Sounding out, whole word and phonics question

[Shattereddreams]

My dd is doing well with her reading. Y1.
At home we read more extensively than school books so I am aware there is an element of pushing her above her school ability so to speak. But her school books are not particularly challenging ORT Level 7.

When she approaches a long unknown word, she basically panics. Small words if unknown don't cause problems, just long ones.

If phonetic, I ask her to sound out. But she can't. I think she reads in a whole word way, and she tries to make a word that she does know without really looking at the word.
Eg
Tethered she wanted to read as teacher.

She has a lazy supply teacher this year so hasn't made much progress in school, plenty at home though.

Is this fear normal progression?

I wondered about the phonics test because if she can't sound out unknown words then this could be a problem.

A Year 6 teacher in a school which has historically not taught phonics well, where such teaching does not continue after an initial romp through the sounds [in some schools, Phonics teaching - wrongly - only occus on entry to school, and is not followed up and reinfoced higher up the school - so even excellent early teaching can be 'overlaid' by mixed methods misteaching and non-phonic reading schemes in following years] may well find that the current group of Year 6s may have some gaps in their phonic knowledge which are forming a barrier to them making further progress from level 3/4 [a level 4 reader, btw, will be very capable of reading most children's chapter books - scarcely a non-reader].

That means that they need better phonics teaching - which hopefully the children in lower years now WILL be getting - NOT non-phonics teaching. If it is gaps in ponic knowledge that are causing the barrier, it is illogical to suggest sweeping away the very phonics teaching that could fill in these gaps....

Of course you can read if you can't decode. Lots of people learned to read without decoding.

It sounds from the post on TES that the teacher is fairly new to Y6 and works in a SATs factory (children are doing 1hr comprehension each day plus SPAG and she worries they may be teaching too much to the test) ... most of the class are already level 5 and the lower ability group are working at level 3/4 certainly not your average Y6 class.

How do you read if you don't know what those squiggles on the page mean (aren't able to decode) learnandsay?

Apologies for appalling typing.

Decoding = literally, to make meaning from the squiggles on the page by 'deciphering' what they say. All readers decode. Not all readers use phonics (systematic sounding out) as their primary strategy for decoding ... but that doesn't mean it isn't the best 'main strategy' for those learning to read. I seem to remember that there is some research involving eye tracking and brain scanning that demonstrates that even fluent readers do actually decode all through words subconsciously, even when they would articulate the way in which they read as not involving phonics IYSWIM

Some people go though their whole lives not being able to decode very well, but have a functional level of literacy.

Someone in my close family finds decoding very hard- they are dyslexic. They can read- they have a degree- but their reading relies a lot on familiarity with technical topics and they don't read for pleasure becasue they find it too tiring. Give them an unknown polysyllabic word and they struggle to read it.

Here's how you read without decoding

I take that isn't you in the video learnandsay is that where you got your inspiration/expertise in reading instruction?
(the dog is decoding the squiggles on the cards)

I just popped by to see how this thread about teaching children to read was getting on.

There's a video of a dog.

It's gone off on a bit of a tangent, I think.

I think you've disproved your point LearnandSay. the dog can "read" the three words SIT UP, BANG, and WAVE. and do a particular action for each of them.

However, because the dog hasn't learnt phonics, and therefore does not know the sound made by SH, he could not read the command to make a mess on the carpet.

Whereas a child that can read SIT UP and has also learnt the "Sh" sound would be able to read SHUT UP and other similar words.

I noticed it took 12 years to learn 3 words by the look and say method and only 750 000 words in the OED.

Of course the dog isn't decoding the words on the cards. It's just recognising whole words. The question is can you read without decoding and the answer is yes you can. It's that simple. I know some people have a hard time understanding it. But that's really all there is to it.

You are the one that is having a hard time understanding. Reading is being able to work out a new word for yourself without having to be told what it is.
As said above some children can covert word recognition to phonics, but most most people cant, and when they come across a new word need to be told what it is. Again a minority memorise those words quickly and have a bigger capacity of remembering words. Then you are left with those who struggle and a lot of those very badly.

Is that some kind of ironic joke?

There are a number of ways the dog could appear to " read" the words.

He only has to perform 3 actions- we can't see what the owner is doing off camera so it is quite possible that they are giving hand signals or similar as instructions. OR that every time the sign is changed, he does the next action- regardless of what the letters say. Be interesting to see if he still did the same actions if the cards were blank, eh? Or had 1, 2, 3 written.

I think this thread has turned into something similar to someone shouting
"The world IS flat" over and over again.
Everyone lse is saying "Look dear, it really isn't".
"Oh it IS flat it's that simple. Don't you understand".

Reading is lots of different things.

And yes, of course there are a number of conspiracy theories about any subject. Maybe it's not a dog at all. Perhaps it's a hamster disguised as a dog.

And yes. You're right it is worrying that so many of our teachers can't grasp a simple fact such as that it is possible to read without decoding. Understanding that simple fact won't cause the earth to stop spinning.

you are left with those who struggle and a lot of those very badly
And what they struggle with is rarely straightforward phonics, but the letters and letter strings which can have more than one sound (on - once; though - through).
Anyone who doubts this, should make a note of the words their children stumble over. (That's a good idea anyway - for drawing their attention to them again after they have finished their reading book or story.)
Looking at such words again and saying them while doing so, several times over, helps to get them to stage where they recognise them without hesitation, i.e. being able to read them fluently. Such words have to be learnt with a mixture of phonics and brute memorisation.

Mrz and other 'nothing but phonics' evangelists tend to keep repeating that it's impossible to learn to read by sight-learning, because English supposedly has an exceptionally huge vocabulary. There are only around 7,000 words that most of us use regularly. Being able to sight-read just the 3,000 most frequent ones is already enough to turn children into very fluent readers.
For learning to read, anything that works is as good as anything else. All children use some phonics - for learning to write. And if English spelling was phonically more consistent, without horrors like 'blue shoe flew through to you two too', it would take a fraction of the time that it does now.

There are only around 7,000 words that most of us use regularly. Being able to sight-read just the 3,000 most frequent ones is already enough to turn children into very fluent readers.

That's a matter of opinion - and a strange opinion too. Why would you be happy that children only know a finite number of words just to get by, Masha, instead of the 140 odd tools which enable master an inifinite number? You seem to have very low standards indeed.

Thank goodness you don't teach reading.

It's pretty silly to argue that sight reading is impossible because that's plainly untrue. I don't really know why they do argue it. I suspect they just like arguing.

read just the 3,000 most frequent ones is already enough to turn children into very fluent readers.

Can you point me to those figures please? I'd like to see the research.

What do you call " fluent readers"?

A reading age of around 8 will enable you to read The Sun. If you want to read Dickens or Dostovsky then you'd struggle.

Functional literacy which gets you by- almost- day to day- is one thing. Reading for meaning and being able to read anything put in front of you is another.

What the anti=phonics lot don't seem to graps - and it's not hard- is that some words are learned by some children using Look and Say. But other children find this impossible due to poor visual memories. Learning to read through Look and Say is limiting at best and has failed millions of children- I know because I have picked up the pieces, teaching them when they were either in secondary school or as adults.

Masha I was not talking about struggling with phonics, I was talking about struggling to memorise words and workout the phonic codes for themselves, because with word recognition that is what you are expected to do.

It is often claimed that English now has around 1 million words, but my big OED has merely 350,000 entries, with masses of multiple ones for different meanings of the same word. Yet even the Ch 4 Countown dictionary expert Suzie Dent often does not know a word the contestants come up with (often not knowing their spelling or pronunciation either). Many of the words are not really English at all (e.g. posada, mercado, schadenfreude) and extremely rarely used by anyone. I would not expect primary children to know those.
I base the 3,000 figure on my learning and teaching of four languages. Once I knew 3,000 English words i had no difficulty reading the Dickens which I had to do as part of my L2 course back in the 60s.
I have not counted exactly, but I don't think that I know more than 2,500 French words, but can get by pretty well in it and have no difficulty reading French.

I got fed up with people making different claims about how irregular English spelling is and spent 2 years investigating it myself. I started with the 25,000 most used English words on the Cobuild corpus (as E Carney had done for his 'Survey of English Spelling' in the early 90s), but when I eliminated compounds which needed no new learning for spelling (e.g. backpack, teapot) and derivatives (e.g. works, workings - from 'word'), I ended up with just 6,800.
I have since come across a few more dozen words which I deem common enough to be on that list. But I can say pretty categorically that the words which the majority of people know number around 7,000, irrespective of what wild claims others make - to support their view that couldn't possibly learn to read English mainly by sight.
We can and do. Phonics is just the beginning.

So we are supposed to believe this " research" which is carried out by you as part of some course you did?

And that invalidates all the work done by people more highly qualified in the teaching of reading, and who have been awarded OBE/MBEs etc for their work?
I am amazed TBH that you come on here and think that your "research" has some credibility. it's a joke.

What you don't appear to "get" is that some people- as has been said numerous times on this thread already- decode spontaneously without having to be taught how to. I'd include myself in that group. I was an excellent reader as a child. It is only as an adult now with specialist training in phonics that I understand how I was using phonics and spelling rules all along- I just didn't know it.

I'd like you to explain why so many children- and adults-cannot read - even at a functional level-when they have been " taught" by look and say or mixed methods? If your theory was to hold any water at all, then everyone leaving primary school would be able to read well- the fact is that 20-25% cannot.

And to agree with feenie, you set the bar very low if you think that learning a finite number of words is good enough .

I suspect that whether teachers like it or not, a lot of children are learning to read using mixed methods. I know the 43 Jolly Phonic sounds but have no idea about alternative spellings or tricky bits of words etc and have no idea whether or not dd has been taught them. As a result if dd comes across a word which she cannot work out at home I just tell her the right pronounciation and she then tends to memorise the word even if it was phonetically decodeable. Since I am not a teacher and these days teachers seem to dedicate relatively little time to listening to children read (especially those who are considered good readers), this is surely inevitable?

I don't think LandS is particularly anti phonics (and I think she's said on other threads that she agrees that it is the best way for whole classes to be taught) but I agree with her that for some children phonics is fantastic, for others (like my dd I think) it is a way of decoding a word which they then memorise and for others, it will just lead to confusion.

Just as an aside, how do children learn to use the different spellings of a word e.g. need and knead? Surely they have to just....memorise them?

Phonics adherents aren't against children remembering anything. They just don't want children to learn to read by remembering entire words.