Help with phonics

[AuntieBulgaria]

Hullo, DD is starting reception in September. She has recently started trying to read things by herself by sounding out the letters. I want to support her but am worried about giving her 'bad' info. Or not actually knowing how to explain.

She was trying to read the word 'alien' in the back of the car the other day but she is used to A making the sound 'ah' (well not ah but you know what I mean, not ay).

Forgive me for being totally dim but why is it 'ay' in alien and age? Is it what I would have called - 'the magic 'e'? Is that what's called a split diagraph?

I read the guide to phonics that DD's school issues and it says that at school they are not given books to read with phonemes they haven't learnt yet but DD is just trying to give it a go with everything she comes across.

What should I say when the word she is reading does something unfamiliar?

Some times she can work it out - she read and blended 'like' as luh i ck eh but then said 'like' because she could make it make sense in the context I suppose.

Interesting thread and I am going to have to go through it a few times to really understand what is being said. I am in a similar position to OP in that DD likes to " read" and I don't want to do anything wrong. I was trained as avprimary school teacher in the early 1990s and no one ever mentioned phonics then, we weren't taught how to teach reading at all! I have never taught by the way.

Is there a special place on Mumsnet to talk about phonics
without highjacking OPs thread?

Although since I am highjacking could I ask how you would explain the two "a" sounds in the name" Lana "? The final one makes sense to me but the first one sounds " ar" and I can't think of another word where "a" makes that sound.

Re. the name Lana -I think that the end 'a' is said as a schwa 'uh' sound ?

L-a-n-uh

Info. on the schwa here:
literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/dreaded-schwa.html

It does make that sound at other times though.... eg banana, calm, daft, bath (depending on your accent, of course!)

So again I would be saying it was an alternative way of sounding "a".

I'm guessing we'll have to wait until tonight to see if that's the proper explanation though, as the relevant people are probably busy doing what they're paid to do!

CecilyP, Joyce Morris's Phonics 44 came before Jolly Phonics, and back in the 1890's there was Nellie Dale?s programme -see ?On the Teaching of English Reading? www.archive.org/stream/onteachingofengl00daleuoft

I used loads of 'letterland' stuff. We had books, posters, flash cards and a DVD. Both my sons were reading before they started school despite having August birthdays.

Thanks spamertime

Maybe my accent is the problem! Even though I am very Estuary , my vowels, and those of DP are northern ( parents from North) so all those words you mentioned have completely different " a" sounds to me :)

Oh, for me too as it happens! But DS has other ideas (we aren't living where either me or my husband grew up) so I have to bear it in mind - although still think its easier to learn to read if you say bath etc properly

Everyone says bath properly regardless of how they say it.

It was a joke - hence the wink

Sorry will avoid trying to lighten the mood in future

LearnAndSay

Psycholinguists (people who conduct research into language processing) have run many many experiments to find out how skilled adult readers, who did not learn to read using a phonics-based system, read.

The story is complicated, and there are individual differences, but the general picture is that as we become more skilled at reading we become less reliant on sound-based information, but that this knowledge of how individual letters (and combinations of letters) are usually pronounced still plays an important role thoughout our lives. In otherwords, we start to mainly make use of a word recognition strategy where we recognise the word directly from its letters without decoding the sound of each grapheme. But it is pretty clear that the sounds of letter still play a role in adult reading. (This is why people are slower to read "pint" than "mint".) So regardless of whether you learned to read using a phonics-based system, you undoubtedly make use of this phonics knowledge in your every day reading.

(There are a small number of adults for whom this is not true, but they will have a form of dyslexia (either developmental or acquired) that makes it impossible for them to read words that they have never seen before. which you have demonstrated that you can do.)

Phonics-based teaching methods essentially aim to make explicit to children the sometimes complex) relationships between letters and sounds. In previous generations children were left to figure these out (unconsciously) by themselves. But don't kid yourseld that previous generations 'did not learn phonics'. They just didn't get the phonics rules spelled out so explicitly for them. Which was fine for the more able readers, but not so good for those who struggled to get started with reading.

Sarky, that's a really really interesting post.

simpson it doesn't bother me at all what reading books dds come home with - I think it is great to have some phonics books, but to have other reading books too just widens their reading vocab, I find (so long as they are happy about reading them, of course).

What does worry me with phonics is spelling. I can't see how you can spell most English words without learning them. dd2 wrote bathday for birthday for quite a while. She's five so that's fine, but she wouldn't be able to figure out that the word is birthday rather than berthday or burthday through phonics, I don't think; she just has to learn what is correct.

So, again, you can't just use phonics to teach literacy. Or am I missing something?

But clinkclink, I can quickly and easily learn to spell words I have clumped together because of their phonic links - eg light, might, sight, fright, bright, slight, etc, etc. So I still use phonics to speed up the process of learning to spell. Same with birth - mirth, girth, etc. It's an excuse to learn new words, too! Much easier than learning apparently random words.

So, rabbitstew, is that the point? That with phonics you specifically look for patterns like that? (You mentioned this about 'night' thing earlier, which was useful btw.)

? But don't those patterns crop up in lots of kids book that aren't phonics-based? Isn't looking for patterns a normal part of all methods of teaching reading? And something that kids do naturally? To take the night example, if I tell dd2 the word night, and she then learns it, then on the next page we have the word 'might', she could figure that out herself, couldn't she? That seems to be what my kids do, I think.

(Am not a teacher, as you will have gathered, so this is a genuine question.)

clinkclink

Nobody (sensible) has ever said that phonics is all there is to learning to read/spell.

Phonics-based teaching is IMO a fantastic way of getting kids started with learning to read and to get them to the point of being able to read most words fluently. But you are absolutely right that thanks to English's insane spelling 'system' it will always have to be combined with the learning of the exceptions. Phonics is never going to help them spell homophones like birth/berth or there/their/they're.

Children learn the rules, and then they learn the exceptions.
But it is still better to only have to learn the exceptions than to have to learn each word individually :)

As children move up through primary the emphasis shift away from phonics-based teaching towards other methods.

That post was in reply to your earlier post.
Now I'll reply to your later post

Absolutely right! Most kids do 'naturally' look for patterns and transfer their knowledge of a word like 'night' to a word like 'might'. That is what we all did when we learned to read, and most children will still do it now. This is just the implicit/unconscious version of what phonics-based teaching is doing more explicitly/formally.

To me the only difference between a phonics-based reading book and and a non-phonics one, is that for a child who is just getting started with reading the phonics ones will be more rewarding because they will be able to figure out more of the words without help. But I still read loads of 'old fashioned' books with ds2 (5) because he likes them. I just accept that I will have to help him more because they contain many more words that he hasn't yet got the skills to read.

I'm not a teacher, either. In my view, phonics is simply making the patterns explicit - ie phonics is nothing but teaching patterns (teaching, rather than leaving a child to make connections by itself, which some children just don't do, or don't do until they are missing out because it has happened later for them than most other children), I would have thought. Not everyone needs to be taught them, and certainly not everyone needs to be taught all of them. I don't think my children needed to be taught them at all, but I didn't make a big song and dance about it and refuse to allow them into phonics lessons, because phonics isn't teaching anything unnatural - just formalising a process which comes naturally to some children.

As for working out from a picture what a word says - I don't see any pattern in that, it's just stupid and I fail to see how it teaches you to read... And working out the word from the context shows you understand the general meaning, which is important, but might make memorising what the word looks like less important to you, so take you longer actually to recognise it elsewhere. Of course children do not only learn words through phonics and phonics is only the mechanics of reading, it does not teach you everything you need to know, but I do agree that they need to develop an understanding of the patterns and the earlier you do that, the quicker you can develop your other reading skills.

Sarky, that's really useful (and sensible!). And actually quite a relief to hear. Phonics makes sense as a starting point, I agree.

Love my dds learning to read, and don't mind how it is taught. I'm happy to support the school's methods so long as I don't have to slavishly follow them or feel - as people often seem to on mn - that I am getting it wrong.

I find this whole thing about being scared to get things wrong really depressing.
A lot of the problems IMO are caused by an over reliance on linguistic terminology in (some) schools. Parents get scared by terms like phonemes and graphemes and so think that the schools are doing something completely different to 'normal' and that this newfangled system is beyond them.
Our school seems to have moved a bit back from this - DS2 seems to be learning in a much more parent-friendly way to DS1.

Phonics really isn't complex. It just formalises the knowledge of letter-sound correspondences that we all know, but don't usually think about.

And if we do get it 'wrong'? Well this is still preferable IMO to not being involved.

The whole phonics thing and the idea that we should go back to more formal lessons in English grammar, spelling and punctuation is interesting... Clearly the current government thinks that learning through experience rather than formal tuition neither results in enough fluent readers (and seriously disadvantages those children not getting any reading practice at home as they have less volume of work from which to make the necessary connections by themselves), nor in sufficiently grammatical, correctly spelt and accurately punctuated written work... I just hope the pendulum doesn't swing towards stultifyingly boring lessons with no room at all for creativity, excitement and experiment - ie all mechanics and underlining of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc, and hardly any free writing and deliberately breaking the rules for the sake of the art!...

Aagh - I'm going to have to come back in!!

The whole terminology thing is what annoys me about the current phonics method. My DSs broadly learned using phonics prior to starting school
and are both strong readers. However I had no idea what a split vowel digraph was or a phoneme (??) and using such terminology, whilst accurate, is incredibly confusing and potentially intimidating for a parent. I am not a teacher but I'm Perfectly capable of teaching a child to read having done it myself every day for the past 35 years. Sticking religiously to such terminology runs the risk of alienating parents and thus discouraging parents from helping their children at home.

Again disclaimer that I'm not anti phonics - I am however anti jargon, in any walk of life.

I once sat outside a gym class with a mother who said to her toddler 'and what digraphs have your learned today, darling'. She wasn't intimidating, but she was intensely annoying!

I do think they have dropped the terminology - someone said that earlier - but I did have to check what a phoneme was at the phonics meeting our school had.

intimidated!

Yeah the terminology is off-putting, but if they call it "split vowel" as mrz did, much better eh? And not very difficult to understand when properly explained, especially as 4/5 year olds can and do understand .

Quite a lot of kids with a real aptitude for reading seem to work out the rules themselves before the explicit teaching. These are the children who "just seem to get it", probably with quite a lot of parental input along the way, DS included, and perhaps the reason some posters find the whole pro phonics MN stuff rather sanctomonius. However, I don't see that having the rules explained and practiced systematically does these children any harm, just perhaps a little late in the day if you have been reading for a while before this happens- 30/40 years in some of our cases .

practised...verb

The whole terminology thing is what annoys me about the current phonics method.

To be fair, most disciplines have their own terminology and it is helpful if those engaged in teaching phonics have a common understanding of the (very small) specialised vocabulary of phonics instruction. Then everyone knows exactly what is being talked about when reference is made to phonemes, graphemes, digraphs etc. It is not 'jargon' any more than 'clutch', 'head', 'big end' or 'pistons' are jargon when talking about what makes a car move. I don't think you would castigate your garage for using technical terms when discussing what is wrong with your car. In fact, you might be a bit concerned if they didn't as it could indicate that they aren't terribly knowledgable...

There is no particular need for the technical terms to be used with children, though children are perfectly capable of learning and applying them. For example, 'sounds' and 'sound spellings' are fine instead of 'phonemes' and 'graphemes'. I think that it is adults who are more fased by the technical language.

P.S If you think that phonics is jargon laden you should try reading some of the writings of the 'mixed methods' brigade. I subscribed to one of their 'research' publications for a year and found many of the research papers to be completely impenetrable