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.

If we were reading a story book in reception class (same would apply at home of course) and came across the word "know" and we hadn't taught the spellings & at that point I would simply teach is another way to spell "n" and is another way to spell "oa" and ask the child/ren to help me read the word "n" "oa" ... that way when they meet knight, and known and knit and knife and own and snow and blow they already have the knowledge to tackle the words.
Some children do work out the spelling sound relationships without explicit teaching but as yet there isn't a foolproof way to identify these fortunate individuals and their less fortunate peers.

Exactly, mrz - I say again that I am in no way advocating a whole word approach. I am simply trying to explain to those who think children genuinely learn to read through whole word teaching that in fact there is something else -poor children - having to go on in order for it to work IYSWIM.

As I have said before, my DS was a self-taught reader who made successful 'untaight' links between whole words and phoneme / grapheme correspondances. I would never suggest that anyone should have taight him that way, just that is what happened even though he APPEARED to learn rom whole words (he memorised texts, then in time used the phonics he had worked out to read unknown texts).

OBVIOUSLY, direct phonic teaching is much more effcient in creating those links and doing so reliably.

And from this thread it is obvious that there ARE some people who think 'phonics is unnecessary / wrong because MY child managed without it'... whereas in fact they just didn't see the 'impicit / invisible' phonics happening in their child. It will do no child harm to be taught phonics REALLY well, and will do all but a very,very tiny minority good (my DS had a great Reception teacher who taught him to use phonics really effectively in spelling, even though he didn't by that point need it for decoding)

I don't think a successful look and say approach is really phonics in disguise argument will work. People have surprised themselves on threads like this with just how many ways there are to represent the sounds ee or ay. But when you learn with whole words the concept is entirely alien. The closest a whole word reader comes to it is when rhyming poetry. Whole word readers are aware that there are sounds in their language. But they don't try to manipulate them when reading. And some graphemes are so peculiar like ear and aigh eigh that most people would be unlikely to come up with them independently.

People have surprised themselves on threads like this with just how many ways there are to represent the sounds ee or ay

Have they? Most teachers know how many ways there are to write the sounds so they are unlikely to be surprised.

There are about 175-180 ways to write the 44 sounds of the English language. There are approx 750000 words in the OED ...

oh and a great many of MN poster who aren't teachers are very well informed about phonics so know very well how many ways sounds can be written.

To see who was surprised you'd need to look back over the thread. Obviously I'm not saying the people who already knew were surprised that they knew. I don't know why you're arguing.

I'm merely pointing out that I've never seen anyone post that they were surprised by the number of ways there are to spell "ay" (apart from your recent post)
I'm going to do a masha type list

may
made
pain
eight
straight
grey
great
sundae
veil
acorn

I can't imagine any MN posters haven't seen all those spellings of the sound "ay"

learnandsay, how do you know what is going on in the brain of "whole word" readers? This fascinates me.

My guess is that at some level, subconscious probably, there is some sort of pattern recognition going on. It's helpful isn't it? Phonics is just an explicit means of teaching this and uses sounds as they are also explicit. Would you teach a kid the keyboard with the sound turned off?

DS tonight stumbled on "feverishly". Divide it into "fever" and "ishly" and bingo no problem.

Well maybe now's the time to look then.

Because I'm one, tgger.

you are indeed

Are you sure?

What do you mean, am I sure? Of course I'm sure.

Perhaps you could do a Phd in some neuro-phonics thing learnandsay?

That might help you argue your case better .

Perhaps I could, but why would I want to?

Evidence based argument.

So, learn and say, you are saying that, for you, all words are 'pictures' - each one is unique and distinct, but you cannot apply what you know about the 'patrts' of one word to read any others? Like heiroglyphs?

So faced with an unknown word, unless it contains other 'whole words' that you know as separate words (so you might, for example, know 'know' and 'ledge', and produce a mispornounced 'knowledge' as a result) you cannot read it at all?

There's not much of that on mumsnet. It's mostly type, argue, type. Whoops!! Think of a witty face-saving reply, on all sides.

Keyboard trouble. Sorry.

So faced with e.g. pterosaur, you would be be reliant on a dictionary with a punctuation guide to be able to make it out at all?

No, teacher. We did get taught about plurals, possessives, grammar, and spelling. And we have learned other languages.