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.

(I mean, you probably already know pterosaur, as I know nobody over the age of 4 who has not had 'the dinosaur phase', but assume that I mean 'an unknown word containing no standard known words, ie no 'word pictures' that you recognise)

No, I think I've seen it before as a dinosaur that flies.

We've had this conversation about the word Achaean. How does anybody know precisely how to pronounce it?

L&S,

Which is why I didn't give you a plural, possessive, or a word with a common grammatical function e.g. their - I gave you the example of an unknown noun in the sungular. As I further clarified it did not have to be pterosaur.

Spelling would be of no help to someone who did not use sounds at all to help them to read a word. the word is a 'picture' - a shape made out of those letters. Spelling merely helps you to reproduce that shape. The question I am asking is 'how do you read an unknown word that contains no 'whole words' that you do not already know?

Spelling is factual. In order to spell without using sounds you simply remember sequences of letters.

The question remains - given a word that you do not know, how does an adult whole-word reader know how to read it if it contains no words within it that they already know?

I know that e.g. when faced with a heavy name in a Russian novel (I learned Latin, French, and some Greek, but no Russian) I use segmenting and phonics - not explicitly, but implicitly and very quickly. What do you use, if you are a genuine whole word only reader?

Say 'Raskolnikov' or 'Yevginey' or 'Pyotr' - those are the words I vcan 'gfeel' myself sounding out in y head in order to read aloud. If you read Russian, then maybe an Indian name would be an equivalent example for you.

e.g. Gangopadhyay

I can see that, for you, such a name would be
'Gang' [unknown] 'pad' [unknown].

How do you fill in the unknown bits?

As a whole word reader I have two choices, I can guess or I can fail to read the word. But in some situations phonics pupils aren't much better off. Because phonics gives a range of pronunciations for certain letter combinations but it does not tell the pupil which is the correct pronunciation.

So, if the pupil was reading a speech which contained the word Achaean and didn't already know how to pronounce it she would probably get laughed at by the audience if it knew and she didn't.

How about "pygalgia"? whole word or syllables

I'd look it up in a dictionary.

So a child whole word reader is at a hige disadvantage - they have to learn as many whole words as possible while there is still some authority to tell them how to say the word or to verify which guess is wight.

Meanwhile a phonic reader has the tools to continue to decode unknown words throughout their life...

Whic one can really read??

Argh. Keyboard.

So every time you find a word that you cannot read - including names, which you cannot look up in the dictionary - you have to look it up to commit it to your word store?

It must make reading novols by foreign writers, set in far-flung places, or the foreign news pages of the papers, an absolute bore, having to look up how to read something every couple of sentences.

Just as an aside, I have found I am absolutely rubbish with Greek Gods names- DS has a Greek Myths book at the moment that he really likes. I have no classical background . I try to use "sounding out/phonics" but am often wrong or unsure.... I need to visit the quicklinks website, although DH's knowledge is better and easier to access .

Not really, I'm not trying to pronounce the words. If I was trying to read them from an autocue and couldn't pronounce them, then yes. It would be a pain. But I'm not.

(On a tangential point, btw, one of the things that teachers have to do in order to enable some children to read effectively at a high level is to increase the range of vocabulary that they are exposed to. After all, if you sound out 'psalm' and neither p-s-alm nor 's-alm' matches any word that you have every come across in your life, then you are at a disadvantage... and such children, like whole word readers, do need an adult to say 'this is the correct version, and the word means...')

It must be rather sad, really, going through life thinking 'well, I know that there was a disaster somewhere because I read about it, but I have absolutely no idea how to say the name of the place so I hope no-one ever wants to talk about it'... must also be difficult for you to discuss such things with your child.

What about when you are reading aloud to your daughter?

Insufficient instruction is a setback in any discipline.

We don't read Russian novels at bed time. But I'm familiar with quite a few foreign texts. So we should be OK for a couple of years yet. When she wants me to help her with Mongolian originals I'll probably decline though.

(I suspect, by the way, that you do use phonics in your guessing, because I don't think anyone 'genuinely literate', in the sense of being able to assimilate new words, only uses whole word techniques. I am just pointing out that if you ONLY used 'whole words as pictures' methods to read, then there are an awful lot of everyday situations - ordering from an Indian menu, say - in which you would be, literally, lost for words because you would be unable to break into the words at all)

Say, given 'brinjal', if you didn't know it - what sound would you make first? I would assert that you would, 100% of the time, say 'b' - this using phonic knowledge.

just as well pygalgia isn't Russian or Mongolian then.