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 suppose what I am saying is that your guesses would be phonically reasonable ones. You would not start to read 'pygalgia' with the sound 'l' or 'n' - you would use your knowledge of phonics to start it with a 'p'. I would also suggest that the only 2 sounds you would consider for 'g' would be hard 'g' or soft 'j' sounds, not a m or a f ... and you would probably apply implicit knowledge of phonics and spelling patterns to posit that it is more likely to be 'j' as in 'giant' than 'g' as in 'gutter'.

From my experience with DD when she was around 6/7. She was initially taught look and say(whole word recognition). I slowly became aware that her teacher was not progressing her reading into phonics because look and say has obvious limitations. It was clear that an otherwise bright child was not reading well so I got a book from the library on phonics and we completed the book with her able to decipher words like parliament!

I thought we had cracked it especially as there was a lot of rumblings from other parents with struggling readers in that class only.

But....I would sit a let DD read to me and it was clear she was still selecting whole word reading and when she came to an unfamiliar word she would put in a similar looking word despite making nonsense of the context. I would say, no go back and work out the word...DD would and always got it right, but this happened over and over again until no sense could be made of the story and she and I were both upset

My conclusion to all this is the brain will accept phonics at a certain time (around 6) and after that if its not taught the brain gets stuck in a rut and struggles. I moved schools soon after and DD had to go into a remedial reading class along with most of her former classmates

I kick myself for not seeing what was happening and intervening sooner but I am not a teacher so trusted an incompetent one. DD eventually caught up but didn't have the love of books DS had as a child. So that's the lesson I learned!

If you GENUINELY only used whole words to read, then you would have no way to choose whether to start 'pygalgia' with a 'p' sound or a 'm' sound, as you do not have a whole word reference for the word IYSWIM.

Forgot to say dd did go to uni in the end but our experience should never hav happened.

http://childdevelopmentinfo.com/learning/brain.shtml Interesting article on brain scans and reading

interesting article on brain scans and reading

Thanks bruffin

I don't really understand the confusion. If you've been taught to spell of course you know that all words that begin with b begin with b. You don't need sounds in order to remember facts any more than you need to remember your times tables by breaking them down into phonemes.

Do you think that poetry and/ or nursery rhymes irons out a lot of phonic confusion in children? By hearing it and then seeing it on the page I suspect a of us were taught phonics by default.

Ditto having stories read to us. You go back and look at the page as a child, and you remember what the sentence sounded like, what the individual words sounded like, and then you begin to use phonic strategies without being formally taught anything. If you hear Red Riding Hood and Wolf enough, it is not a great leap to start understanding the principles by which words are constructed. But no-one has to actually TELL you that the ol sound is the same as the ool in the wool or ull in full. You pick it up, like you pick up how to speak English.

I have issues with the idea that you need to formally explain how to speak English to a twoyear old, anymore than you need to formlly need to explain how to read to five year old. You present them with the relevant resources books or spoken language that help their phonological awareness and hey presto they learn to read,in the majority of cases. And they can go on decoding forever, with that under their belts. Why throw out the most important aspect of classroom teaching - the pleasure of Language as she is spoken, in favour of an arid diet of synthetic phonics?

Teaching speech to children is a gradual thing. You correct your children all the time. They get tenses wrong. They get possessives wrong and so on. But after enough correction they get the hang of it. You can hear people speaking who have clearly not been corrected enough and still do not speak English correctly.

There is also a grammatical form of English which grew up at around the time that Dr Johnson wrote his dictionary. At about that time grammarians began to sell popular works which explained to people how English should be spoken and popular forms of speech began to be frowned upon if "one was from the right set."

I have a 10 year old who cannot spell for toffee. Yet he can read a page of text he hasn't seen before or heard before with no difficulty. His reading ageis 10. His spelling age is 7. He can decode, if you like, in a contextual setting. But the other way round is another matter. Presumably it is because he doesn't read enough to himself and therefore isn't familiar (when he initiates text, writes) with how everyday words appear on the page, or he is a lazy child who never bothered to learn those spelling lists. Both really. Familiarity with the printed page in its more pleasurable form is what teaches you to spell. Familiarity with the sounds of words when they are read to you (his preferred way is to listen to us read) is what teaches you,ultimately,to be successful decoder.

It is a bit like the way it is much easier to read/decode French than to make it up from scratch.

I don't think we correct children in their speech. We model it, and they hear it. The best form of modelling is when you repeat back to a child in a responsive way, conversational way,the correct form. You don't go round correcting as such. You re-inforce positively, good grammar. If you want to

I'm not sure how you do it. But I correct my children all the time. I'm not sure if it matters if ultimately they learn to speak properly.

But L&S, spelling (as you call it) teaches you how the sound 'b' is written down - I would call that phonics, but we are splitting hairs here.

Then when you see a new word starting with b that you have never seen before, you apply that knowledge of sound - phonics- to read the sound that it encodes .

If you GENUINELY only read full words - as an Egyptian reading heiroglyphs read pictures - then you would not be able to apply information from one word containing b to another, as you say that you only recognise and read any word as a whole.

In fact, you use what you call 'spelling', and I call 'phonics' to break the word down to read it, using the 'spelling' / 'phonics' rules you know. Ergo, you use phonics to read - maybe only for truly unfamiliar words, but you still use it.

ITWB "I have a 10 year old who cannot spell for toffee. Yet he can read a page of text he hasn't seen before or heard before with no difficulty. His reading ageis 10. His spelling age is 7. He can decode, if you like, in a contextual setting."

Reading and spelling are 2 completely different neurological processes.
In reading we look at words and decode. In spelling we retrieve words and the letters that are needed to make them from our long term memory. If they are not in that memory, or we can't manage the phonics ( for completely regular words) we can't manage the spelling.

Many children who are dyslexic can manage to read quite well - at their chronological age- but are behind in spelling.

If your son is 3 years behind in spelling, then that should raise alarm bells- any history of dyslexia in family etc? Have you thought of having him assessed?

slightly off piste here...yes, have had him assessed, but if he has dyslexia it is very mild,[recommended] dyslexia tutor said. We are trying to find him a literacy tutor through local Dyslexia charity, just to help with literacy and handwriting as it is his ASD traits that need the 1:1. It is not in the family, the ASD is!

Well, teacher, at the level where everything in an alphabetical language must have some element of phonics about it whether you like it or not, I like you am not sure. I don't know where the limits of whole words and phonics lie. (Well, actually I do. But that's another story.) Given that letter names don't sound anything like their phonics sounds there is an extra level of abstraction involved in what you're suggesting. But, ultimately you're right. Yes. There must be some phonetic correspondence between letters and sounds in an alphabetic script (and in many pictorials ones too.) And, can anyone who is proficient in that language and script be wholly unaware of it, even if their awareness is subliminal, accidental, or fleeting? No, probably not.

I think the other interesting thing about phonics is that Latin is so phonologically consistent compared to English. Yet no-one finds it that easy because we never hear it spoken, except possibly in a Latin mass or concert with latin words.
Could that be why JKRowling used it for her spells?

Maybe if English is a mixture of Norse rune sounds and Romance languages which were based on Latin phonemes which looked like they sounded, that is why it is so inconsistent?

sorry, too many clauses; keyboard sticking...

It will depend on which version of Latin modern scholars are arguing about. Latin was a widely spoken language and probably had many variations as many modern languages do today.

English is a poor beast. It has been through so many variations from Celtish, through Latin, Anglo Saxon, (in several successive stages,) through Norman French and Latin, again, and back into English. It's not all that surprising that we find it hard to relate to it in its written form.

Do we find it hard? Or is this discussion because some of us found it very easy to learn to read and write and expect it to be that easy for our children too ...

It's not hard.

When children are taught they learn that a letter has 2 sounds: its name and its sound.

Eg Mr Tee is the name, tu is the sound. (simplistic explanation)

Very early on they ought to know the differences.

The term relate does not mean read. It means understand why one is spelled the way that it is, or psalm, or knee or why we say say and saying but said, or why the word read is both an irregular verb and a past participle and the word jump is not.

These things are not commonly understood. That doesn't mean that they can't be found out if anyone is interested enough. But such knowledge is not commonplace.