Confused at to why Reception DD is being taught letter names so soon after sounds?

[Owlelf]

DD is in reception. When she she knew a few letter sounds and could form a few letters. She seems to have progressed really well and knows all get letter sounds, is decoding words and writing captions. To be honest I am really impressed that she has come on so quickly and have to credit her teachers.

I am confused though, that her phonics group are now learning the names of the letters. This evening we read her school book and she seemed to be confusing the letter sounds and names. To my (completely untrained) mind it seems too soon to be confusing her with letter names when she has just learned (?learnt?) the sounds.

I realise I could broach this with her teacher, but would prefer not to as they must know what they are doing- not least given DDs progress so far under their wing.

She is working within stage 3 phonics BTW (her class is split into several groups for phonics, so not all children are learning letter names at the moment).

So I am really interested as to why, at this early stage the letter names are needed? Can anyone explain please?

but they aren't taught that any word is too difficult for them to work out

That's what I mean. Surely, most of them would have read the word 'was' before you have taught the theory behind its pronunciation.

The children enter our reception class as complete non readers - some don't even recognise their own names. I would teach was very early in reception year before any of them are at the stage of reading it for themselves.

Most want to use it in a sentence for writing long before they are reading

OP here. I can confirm that for my child the phonics approach has worked well so far. I am amazed that she has gone from knowing a few sounds at the start of reception to all simple sounds, many 'two and three letter one sound' sounds and reading cvc, cvcc and ccvc words.

I have supported her at home but most of her progress has been achieved via what she had been taught at school.

She has a grid of 25 Words that her teachers call 'tricky'. We looked at them every evening for a week and played some silly games and she can now read these also.

The letter names thing has really thrown me and it several posters have agreed that learning them so soon after the letter sounds may be confusing. To me the letter names are just not as useful at this stage- singing the alphabet and knowing the 'proper' name for a letter is just a memory exercise and does not contribute towards learning to decode.

Singing the alphabet is useful as it teaches alphabetic order which is perhaps the most important reason for knowing the names.

I hadn't considered that. Will this help them learn to read though?

Letter names aren't really helpful for learning to read or write.

Thought not. Hopefully DDs phonics group will move onto something else swiftly. Meanwhile I will try to trust in her teachers and resist the temptation to interfere!

yes but my point is that many children are reading within a term of starting reception. so it's me at home saying ah well you can't sound this out in the way you normally would because this one behaves differently and approaching it the way you are saying mrz - showing the way it works and drawing parallels with other words. but then they do just have to remember that exception (i'm not talking about doing it by sight memory), they have to remember when they see that whole word that it's one that does something different then apply what they remember about the difference in it.

ds is on his first sent home book - it's mostly straightforward words that follow the phonetic system they're following and where they're up to in the stages so far but even in that there's the reality of the word 'put'. cut, but, tut, mut, hut etc would make perfect sense to him but obviously put as in put his hat on doesn't follow that pattern.

what other words would you compare 'put' to to make a consistent rule btw?

"Letter names aren't really helpful for learning to read or write."

DD has certainly found learning letter names very useful for learning to spell out loud, which, entirely anecdotally and observationally, I think helped her learn to decode and encode.

yeah ds knew all his letter names by the time he was 2 because he loved the singing alphabet and that enthused him for language and wanting to learn to read - he would spot letters etc and loved having alphabet charts in his room. he presonally (and again anecdotal and a study of 1) has not found any confusion due to this and it does seem to have helped him - he seems to enjoy knowing that 'that letter is called 'tee' and it makes the sound 't' (no uh, uh's are banned at school and he has quickly learned that and corrected all adults who tell him to spell mum muh uh muh saying it's mmmm uh mmm actually).

It has been established that knowledge of the alphabet letter names is one of the best predictors of later reading attainment, but those who, as a consequence of this information, advocate the early teaching of the names, are confusing correlation with causation. 'Experiments on letter-name training did not produce increased reading achievement' (Jenkins, Bausell, & Jenkins, 1972; Samuels, 1971) Dr. Solity, 'maintains that because 'teaching letter names is a redundant skill in both early reading and spelling', these should be introduced after children are fluent in applying sounds' (McLernon,Ferguson&Gardner p40)

Experienced tutors find that struggling readers, in particular, tend to use a strategy of mixing sounds and letter names when they try to decode.

www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/teaching-spelling-how-5079
Debbie Hepplewhite: How to teach spelling

Why do we say teach letter sounds before letter names?
www.phonicsunlimited.com/page11/page11.html

The main letter names that are less than useful from a phonetic point of view are c, h, u, w and y as they all start with a different sound to the one that they most commonly represent. The other 21 should not cause a hindrance.

maverick - I think that the way my DD was taught letter sounds and letter names in both English and French was one where the most common sound associated with each letter was the dominant memory. But the letter names were introduced quite quickly after that, and certainly before all alternative (or even most alternative) letter sound associations were taught.

I remember 'i before e except after c.' But that's about the only rule I ever remember using. If anybody wrote down all of the rules that have been produced in this discussion and actually tried to introduce them to a reading learner I'd be surprised if that person didn't get put off English for life! I have some sympathy for Bonsoir's point that knowledge of the rules helps a foreign language learner. But isn't that at least partly because you're learning as an adult? And the rules help you to construct the form when you've forgotten what it looks like?

Children learn rapidly and suck information in. And a large amount of it just 'sticks.' So my daughter learns that elephant spells the name of that animal. Then she knows how to spell it. Most f sounds are made using the letter f. So it's more useful to be taught to use the letter properly. Useful exceptions can be taught too. But what's the point in teaching that 'wo' makes the sound 'oo' when the word two is the only one that uses it? Sure, it's a rule of English spelling. But how useful is it? Not very.

i should imagine the correlation between letter name knowing and later reading success is that the kids knowing letter names were taught them by their parents before school re: were actively taking part in teaching their child and fostering an atmosphere of learning from an early age (whether you agree with their method or not). so all it really shows is that kids with involved parents will tend to do well.

''the correlation between letter name knowing and later reading success''

It's likely to show that these children have brains set up for efficient paired-associate learning.

If children learn letter names first they use this information to inform the learning of letter sounds. If they learn the sounds first then they use that information to inform the learning of letter names. Either way they will encounter a few problems as per my post above. Neither way has been shown to lead to better long term performance afaik.

"It's likely to show that these children have brains set up for efficient paired-associate learning."

In the case of early bilingual children, their brains have been practicing associating two names with one object for several years before learning to read, so maybe it's easier for them to get to grips with the concept of a name and a sound simultaneously?

Of the European languages, French is next hardest for learning to spell, after English which beats all others, but English beats French by several thousand words with unpredictable letters.

Learning to read French is almost incomparably easier than English, and especially for foreigners. Quite a few French sounds have different spellings (e.g. the English long oo sound in 'ou nous tout choux') but the pronunciation of French spellings is regular, with only minor problems like a final consonant being silent before words starting with a consonant (tout que), but pronounced before vowels (tout a).

So children don?t need to be taken through wordlists like Mrz?s
look, book, took, cook, good, hood, brook, stood, crook, wool,
room, broom, moon, pool, cool, spoon, balloon, groom, stool, roof etc.
for learning to read.

The sound of French ou does not constantly vary as in
sound soup shoulder should double....
Such phonic inconsistencies are the reason why learning to read English takes children much longer than other European languages (as Seymour et established in 2003).

I'm sure even Mrz is able to see that if ou always had the sound of 'shout out loud', learning to read words with that grapheme would be easier.

Coming back to letter names and sounds of the OP,
the vowels a, e, i, o and u
have the sound of their name as often the first sound which children are usually taught for them (able, even, island, only, use).

'If children learn letter names first they use this information to inform the learning of letter sounds.'
No, they don't! If you teach a child letter names, you make it much harder for them to learn to read with ease. Take for example, the word 'mat'. Using letter names, you get 'em' 'ae' 'tee', 'emaetee', a completely incomprehensible word. On the other hand, if you use sounds, you get 'm' 'a' 't', and you can hear 'mat'.
Letter names are a short cut later on when children are really good at blending and segmenting sounds in words. Then, they're useful. Thus, when my youngest daughter was in Y5 and she asked me how to spell 'archaeology', I asked her which was the difficult sound. Her reply was that it was the 'ee' sound, here spelled as (ar|chae|o|lo|gy). I told her her, "It's the 'ae' 'ee' spelling." That's when letter names are useful. But to many young children the use of two simultaneous systems is confusing.

i still reckon i'm right. i bet you could find the same correlation to reading success with knowing all your colours and numbers before school. involved parents = better chance of success.

that makes sense sounds (the ae business) dipthongs.

French is not an easy language to learn to spell. While there are fewer phoneme-grapheme correspondences to learn than in English, there are still a lot of them, and French grammatical spelling (conjugation) is a lengthy nightmare lasting four years that English children do not have to tackle at all.

agreed. glad i don't have to teach ds to do french style conjugation of verbs. let alone dealing with tenses.