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.

CecilyP - whole word reading schemes may believe and claim that they are introducing whole words and building up a word bank in the brain but brains don't actually store written words as a bank in that way. At least, that is my understanding of what neurological research has shown - that all brains store words as phonics. Phonics is a body of knowledge about how language/reading works in the brain that has resulted from sophisticated neurological research, as opposed to vague hypothesis/wishful thinking!

Sorry, but we can most certainly store words as patterns before we have learned any phonics. We can also recognise long complicated words, including possibly our own names, when we are still at the 'cat sat on the mat' stage of phonics.

Please note I am not suggesting that anyone should attempt to teach children every word in the English language as a whole.

Just as an aside - it must certainly be POSSIBLE to learn to read by pattern / picture / shape recognition, because otherwise no Chinese / Japanese people would be literate... Whether it is an efficient route to learning to read languages such as English which do have a phonic basis is another matter, but 'the brain is hard-wired to only do phonics' surely cannot be wholly true?

^CecilyP - reading to your children is a good thing, obviously, but it does not follow that the more you read to them, the better at reading they become.

In fact, some children I know are not really as good at reading as they should be because their parents insist on reading difficult books to them rather than insisting that their children read easier books out loud to them.^

I couldn't agree more, Bonsoir. Reading to your children is a enjoyable activity which expands language, shows how books work and may motivate children to want to read themselves. But once they have got the idea, they have got the idea.

I have heard that, when children are taught only to read joined-up writing, they may be more likely to memorize the whole 'shape' (and I agree this is a monumentally daft way to try to teach children). Certainly in Russian, children are (apparently) often taught to read in cursive without being introduced to individual letters except as the alphabet.

It seems to me that it is all wrong to focus on the (surely very, very small?) number of children for whom visually remembering a whole word as a picture works ok ... why not focus on the vast majority who will be better with phonics. After all we all need to get to phonics in the end so why not begin with it?

teacher - I don't know if it is relevant, but FWIW, Chinese characters do have a phonetic element I think.

anecdotally I know of a child (severe ASD, found it very difficult to learn to read, verbal language was good/above average so comprehension in conversation etc ok) who learned to read via word recognition.

this was then broken down (once enough words were learned) and the child could recognise chunks and segments/syllables. using this method, he was able to read new words, and 'sound' them out - and then he knew the word since his spoken language was good, so comprehension etc was ok.

eg, having learned to recognise the months of the year from calendars, and having learned the names of his favourite activities and games, he was able to use parts of the words 'september' and 'tickle' to read septic.

he knew no phonics whatsoever, and could not break down those chunks further when asked.

dd1 can read her name (full name, inc middle names and surname - which is foreign and not phonetically decodable according to English rules). whole word recognition is a possible tool for some.

It seems to me that it is all wrong to focus on the (surely very, very small?) number of children for whom visually remembering a whole word as a picture works ok ... why not focus on the vast majority who will be better with phonics. After all we all need to get to phonics in the end so why not begin with it?

That is a good question. I am wondering why whole word systems caught on. Perhaps someone whose mum or gran is an early years teacher could shed some light.

Phonics is brilliant. Phonics is obviously wholly necessary, and works beautifully for most.

At the same time, its also patently obvious that some kids prefer learning by memory - my dd2 is one of them. She knows her phonics, and can and does use them, but she will always prefer to just 'know' a word.

Its come as quite a surprise to me, as dd1 was utterly a phonics learner and had to make the leap to 'whole words' instead of sounding out.

They are both good readers (YR and Y3), but just have different processing mechanisms.

Thankfully, their Early Years and KS1 leaders believe in the two-pronged approach, teaching high frequency words and phonics and working to a child's strengths. Don't most places?

Also, having read with dd1's class for 3 yeas as a helper, and therefore in a very very small sample group, it seems about one in ten kids prefers memorizing to phonics, about two in ten prefer sounding out, and most of them are somewhere in between.

Yes, I'd like to know that too!

I suppose that with flashcards you could give the impression of very fast learning, but a lot of it might be much more rote than understood - if you didn't realize that, it'd seem great.

When I was at school I knew a child who memorized the flashcards to such a degree he could tell you thinks like 'the one with 'because' is bent at the top corner, the one with 'school' has a spot on it'.

Silverfrog my dd also asd (severe) learnt initially by whole word recognition without any input from me to be honest other than me reading her stories and PECS cards and visual timetables. Then she used chunks of words she knew to decode words she didn't know.Once at school she was/is taught phonics.
Watching her write you can see her going through the three methods she learnt in order. For words she hasn't already memorised which is her first choice she will then try chunking the word into segments and if that's not successful she reverts to phonics. I find it fascinating to watch.

Elibean the official figures are nearer to 1-10 000 children
I think sometimes people, especially with older children and adults confuse rapid automatic decoding with memorising words for reading . Brain scanning techniques seem to indicate good readers are processing at a phoneme level but incredibly fast. Which after all is the aim.

Really? Thats interesting, I wouldn't have guessed. dd didn't know her phonemes before she started memorizing words

She loves her high frequency word sessions, and loathes her decoding sounding-out book reading sessions....though getting better now as she progresses (she's only 4, in Reception). Whereas dd1 was the opposite.

My understanding is that there are a few children a teacher may come across in their career that really need a different approach but the problem is that a 'two pronged approach' to suit all actually means diluting the main approach , phonics, that suits nearly all children. The outcome is that all children have weaker phonics teaching.
Having said this, it really depends what is meant by 'teaches some high frequency words. 'If that ends up meaning the whole busines of gaining cues from pictures, initial letters and such like that is definitely not sensible balance, its bad teaching. If taught to guess children will naturally prefer this to reading through the word, that doesn't mean thats what is best for their progress, it means they prefer a bad habit to the slog of creating a good one - entirely natural but not something to encourage.

I don't understand how anyone who can speak English could not know English phonemes? You might not be able to separate them out very well (plenty of people struggle with things like 'whats jar without the j sound?' questions). But you can't not know the sounds of words or you wouldn't be able to speak, surely? I think the struggle for me was learning which sound went with which little squiggle on the page.

Elibean

DS didn't know (explicitly) any phonemes at all when he started memorising whole books, then matching up word for word, then reading those words in other contexts, then reading other words...

But by the end of that process, he did have an excellent, explicit but wholly untaught (as in he could identify a phoneme in isolation as well as in words he knew) knowledge of phonics...

Obviously the step-by-step sounding out of a new word was slower and more painful for him than the almost instant self-taught segmenting-and-blending thing he did with known ones.

When speaking we don't actually work at the phoneme level camicaze. Because we are literate and so much of our lives has been spent dealing with words/sentences recorded as letters and text iwith separate letters and words separated by spaces, it can be difficult to understand that spoken language does not have this characteristic. . . .

mrz, I was saying that I know you might not know how to separate words into phonemes (the example I gave was separating jar into the component phonemes), but does that mean you don't 'know' phonemes as they appear blended together in words? I mean, isn't the whole point of phonics that you learn how to separate words into phonemes that correspond to graphemes ... not that you start hearing something new?

Oops, sorry, ignore me, I thought that was to me not cami. ]

LRD - the brains of illiterate people are different to the brains of literate people - the very fact of reading changes (refines) the brain and, yes, creates phonemic awareness.

True.

It just seems to me that, whereas phonemes can be identified in spoken language by reference for literates (the 'jar without the j sound' test is hard or impossible for illiterates), at least the sound we associate with each phoneme is there in the spoken language. Whereas the shapes of words are much more arbitrary, and there's no reason at all why anyone would be particularly well equipped to memorize however many thousand images you'd need.

It just seems odd to me, but maybe that's just me..

Actually, thinking about it - is that why the flashcard thing was so appealing when people first thought of it? You either know the flashcard word or you don't, so I suppose it'd seem very simple. Whereas you get that stage with phonics where you know the phonemes, and you've cracked the conceptual principle, but you don't know how to blend them and perhaps can't always associate the right phoneme with the right grapheme.

(I am just speculating why flashcards ever became popular btw - no need to convince me that phonics is the better approach.)

www.pbs.org/weta/twoschools/thechallenge/history/history_2.html

MRZ I think you meant LRD not me?

ooops