spelt, just like
and for /wo/ and /wor/.
Part of learning to spell English is learning just quirks, but they always have exceptions:
and are sometimes actually pronounced that way:
wag, swam, quak.

is the main spelling for /sh/ in unstressed endings, such as
which sounds , but sometimes it is replaced by or (pretentious - voracious, conscious).

Ditto for / / (attention, extension; ambition, mission).
has the unpredictable variant (availabe, audible).

Anyone who has taught English beyond a basic level knows this. They also know that many pupils take a long time to master such differences.

masha they aren't single phonemes no matter how often you post them

anyone who has taught English knows your lists are

maizie - re quantifying things, what proportion of children are dyslexic? I can certainly see that for dyslexic children pure synthetic phonics might well be the best method - I'm just very dubious that it is for the non-dyslexic majority.

If synthetic phonics was the only and best method for all children, then until its recent introduction, we should all have been appalling at reading, writing, spelling etc. But you and I both know that is rubbish! I know few children taught under synthetic phonics whose reading is anywhere like as good as those taught by the traditional methods you deride. Yes, traditional methods did let down dyslexics, and it is good that methods now exist to help them - but that does not make them the perfect method for non-dyslexics, IMO.

mrz - re 'slow', this was my primary meaning - not so much that those taught by synthetic phonics learn to read slowly, but that their final reading speed is (on average) much slower than those who have learnt to sight-read common words, as you would expect, since the sight-readers don't require any time to 'work out' how the common words they encounter should read, as they know them instantly.

Obviously, there will, very occasionally, be new words that one encounters, at which point, phonics and sounding out methods will be very very useful. But for anyone with a good visual memory, that will be increasingly rare. Personally, I have a pretty photographic memory and any word I have ever seen written once I can recall on every future occasion, including the correct spelling. I have no idea how common that is, but I don't think it's that rare either. Going back to first principles each time would be a waste of valuable reading time, when so many people can recognise words from a single viewing.

Are u denying that ti, ci, sci, ssi, sion are variant spellings for the phoneme /sh/ in the unstressed endings -tion, -cion, -scion, -ssion, -sion?

no masha please try and read what people are posting!

your phoneme lists on tion etc aren't single phonemes they are three separate phonemes sh o n

Thank you for getting back to me on the "slow" issue" I'm afraid I disagree there is nothing slower than a sight reader who meets an unknown word and hasn't got a picture clue or a prompter...

BreadandButterfly you've just asked the question I was thinking! If flashcards/memory based whole word learning is so bad, rotten damaging and wrong; and given that the majority of mumsnetters will have been taught using these destructive methods which by the way also may be responsible for dyslexia, famine, war, the hole in the ozone layer, the way when you need a coffee most the milk has always gone off in the fridge, and Russel Grant's shirt on strictly this week...

Then how are any of us reading this thread anyway? I assume (possibly wrongly) that no-one actually sat and sounded out the whole of those poems to work out what was meant, we just read it.

I suspect the actual neurological processing of learning to read is much more complicated than any of us are yet aware, and involves shades of grey not yet accepted in the debate. What's wrong with doing what seems to work for the individual child? (or adult doing English as a 2nd language for that matter - would you suggest they start with Floppy/jolly approach as well? - if not, by what reasoning?)

If you look at the research carried out by Yale university in a ten year study using brain imaging techniques they concluded that good readers ie you, BreadandButterfly and I actually do decode a phoneme at a time but do so incredibly fast

Thanks for the explanation mrz. It makes sense that there are people still studying it.

If that's the end result with either method though, does it really matter on an individual scale how we get to that point? I know more children get there quicker with phonics, but if you have a child who's skipping ahead to the see-it-read-it-read-it stage then what's the harm? If there's evidence that it causes problems in later learning then that's a different case to making it harder to plan a class in primary, but I don't know that there is.

I may be getting the wrong end of the stick, but is it therefore more a case of showing your working like in maths, so done to emphasise the methodology rather than just going for the end result?

Many children who learn to read by sight struggle later with encoding words for spelling so yes there is evidence that it can cause problems for a significant number of children who aren't dyslexic
It's like starting with quadratic equations before the child knows how to count ...

It was summed up this way by a researcher in the US

As far as I'm concerned, both have proven to work. It just seems that one takes more drill and practice, and one is on-going for years to come. Phonics takes skill-building, to be able to sound out the words. Whole language is kind of a never ending process, because there seem to be words coming up all the time that are unknown.