How bad would it be if I taught my daughter to read...

[JeanBodel]

---using whole word recognition rather than phonics?

She's 3, she loves books, she wants to read them herself. She's an autumn birth so she won't go to school for another two years. I don't think either of us can wait that long for her to start reading independently.

I've got a whole set of Peter and Jane's (yes, the very set I learnt with 30 years ago). I really don't want to spend lots of money on Jolly Phonics when I know I can teach her with the books I already own.

I just dread getting into trouble with the reception teacher. I don't mean to criticise teachers or phonics in any way. I can see how annoying it would be to have a kid in your class who's shouting out the word without segmenting it.

All advice gratefully received.

The whole thing is really interesting (and little did I know, all those years ago when debating all this stuff with Gerry Altmann and others that I would end up with a real live example of it to practice on ).

Often, with dd1, we try various things. and most of it does not seem as though it is working. and then, it does. usually because she has worked it out for herself, sadly (I say sadly, because we would like to help her more. and we help her all we can. but she still has to do the lion's share of the work). she learned to tell the time by asking me continually what time it was, and referencing the clock each time I answered (she owuld literally ask on a repeat loop - every 10 seconds or so, for days on end). when I was just about to go insane with the sheer irritation factor of not being able to breathe without being asked what itme it was, she worked it out (well the beginnings of it), and told me when it was 3 o' clock. she can now tell the time for any 5 minute position around the clockface, with alternative phrases too (35 past vs 25 to, quarter past vs ?:15, etc) and is beginning to be able to tell what time it will be 'in 10 minutes' or 'in 20 minutes' etc - all this without being able to do any maths

so yes, she is full of interesting skillsets - the most useful of which to her is the ability to extract information which she is currently trying to work out (although it drives me batty at times!)

the matching words thing moved on to being able to match parts of words (once she understood that words were part up of constituent parts) - eg sorting out all the words that had a particular sound in them. this has led to her being able ot make good attempts at new words via recognising syllables and trying to put them together when met in new words - not totally successfully, but she tries. she has made good progress recently with phonics, though, and so is also now beginning to blend (thank the lord!)

Skimming the abstract, my first response is, yes, that seems obviously what must happen. And it would fit fine with what I'd been told, but doesn't help any with this idea that words can have 'meaning' you recognize spontaneously.

We do the same things with eye-rhymes too, don't we? People who speak whichever language it is that can be written in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets appear to be aware of the eye-rhymes in the both the alphabets when they're reading something in the one. You know - there'll be words that could be a word in both Cyrillic and Latin writing, but it'd be pronounced differently because the same graphs represent different sounds. And people get confused and see a rhyme where there shouldn't be one, because they're momentarily seeing the available word in the other orthography.

I don't know what that says about how phonetic decoding interacts with orthography at all, it just made me think of it.

Thanks so much for that link ... that's just cracked something for me that is completely irrrelevant to this thread, but which I'd been puzzling over for a good while! I'm really grateful.

Glad to have been of service, LRD

I'm off to bed now. Have very much enjoyed our discussion

Re Chinese, - Pinyin is just writing the words phonetically in the Roman alphabet and is also used to teach basic Putangua/Cantonese to foreigners, so there are a lot of people who can speak some basic Chinese but can't write a word. However, it does limit how far you can get with it.

This is actually why I have some scepticism that Mandarin is going to become so critical as a foreign language. It's is just massively time consuming to learn to write it (far more time than will ever be dedicated in schools) and you can only get so far not being able to write it at all. Then add in the four/six tones (every word has 4 or 6 meanings depending on tone used- "gau" means help, nine, penis and something else, depending on inflection), and I suspect that English will add another 1 billion speakers, especially as they're now getting taught the Roman alphabet before they access their own symbols.

Night maizie. And to you too!

LRD - how phonetic decoding interacts with orthography.

A cross-European study (P H K Seymour et al, 2003) established that more phonetic spelling systems enable children to read and write much faster than the English one.

Research in 1963-4 with i.t.a. found that with more consistently spelt English children can learn much faster too (as I explained on my blog 'Proof that reform would make a difference'). - This study must not be confused with schools subsequently using i.t.a. as an introduction to the alphabetic principle before tackling normal English spelling which proved disastrous for many children.)

As for Chinese writing, I think that gradually fewer and fewer young Chinese will learn to write the traditional way. They already learn to read with Roman letters first and then learn to read traditional characters with captions in that spelling.

On computers they all write phonetically with the same keyboard as we do and this gets translated into Chinese characters on the screen. Being able to write with the Chinese characters will probably become rarer and rarer as time goes on, but with far more people being able to write than has been customary in China.

I'm not sure if this thread is still alive.

But if it is - does anyone have evidence that the (imho absurd) look-say method was deliberately intended to damage education (perhaps also to induce remedial teachng too)? Part of post-1945 trends.

There is a child in my class whose mother bought the entire reading scheme to use at home before he started school. Now, all my books are decoadable, but she taught him to read using the whole word method. He has an excellent memory - so he knows the words, he doesn't just remember the stories by heart. He also knew all his single letter sounds. He just had no idea how to decode words for himself because Mum told him what all the new words were and he remembered them for next time. In September he was the best reader by far, but all these weeks later he still struggles with new texts - even simple CVC words sometimes. He's still one of the top readers, but other children have overtaken him by using decoding because they are much more independent readers. Other children have come into school reading fluently having worked out a lot of the code for themselves. It all depends ...

I didn't realise that this was an old thread, but just wanted to add that I actually took dd1 out of school and homeschooled her for a couple of years, because of the, imo, ridiculous whole word recognition reading scheme used to teach reading. This was in 2003. Funnily enough a couple of years later, the school changed its policy and introduced phonics to teach reading, so it obviously wasn't working.

I used the EXPLODE THE CODE reading scheme
and cat = CAT by Mona Mcnee.
I didn't use Jolly Phonics at all.

Rerevisionist - the book DUMBING US DOWN by John taylor Gatto might be helpful.