Sorry, another reading one... how to stop DD from guessing

[Pozzled]

DD1 is in reception. Her reading has really taken off recently - her school don't use bookbands but she's somewhere around green level. The problem is that she is starting to guess unfamiliar words from the context rather than sounding out. Whenever she makes a mistake, I get her to use her phonics, but how can I get her to do this automatically? More phonics practice? Reading words out of context? Harder books so that she has to 'sound out' more often?

(Don't suggest I ask her teacher- the school would be quite happy for her to use mixed methods. I'm not.)

I agree - why would you limit children until they do?

My daughter has shown some interest in Welsh, but at the moment I think it's just amusement in the fact that I used to speak it. I'm not sure how she'll react to speaking it herself. But we'll see.

Yes, it amuses 7 year old ds.

There's no equivalent that I know of of the ll sound, but supposing you can get around that it's

"chl"-an-ich-are

<a class="break-all" href="http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130401151715/www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/TEV_A4.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130401151715/www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/TEV_A4.pdf

reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/voc/voc_what.php

It's a while since I spoke any now. But I always remember there being a few real initial difficulties like dd and ll, but once they'd been explained and you'd a reasonable grasp of them they were no more trouble. None of my very large family could speak Welsh, except me, but they could all pronounce the place names. I seem to remember things getting hairy, if you'll pardon the pun, around the mutations like the nasal mutation.

If my girls show any real interest, and half our family is Welsh, so they might, I'll show them the long word, and if that doesn't put them off for life I'll blow the dust of my first Welsh books for them.

All of this resonates for me too... DD in reception at an "outstanding" infant school, who proclaimed that they teach reading using jolly phonics & letters & sounds at the parent reading do. Failing to mention that they have relatively few phonic books or that they explicitly teach children to guess from pictures etc. I queried the head on this, including asking how they did in last years phonics test ... about 30% passed, all explained with a big smile as it was the best readers who struggled and the ones lower down the scheme who did best .

Given that the average year 1 readers are on green - turquoise, & the best (all 2 of them this year at least) were on white a month ago it doesn't seem logical to me that these "best" readers would suddenly forget all their previous great phonics teaching. I realise last year was a different cohort but I doubt there were 20 or so free readers.

No I suspect it was the dire phonics teaching in the first place, like the other week ... here are some tricky words for you to read children ... including 'on', 'and'; and wait for it, 'went'. The teacher, I kid you not, highlighted the letter n in the word went and said here's the tricky letter . Or the lesson focussing on words with the /or/ sound, except none of the 20 or so words on the sheet had the /or/ sound in them, for example one word was work. Many of the words were or spellings making the /er/ sound. As if that wasn't bad enough the teacher, as it dawned on her reading out the first few words said "well you might not be able to hear the /or/ sound, but it is in there". Where is the WTF icon?

In the first half term I was told DD was being overtaken by other readers due to my insistence of sticking with phonics & not teaching her to learn the tricky words / key words that were beyond the level of code taught as whole words or letting her guess. Wow, so that told me what the school thought of my crazy insistence of teaching DD to sound out new words.

So I chose to teach DD the code required to read the non phonics books & she whizzed up the bands, and up & up. Going in as a parent helper I felt like crying as other children scanned the pictures to guess words like fire engine & windscreen wipers in the pink band books.

The other day I printed off last years phonics test put in on the table (face down to read later) & turned around to hear a minute later DD excitedly start to read out the words. I went with it, she scored 38 & the two she got wrong were not unexpected to me (gi & au, both code she is not secure with quite yet, like the soft 'c' words too, all these "get her" occasionally).

So despite my best efforts and her incredible success (she's in reception, not quite 5 & on gold band) DD, at times, uses context to guess. So when she reads frosty instead of foggy I just put my finger there or say, look at that one again. Fair enough, she's enjoying the story etc, a bit of it is fine. Sometimes she hardly does it other times more so. School do no phonic work with her over and above the equivalent of phase 3 & 4 of letters & sounds. So no split vowels, no soft c or g, no au, and so on.

So what I really need help with is this complex code. I am so tired of saying, ah, well in this word, these letters are spelling this sound. I need more help. So for example words like buried, aunt, curious, view, veil, afterwards & sew, all seem to have, well I think rare code? I'm a hopeless speller so this is not exactly my comfort zone! But hardest of all are the polysyllabic words with split vowel spellings in them, deceiving for example. Should I let her read less and do my own phonics lessons (but what format would be best) as otherwise I worry guessing, or wanting me to sound out for her, will start becoming the norm?

Anyway, as must be obvious, I've been wanting to get all this off my chest for a long time - sincere apologies for the essay, perhaps I'll win the booby prize for the longest post on MN.

I'm afraid your story doesn't surprise me tiredbutnotweary, although it does make me very angry that some teachers are so badly equipped with knowledge and resources to teach effectively.
All these years after the Rose review of reading and universities and schools still haven't trained teachers to teach phonics!

Someone has just directed me to this thread and I have taken the time to read all the messages to give me a proper understanding of the thread's development.

I hope my 'intrusion' will be taken in the spirit in which it is intended. Some people, however, may well consider that I'm lecturing but I am really just trying to be informative and helpful.

First of all, children are very different with different backgrounds and experiences and they can 'learn' to read and spell through different routes. However, we have plenty of research and practical evidence that routes such as 'whole word learning by shape' and 'mixed methods which involve multi-cueing guessing strategies' can be extremely damaging to a lot of learners. This, as maizie has pointed out, may not be evident to infant teachers because children read books with obvious texts and themes and with lots of pictures in the main.

The subject of 'dyslexia' raised its head - and no-one thought to mention that 'dyslexia' (difficulties at word level for reading and spelling) can be caused by the very methods and experiences of young learners - it is not necessarily something which children are 'born with' although there are traits that children inherit within families.

One of the most worrying aspects of the complexities of the English spelling system is the failure of the educational system to establish 'the alphabetic code' through a clear visual aid. This is a failure as evidenced by this thread - there are people contributing to this thread who have a better and quicker grasp of the nature of the English alphabetic code - the patterns of sounds linked to letters and letter groups - and they have a more organised ability to list the words which fall within these patterns, such as the 'ou' words where 'ou' is code for the /u/ sound as in 'cousin'.

When an adult is already literate and has picked up the ability to read and spell through home and school experiences and 'deduced' the alphabetic codee for themselves, it is almost impossible to put oneself into the shoes of a beginner who may struggle to pick up the code. Sir Jim Rose in his Final Report of the independent review said that children should not be left to "ferret out" the alphabetic code for themselves. I suggest that that is probably what the vast majority of literate adults in the UK have actually done - but without even realising it.

As adults, when we need to read new, longer and more challenging words, virtually all of us (but not all of us) will apply some form of phonics where this is turning recognisable parts and chunks of words - usually from left to right - into sounds to give some reasonable pronunciation of the new word. The pronunciation may not be perfectly 'correct' by a general understanding, but we may even need to be told as adults what that correct pronunciation would be if the word was outside of our spoken vocabulary.

Without some form of phonics (print to sound for reading), how else would new words be 'read'?

The trouble is, then, that most of the teaching profession itself fall into the category of children who were able to "ferret out" the code - meaning they often apply the code subconsciously for reading and spelling - so they don't realise it - and as they have not had childhood experiences of being taught the alphabetic code to the level of the systematic approach which is being recommended nowadays, they may be unconvinced of the importance of teaching phonics thoroughly and systematically.

However, some of you are bringing up various 'for instances' with which I have a lot of sympathy. Someone said dyslexic children need 'more time'. Too right (and not just 'dyslexic' children) - but there has become a bit of an established 'myth' around how much time to spend on phonics - that is, 15 or 20 minutes per day. This is rubbish. Some children need much longer - but actually under the heading of 'phonics teaching', a lot more should be going on (in my opinion and experience). Also, some children need more repetition to embed the learning - so what does 'little and often' look like in your average school and for all the children but according to their individual needs?

For some children, 'once a day' is not at all sufficient. This is why teachers' practice and working in partnership with parents is so important - but also the design of resources and the accompanying guidance.

Let's focus on the integration of phonics with the wider curriculum. There have been some good practical comments on this thread - from parents and teachers - about simply pointing out the phonics within any type of book at any time, "In this word, these letters are code for the /.../ sound."

I think this is a hugely important part of the approach towards phonics and for the teaching of reading and spelling, for the wider curriculum and wider reading experience and for differentiating for children who really can assimilate phonics much quicker than others.

So, I call this the 'two-pronged' approach - both formal application of 'systematic' and 'incidental' phonics teaching. But this is not an established approach in terms of the 'official' route - which, currently, relies only on teaching a 'basic code' first (all the sounds and mainly one spelling) followed by the 'advanced' or 'extended' code. By introducing correspondences systematically, one can then build up a cumulative word, sentence and text level bank of material so that children can apply their current knowledge about the code and their level of blending skills for reading (and segmenting skills for spelling).

This is very restrictive, however, and I suggest that we need to move to a two-pronged approach understood nationally and internationally as the 'understanding' of phonics provision.

mrz may have some sympathy with this type of approach because in the method called 'linguistic phonics', there is a process of introducing 'alternative spellings for the sounds' in larger groups than just introducing them one at a time in a constantly linear way.

Phonics, however, should be underpinned by using the charts I mentioned above. I find a huge amount of errors in academic books being written about synthetic phonics, in the actual commercial phonics programmes material and in people's basic understanding about the notation for sounds and their relationship with the letters and letter groups. I provide a range of Alphabetic Code Charts free to download at www.alphabeticcodecharts.com and I bang on about their 'need' ALL the time as anyone on this forum who knows me will testify! But they are THE STARTING POINT.

Further, I use them with the pupils themselves - right from Reception - and this empowers both the adults to teach any phonics at any time -and for the pupils who get to see, and eventually understand, the bigger picture.

How on earth can we teach an alphabetic code without providing a proper alphabetic code chart? But that is exactly what is happening everywhere. I haven't even managed to persuade all my phonics associates of the need to have 'the chart' as the starting point! By the way, no Alphabetic Code Chart can be definitive - and they can have different structures according to their exact role or associated with specific programmes.

The next visual diagram which I believe to be extremely helpful to explain the dynamics between being able to decode the words on the page (the technical skill) with the understanding of the words that have been lifted off the page is the Simple View of Reading diagram.

This, was suggested by Rose and adopted by the UK government as a 'useful conceptual framework'. And it really is - but for teachers and for parents in my opinion.

People on this thread have also touched upon English as an additional language - and many of our teachers are now faced with large percentages of children where English is not the first language or may even be a brand new language.

So, there is a lovely dance to be had between notions of word decoding and comprehension - but the bottom line is that if a child decodes a word within the child's spoken language, comprehension is likely to be automatic.

A learner with more than one language will need to be 'plotted' on the Simple View of Reading diagram for both the 'English' language and the 'mother tongue'. So, an individual may be good at technically decoding the words on the page - but may not understand them because the level of spoken language is not there for one reason or another - and there are many different reasons to explain the lack of comprehension.

Sometimes a teacher comments about a child 'reading Harry Potter' and 'not understanding it' therefore 'barking at print'. When I ask whether the same child would understand Harry Potter if an adult had read the book to the child as a story, the response may be 'yes' or 'no' but there is a different level of analysis to be had for each child/learner.

I highly recommend, therefore, for parents and teachers the two diagrams here to help unpick the profile of readers and writers:

www.phonicsinternational.com/The_Simple_View_of_Reading_model.pdf

I'm so sorry to bang on for so long - but I just wish we were all sharing a cup of tea and able to have a face to face conversation.

There have been so many good comments on the thread - with accompanying examples of real children and experiences - and I have had suggestions and comments to make about them all.

You see, the current guidance of a one-pronged systematic synthetic phonics approach does not have all the answers - and the current lack of teacher-training about the need to establish alphabetic code charts for teachers and learners alike does not have common uptake - so there is a very varied picture of phonics adoption across the land - just like the original poster reported.

Warm regards.

Debbie

PS: We need a Welsh alphabetic code chart. If anyone who speaks Welsh and can read in Welsh and would be interested in devising a Welsh chart, please contact me.

How crazy that schools teach any country's language without the code for the language!

Would that happen at Spy School?