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?

Isn't that the point of phonics though Cote? Most children taught to memorise words will intuitively learn the phonic code and then be able to apply it to new words - however a significant minority fail to do that and therefore are unable to read, as they cannot memorise every word.

Greythorne - "Pipdogpopdogmopdogflipdog. You can't know how to pronounce his name without breaking it down into simpler sections."

That is how English works. It is not how all languages work.

Where there are no letter combinations and all letters are pronounced in only one way, you do know how to pronounce even the longest word without breaking it down into any "sections".

I'm sorry that this is not easy for you to understand. It is because you don't have experience of such a language, I suppose.

Jolly Phonics Manual is available in French - why not get a copy. It isn't that difficult to learn the French letter-sound correspondences, as many of them are the same as English, then use blending to learn the sight words.

How do you know that though Jolly unless you are using phonics? You obviously know that "ph" can make a f sound for instance.

summerrain - you can't jump from your dd to 'most children'.

That's what I mean, cote, they are learning that plough is pronounced to rhyme with how. This is surely no different to learning that a in ant is pronounced ah.

They also learn that ea can be pronounced ee or eh.

I'm talking about the list of tricky, irregular words.

If you were learning English as a second (or third) language and already had a good command of reading in your mother tongue, your learning of the English code would in all likelihood have happened very quickly.

But take my parents for example. They speak a bit of French, but struggle with written French very badly. Take a name like Neuilly sur Seine. They don't know the French code, so will pronounce it something like "New-illy saw sain". They need to be taught the code to be able to read French.

You probably spoke good English and grasped the English code fast, possibly without any effort on your part.

cote

No, you are quite right, I cannot imagine a language with a made up, crazy word of 40 letters being immediately readable by everybody! Fair enough, I will take your word on that.

Both French and English would need to break it down into sections or phonemes.

What worries me is that DD has nit been taught the French code and is having to rely on visual memory to learn the list of words every night. Clearly, this is not going to be a good long term strategy!

But as oer your suggestion way upthread, it is day 3 and I will give it some time before jumping up and down in the directeur's office.

Rubirosa - I can't comment on the point of phonics, as I've never learned it. My reply was to the person who implied that there was no place for memorising words.

sight memorisation works a lot of the time for a lot of children. if i were you i'd wait and see how it goes.... if you become worried about her progress relative to the french mono-ligual classmates then it might be time to do something/have a word, but i'd give it some time.

Cote,

Some children manage to learn by memorisation but many of them work out the phonics for themselves (I once had a Y9 boy tell me how he had done it).

For most children it isn't as effective as just getting on and teaching the phonics from the start. And, believe it or not, phonics is faster.

Greythorne,

I hope you've ordered that Jolly Phonics manual!

You say "clearly this is not a good long term strategy" but it DOES work for a lot of children, they work out the 'rules' themselves...i learned to read this way from 'flashcards' at a very young age (3.5). It's not ideal and it doesn't work for all children but you don't know yet if it will for your daughter.

sight memorisation works a lot of the time for a lot of children.

How do you know? Years of experience of teaching children to read?

Why do you think that we, and the US, and Australia, and New Zealand (all enthusiastic 'whole word' teachers for many decades) have huge problems with poor literacy?

Jolly - That list of tricky words is a very long one, which is probably why our teachers never bothered with explaining the rules and just went with "This is how we say the word, and here is how it's written".

Another factor may have been that we were all 12, so considerably older than the age at which native English speakers learn to write.

We were also forbidden to have a dictionary in the first year, even at home.

maizie - I am not saying that phonics as a method doesn't work. I am only saying that you can't learn to read English without a certain amount of word memorisation because the same combination of vowels can be read in different ways.

It's not ideal and it doesn't work for all children but you don't know yet if it will for your daughter.

I never fail to be amazed at the way people casually advise the 'suck it and see' method on the grounds that it may work. If they had to work with the children it has failed they might not be quite so cool about the stronger possibility that it won't work and the damage this will do to the child (not their child, of course...).

When I speak grammatically correct English at speed I'm not thinking about the correct order of the verbs, adjectives and conjunctions at all. And I'm definitely not conjugating verbs for tense and pronoun as I do it because (being a child of the seventies) I was never specifically taught formal English grammar at school.

Therefore I must have memorised every possible English sentence I've ever used. It is the only possible explanation.

Greythorne - There was an article in The Economist several years ago about different/difficult languages. It is fascinating. Do take the time to read it, if you are interested in the subject of languages.

In that article, you will see a word in Turkish (probably the longest): Çekoslavakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmissiniz. It means "Apparently, you were one of those we couldn't turn into a Czechoslovakian". Yes, that is an entire sentence said in a word (common in Turkish). And yes, it is very easy to read because there are no letter groups and all letters are read in only a single way

I am only saying that you can't learn to read English without a certain amount of word memorisation because the same combination of vowels can be read in different ways.

But you learn the different ways that the vowel (and vowel + consonants in some cases) can be read, then apply that knowledge to unfamiliar words as you decode and blend them. It may be that you might ultimately have to ask how a particular word should be pronounced, if it's not in your oral vocabulary, but most words are quite simple to work out independently. It's not a case of 'learning' discrete words; they do become easily read 'on sight' after having been decoded a few times (often only once) but this is not the same as deliberately memorising them.

maizie - Why are you sure that it won't work? My DD started learning in this way and she was reading French in three months.

OP's DD is three days into the school year. They are learning letters. In a few days, they will be reading vowels. Then they will come to letter combinations. (This will make you happy, presumably).

"they do become easily read 'on sight' after having been decoded a few times (often only once) but this is not the same as deliberately memorising them."

How is that not the same as memorising? Seriously, I don't understand what you are saying here, if anything.

I (will) read. I (have) read. Written exactly the same, pronounced differently. You need to be told this and remember it (i.e. "memorise"), as no amount of "decoding" will tell you how the second "read" should be pronounced.

Have not read the thread but I Have 2 kids now 9 and 10 that were taught via the sight recognition method as opposed to my 13 year old who was taught phonically as is my 5 year old. The 9 and 10 year old struggle massively with litracey even now, Could be a coincedence but I doubt it.

It's not the same as memorising, and the difference is at the very heart of the matter. Memorising means you are learning every word just as scribble on page, and as a unique unit.

Larning rapid recall of a decoded word "looks" the same but the DC is not rote learning, but code breaking then remembering - for example, automatically knowing that all words with a 'f' at the beginning start with the sound /f/, eventually covering all sound/grapheme correspondences and thus becoming able to read every single word in English.

If yo are sight reading, you would be stumped by novel words. If you are not stumped by novel words, then you are transferring your phonic knowledge to be able to say those words (then compare them to your oral vocal for meaning). You might not have been explicitly taught to do this (and there is a generation who wasn't taught, but that doesn't mean you didn't crack the code eventually yourself. It is however demonstrated over and over again that children learn better if they are explicitly taught these rules, rather than being left to invent them for themselves.