Phonics blah blah blah

[expansivegirth]

This link is interesting from the bbc today ... a 'viewpoint' with various contributors questioning the supremacy of phonics (hurray).

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19812961

My guess is that a national strategy to tackle early reading deficiencies is bound to have some positive results if it's the result of positive trials. Dr Seuss books and the Little Bear stories were both created from a restricted word set to help very young children to read, who knows, a national strategy based on Dr Seuss might work equally well if it necessitates all schools teaching Seuss for half an hour a day and all children reading Seuss books three times a week and recording what they've read. I'm guessing it's not so much what strategy you pick (as long as it actually works) but how you apply it.

When the new national results do come out in the next nationwide review, if they're not as good as hoped the phonics purists will say ah, but some schools are teaching mixed methods, some schools are doing this wrong, or that wrong, ie they'll concentrate on trying to defend phonics rather than focussing on what the limits of any national strategy are.

There is always going to be a reading failure rate and my guess is that it will be caused by a number of things, including diet and sleep. There will never be a simple answer, not phonics, not Seuss, not anything, only partial answers.

Learnandsay
There is always going to be a reading failure rate and my guess is that it will be caused by a number of things, including diet and sleep.

With spellings like 'ouch - touch', 'on - once, only, onion' that is absolutely certain.

There will never be a simple answer, not phonics, not Seuss, not anything, only partial answers.

There is, but most people don't like the remedy.
Does anyone really believe that if we made some amendments to English spelling (e.g. tuch, wunce, onely, unnion'), children would not learn to read and write more easily?

Even phonics evangelists like Debbie H and Dianne McGuinness have admitted,
?If only the code was as simple as a letter, or group of letters, representing any one particular phoneme, then the teaching and learning of the code would be speedy and straightforward?.

When something is easy, speedy and straightforward, u invariably get a much lower failure rate than if it is complex, difficult and very, very time-consuming (3 years versus 3 months in Finnish).

Even if we simplified English spelling we'd still have to teach it to some ragged children whose parents take drugs, beat them, don't feed them and are in the process of moving from their eighth foster home to their ninth. Of course the irregularity of English spelling makes reading harder, but what about children who can't read even simple books like Little Bear, which doesn't contain words like the ones you mention? I think the most complicated words are says and said. (Maybe mother, if you consider that complicated.)

Yet generations of children, using phonics methods for greatest success, but even when using inferior methods or mixes of methods have learned to read and write in English and indeed in other languages which do not have one to one grapheme/phoneme correspondences, and which have far fewer graphemes than phonemes.

And masha: you are really denying the existence or importance of the Great Vowel Shift? Because your earlier post seems both to decry me for mentioning it, whilst simultaneously giving even greater importance to it than usual by claiming it as a continuous phenomenon by conflation with normal language change.

The Germans do periodically revise their spelling. They have a large s which you find in words like strasse (street) A few years ago it was officially removed to simplify the language. But removing it caused so many problems that it has now been reintroduced.

Learnandsay

The German spelling reform of 2005 did not remove the ß. It differentiated between the previously somewhat random use of ss and ß. Now ss is used only after short vowels (Kuss, muss) and ß after long (Fuß, Gruß). It has greatly reduced the spelling errors of school children.

Most European spelling reforms have amounted to similar reductions of unpredictability. It would be similar to keeping the -e ending only when it lengthens the preceding vowel (gave, drive, survive, refine, to advocate), but not where it is clearly redundant (have, give, relative, imagine, an advocate - cf. chav, spiv, boffin, acrobat), as happened with 'olde, worlde, worde' etc. in the 17th C in England.

Some old people are still using them as they were brought up to do, but gradually the new usage is replacing the old everywhere. That is how spelling reforms are generally brought in.

French now simply allows around 600 simpler spellings as optional alternatives. So far they are catching on mainly among younger people more adventurous olds.

And EdithWatson
I am not denying that there have been some changes in English pronunciation over the past 600 years. I just have grave doubts about the theory that it is one of the main reasons for current English spelling inconsistencies.
Masha Bell

In that case you seem to be suggesting that spelling reform is a natural process (in English) It's just very very slow!

The phonics readers actually do do something similar to what you're suggesting in that the present children with an artificially simplified version of the language. The cat sat on the mat. Big pig digs in a wig, etc, etc. But the problem is that some children can't even read that and that has nothing to do with the inconsistencies in English spelling. (Personally I think you've got a point English is unnecessarily inconsistent. But straightening it out isn't going to make much difference to the kids who are struggling.)