Phonics and spelling

[PiggeryJokery]

Just interested how phonics works with spelling. Sounding out when you look at a word works well, but ds struggles when writing as he's just putting down whatever sound he hears, so for "might" he wrote "mite" which is understandable as both versions use an "ie" sound. How do they learn the right spellings?

Also I was surprised that he could sight read "beautiful" but was totally unable to spell it - he tried "beeyootiful" - and he was really taken aback when I spelt it for him, as he was obviously thinking about the sounds and not how it looked when he last read it.

Well this took an interesting turn! I am a long-time lurker on the Primary Education board and know better than to give Masha any credence! Thanks again Mrsz and fellow teachers for your help.

mrz apologies

as a grown up I dont get phonics. some people seem to think its bril

laughter, phonics is sounding words out, like "cu" "ah" "t" instead of cat or "see" "ae" "t"

so you say the sound that the letter makes instead of calling the letter by its alphabetical name. It makes perfect sense for a lot of words, it becomes controversial for lots of people at the point where you have lots of different ways of sounding the same thing, or where the words don't really look soundable and where most people are prepared to accept the fact that you just have to remember that particular word.

No laughter it most certainly is not sounding out words like "cu" "ah" "t"!

laughter can I ask what you do when you want to read or spell an unfamiliar word?

what is it then?

learn

I think that mrz is just being precise about the way you wrote the phonemes! You added a vowel sound to the c, which isn't actually there when it is spoken. Apart from that, your explanation, as far as it went, was OK.

no maizied I wasn't just being precise (although there is that issue) rather the idea that saying "cu ah t" (or c-a-t) is all you need to know.

I was having a discussion with a mum at the school gate the other day. She stated that reading was about memory, and phonics was rubbish. I asked her how anyone decoded an unfamiliar word if reading was only about memorising words and she said that you had to break the word down and sound it out .

I pointed out that this was phonics but she said it wasn't

travelin: I'm American, so that's why I spelled it with a z.

travelin And it should be fool-proof. I was watching television at the time and wasn't completely paying attention...

Humphrey, of course everyone first attempts to "sound out" an unfamiliar word the first time he/she encounters it. Phonics provides clues for pronunciation, but you can't rely on them 100%.

After you see an unfamiliar word, a couple different things may happen:

1. Once you've pronounced it, you recognize it as a word you have heard before, and then you memorize the spelling so that you don't stumble the next time you have to read or write it; or

1. You don't recognize the word at all, so you attempt to memorize it, using context or a dictionary to associate the word with its definition, so that it's not unfamiliar to you the next time.

Either way, you ultimately resort to memorization.

P.S. Why is there no edit function on MN? I always seem to notice my typos after I've posted.

Nothing is ever foolproof. I think what believers in phonics mean by foolproof is that it's a very good method of teaching large numbers of children to read. (And it probably is.) I think what they forget is that it's a class teaching method. (You don't need a theory to teach one child to read you simply get on with it.) Lots of people were taught to read by their mothers. I'm guessing a fair degree of those mothers didn't theorise about it. They just got on with it. You probably do need a theory (or at least some system) for teaching a class to read otherwise you're going to get disorganised. All you need to teach one child to read is a book.

No learnandsay they don't mean it is a class teaching method, it is actually even more effective one to one.
You keep referring to it as a theory but it isn't a theory it is a centuries old effective method of reading instruction.

I'm teaching a single child (i.e. mine) to read and spell using phonics, and find it great - it makes things much easier.

Phonics gets most children off to an excellent start with reading, although some need very little of it and quickly move on to learning to recognise all common words as wholes, without which nobody becomes a fluent reader.

For learning to spell, phonics is much less useful. If children learn, for example, that the /ee/ sound can be spelt ea, ee, ie, ei, e-e, i-e, -ey, -i, as in 'speak, seek, thief, seize, even, machine, key, ski', they have no idea which one they must use in each of the 459 common English words with that sound (152 of which use ea, 133 ee, 86 e-e, 31 ie, 29 i-e + a few of this and that).

That's why learning to spell English takes so long. Teachers can teach the different spellings in different little groups of words, but the correct spelling for each word still has be stored in children's heads where they get jumbled in all sorts of ways, by all sorts of things.

If English spelling was like the Finnish system, those 459 words would all be spelt with ea, or ee, or whatever. Children would simply learn the rule ee sound = x and there would be no need for word by word learning, or spelling tests, or endless correcting by teachers.

If it was up to me, I would make learning to write English less labour-intensive (and the teaching of phonics more useful for learning to spell too), but I realise that most people don't think there is anything wrong with learning to spell having to take a very long time, and so nothing will change in a hurry. But I will keep disabusing people of the belief that phonics can teach anyone to become a good speller of English.

I will keep trying to put discussions about how best to teach children to read and write English on a more rational, factual footing.
Masha Bell

"If it was up to me, I would make learning to write English less labour-intensive "
Thank goodness it isn't up to you. The thought of having to write in text-speak would drive me absolutely nutty. I love English the way it is.

I was wondering about this. When my dd first started writing independently, I always praised her effort etc and only corrected her if she asked me to - whole sentences would be phonically plausible, but of course pretty far out in terms of spelling.

She's now in year 1 and her writing and spelling are much more secure; she often asks now if she's spelt something correctly or how to spell something. Should I be more proactive about helping her identify and correct her mistakes, often minor, like 'banana' being spelt 'bannana'?

TIA

How much to correct is a tricky question, and depends very much on the child - not so much that it puts them of writing at length and using a wide vocabulary. My daughter learned easily and did not mind having every mistake corrected. With my son I had to correct far more selectively.

As for making English spelling more learner-friendly,
I like 'u' for 'you' on the model of 'I', but I am not advocating simple adoptions of text spelling, but reducing inconsistencies which take a great deal of learning and keep causing mistakes, such as inconsistent consonant doubling (muddy - study, copy - poppy, holly - holiday) or the silly differentiation between practice/practise.

When it comes to how much to correct I usually try and pic one or two things to use as teaching points if he hasn't asked me something specific. ie today he was pretending to go shopping and wrote a list including "woshing powdur" Perfectly clear what he meant but he asked if it was right. I said that it was really clear what he meant and was so close to being right and then showed him how to spell it.

It's funny actually, but I would have sworn blind that phonics was bloody useless for English spelling. But my four year old taught me something today. I've been teaching her words that contain "igh," sight, right, Wight, etc, etc
Today she was listening to a song with the word tight in the lyrics and told me that "tight" was another word with igh in it (and knight, as opposed to night) for some reason she knows the difference between night and knight. She hasn't covered these things in school. (They're still doing ORT 1+ Dan a man, bans a pan and a fan.) I don't know why she knows this stuff. She does have a poetry book on P.E which contains knees. She knows knobbly knees and won't let me pronounce it kknobbly kknees. Because she says that doesn't exist. So it has to be nobbly nees. I think children's abilities to just know what's what and what isn't are seriously underrated.

I think children's abilities to just know what's what and what isn't are seriously underrated.

Going by my own kids and grandkids, having taught some very bright kids A level as well as some bottom sets in comps, along with some slow readers in primaries,
I would say under and over, yes and no.

I keep trying to find better ways of explaining what the main English spelling problems are. Does this following help?

By analysing the 7,000 most used English words for spelling regularities and irregularities, I found that roughly 4 words in every 7 contain some unpredictable letters, like ?friend? or ?eight? (cf. end, date):

English has 91 main spelling patterns, 80 of which have exceptions, but
the main retardants of progress with learning to write are the following 10:

973 words with inconsistent consonant doubling,
(poppy ? copy).

459 unpredictably spelt /ee/
(speak, seek, shriek, seize, scene...key, ski, quay...)

196 irregular long /oo/,
(scoop, soup, move, blue, shoe, flew, through...).

156 variants for long /o/
(stole - coal, bowl, poll).

154 surplus ?e endings

(are, have, imagine, delicate, promise ?
car, chav, boffin, acrobat, tennis)

150 unpredictable

(her bird turned early)

102 variants for

(date ? great, straight, eight, gait)

68 irregular short

(cut - couple, come, compass, does, blood)

67 irregular

(bed - said, head, any, friend )

45 irregular
(sit ? pretty, busy, women, build, crypt)

Those 10 irregularities make 2,370 words tricky to spell. They slow reading progress too, because many of the variants are used for more than one sound (e.g. trouble, group; said, laid; threat, great).

   Exceptions to the other 70 spelling patterns affect only 1,331 words between them. Many of them also occur in the endings of longer or less common words (ordinary ? archery; potter ? actor; present ? peasant) and are learnt mainly in the later school years, with less impact on overall literacy progress. The greatest impediments are posed by the irregular spellings of words which children meet and need to use  in their own writing in the early years, such as ?said, one, friend?.

The greater the number of words with variant spellings which has to be memorised, the longer they take to learn, but the strength of the pattern from which they diverge has an effect too. Because the long /oo/ sound, for example, is spelt in only 95 words, while 101 have other spellings, all the spellings for it have to be learned word by word.

One of the numerically relatively small irregularities takes much learning too. The short /oo/ sound of ?foot, put, should? occurs in merely 35 words (as spoken by most people), but its spelling is exceptionally tricky because it has no unique pattern of its own. All the spellings used for it are more common for other sounds (foot ? boot, root...; put ? but, cut...; should - smoulder, shoulder...; wolf ? wobble, wombat...).

The biggest spelling difficulty cuts across several sounds. The greatest source of English spelling errors are the 334 sets of different spellings for homophones, such as ?their /there? and ?it?s /its?.

Hi Masha,

Does the following help me? Um, no not really. I genuinely didn't believe that phonics could help spelling for reasons similar to some of yours. Read/read/reed. Bow/bow, their, they're, there, to, two, too and those are just the easy ones. But my daughter seems to have a natural grasp of which words fit together in word families based on how they're spelled. I guess it's a memory aide. God knows I don't think like that. But if it helps her. (And it's early days.) But if it helps her then I'm all for it. The fact that it didn't help me (and still doesn't) is irrelevant. Maybe different people think differently.