School teaching "sight memorisation" rather than teaching phonics...what to do?

[Greythorne]

We live in France and are a bilingual family (English - French).

DD1 is 5.9 and in Year 1 in a French school. Last year, in what would have been her Reception year had we been in the UK, I taught her to read using phonics. Thanks to lots of advice on here (waves to mrz and others) it worked really well. It seems to me like DD made the two big leaps in learning to read: she has "got" the concept of sounding out sounds (not letter names) then blending them AND she has learnt a lot of the sounds, so she is reading pretty well. Still a long way to go and we have not covered all sounds yet, but we are getting there very surely.

So, in French school, this is the year they start to teach reading. They are supposed to use phonics, according to government guidelines, but I have heard that many teachers are wedded to older methods, esp the sight reading / "méthode globale" / look and say approach.

It is only day 3 and DD has already been given three lists of words to memorise, not read, just memorise. She has memorised them, but as soon as they are in a different context or even a different font, she is struggling, as she has obviously just memorised the shape.

I keep suggesting that she sounds and blends, but she has never been taught the French sounds, only letter names so far. I have avoided teaching her much in French as I am not French and to be honest, I have got enough on my plate teaching her to read in English! I really thought I could rely on the school to teach her to read in French, esp as she already has the concept of reading down pat.

Any advice?

I think some people just like to pick an argument

Not really - but they will pick you up on posts which are inaccurate. The OP clearly has a firmer knowledge base than you have.

You could still learn something though - which words do you think are not decodable?

Therefore all languages are phonetic
ah but what about Chinese?

What about it? There is still a correspondence between symbols and sounds.

There are 3 methods we all use in reading. Phonics/sounding out, memory and using the context to figure out the word.
There are far too many phonically irregular words to use just one method alone.
My DD learns jolly phonics, but high use words are learnt by sight. e.g.
you
go
do
the
(How can you learn all the codes for the above?)
I hope your daughter gets the hang of reading in French, I'm sure the teachers have a tried and tested method, but they would welcome any information you can give them to help your daughter further.

The problem here is that you don't understand what people mean by "phonetic language" and respond with irrelevant comments like "All languages are phonetic".

Therefore all languages are phonetic
ah but what about Chinese?

The Chinese language is phonetic the writing system is pictographic

There is still a correspondence between symbols and sounds
interestingly, in Chinese, there isn't.......that is why so many Chinese can speak it but not write it.
(sorry OP slightly off topic)

Really? But there must be some correspondence, surely?

cote

Well, my problem is not that the French system does not mirror exactly the Jolly Phonics we did in English. I am experienced enough in the French way of life to know there's no chance of that :)

I am just concerned that at the moment, she has not been taught any sounds, instead she has been taught letter names which seems a shame.

And two, getting her to memorise whole words seems strange. I just cannot fathom yet how she is going to learn to read without learning the grapheme - sound correspondances.

All language, except sign language and mime, are phonetic.

Indeed all languages bar those are also phonemic (ie changing units of sound, whatever the phonetic rendition, changes meaning) for that is what produces meaningful speech.

Chinese phonemes however cannot be taught phonically, as there is no predictable relationship between the written characters and the phonemes of the language, and must be taught by rote. There is no need to rote learn any alphabetic language, for even though the phonic code differs between them it still exists. That some are deemed more complex than others does not invalidate the theory.

Sorry, not 'theory' - I meant 'principles'

Cote

Did your DC learn to read simultaneously in both languages or one first then the other?

I don't regret at all teaching DD to read in English first. I did hope it would be a transferable skill, from English to French, contingent on the school teqching her the French code.

But now it looks like the French school is going to go "la méthode globale" route.

ah thanks edithweston, that is what I meant but you explained it better, seems I was confused about the precise meaning of 'phonetic'.

Harecare - the high frequency words shouldn't be taught by 'sight' in Jolly Phonics, they should be taught as decodable but with a 'tricky' bit - that is, a grapheme/phoneme correspondence that the children have not yet been taught. They should not be taught as whole words to memorise.

go - Is just 'g' with the 'o' representing an 'oh' sound - as in 'so' or 'yo-yo'.
do - The 'o' is an alternative way of making 'oo' sound, as in 'move'.
you - Here 'ou' is a different alternative for the 'oo' phoneme, as in 'soup' or 'group.

etc

frenchphonics.com/info/category/phonics

Greythorne some of it is transferable. With the exception of the nasals, the consonants are the same. A firm grip on those will give her the 'scaffold' of the words. Then you need to find a way of filling in the vowels that is better than guesswork (though with guesswork pupils may well work out the vowel code for themselves). I can quite see why you would want to save your DD from having to reinvent the wheel in that way. Are there textbooks/readers for the other French methods which might help?

If the OP is still with us...

Jolly Phonics do a French version of the Jolly Phonics Manual (no doubt with actions and all!),. I think they developed it for the French Canadian market.

It can be ordered from the Jolly Learning website.

jollylearning.co.uk/shop/jolly-phonique/

I wouldn't want to risk my child's chances of learning to read French easily by going along with the far less effective 'look and say' route (which she is clearly already finding much more difficult than phonics)

Feenie - So how do you know to say doo instead of doh, goh instead of goo? By learning the whole word. It's the "tricky bit" that has to be learnt by sight. Why are you so opposed to using a combination of methods to read?
Why shouldn't high frequency words with tricky bits be taught as whole words to learn by sight? It's much quicker to learn them like that.

And as you read these words now are you quickly sounding out the letters in your head or are you reading by word recognition? I would assume the latter. It is a skill that is needed to read fluently.

You are on Day 3 of the school year. Give it another week and I'm sure that you will come to sounds.

If it's any consolation, there was a lot of memorisation back when I was taught English as a second language. We would hear a new word, see how it's written, and that would be that. Sometimes there would be a logic to it, like that bat fat cat and other times memorisation was all that worked, like with tough and though or none and cone.

Compare this with a language like Turkish that is written so phonetically that you can read the hardest text if you can recite the alphabet, even if you don't understand a word of it Even Italian can be read without the slightest understanding of the context, if you know the alphabet plus a few simple rules.

Feenie - So how do you know to say doo instead of doh, goh instead of goo? By learning the whole word. It's the "tricky bit" that has to be learnt by sight. Why are you so opposed to using a combination of methods to read?

When children know the alternatives - usually by the end of Y1 - they become very adept at trying the alternatives swiftly.

The reason I am so opposed is because those same mixed methods fail one in five children - my own ds included. Twenty years of teaching using phonics has shown me that this method hardly fails any child, except a few children with the most profound difficulties.

And as you read these words now are you quickly sounding out the letters in your head
Latest brain research shows that that is exactly what we do - but too quickly to register it.

MaizieD

That's exactly it. I feel like she has "got" the concept of synthetic phonics and we have worked so hard on it together :)

Edith

You are, of course, right that the on the whole consonants are pronounced the same in both languages. But look at the French word for cat: "le chat" .... DD will spontaneously pronounce it as per the English word "chat" as in talk.... Because she has not been taught the French code.

I have no idea how the other French kids would "read" it at the moment either...as they have not been taught the code either, so they will be coming up with something like "kuh-ach-a-teh" which are the letter names they have been taught OR they will be memorising it.

Surely the whole, tricky words are just large phonemes/graphemes that need to be learned?

(Sorry if that makes no sense, I can't get my head round phonics at all - I have no argument with it as it clearly works well, I just don't think in the right way)

Greythorne - Last summer, I tried to teach DD to read in English but it was a disaster. Then, she learned to read French in school. I didn't push with any other language all of last school year, so French was the only language she read until a few months ago.

Something surprising happened this summer: We were on holiday in Turkey and she just started reading road signs, food on the menu etc. I had bought her an Angry Birds comic book in Turkish which she was desperate to read. She pored over it for a day or two and the next thing I know, she was reading.

We came back from holiday, and she did the same thing with DH's Tintin comic books (don't ask) - taught herself to read English. So now she can read all three of her languages

How can it work in the wrong way?

cote
very inspiring story!

Compare this with a language like Turkish that is written so phonetically that you can read the hardest text if you can recite the alphabet, even if you don't understand a word of it

I know what you are saying; you've just got your terminology a bit muddled. Turkish (and many other languages) have a far more 'transparent' code (correspondence between sounds and letters) which does, indeed, make them easier to learn, but English is based on the correpondence between sounds and the letters that represent them too and is also written 'phonetically'.

The English 'code' is more complex and takes longer to learn. But it is still easier to learn by the 'phonics' route (learning the way that the 44 ish 'sounds' of which English words are represented by about 160 -180 common letter combinations) than by attempting to memorise some 250,000 words as 'wholes' (which is actually impossible..)