Learning to read using Look and Say

[ApplePippa]

DS is due to start reception in Sept. He is autistic, with significant speech delay - he has only in the last few months started to put single words together together. His speech is also extremely unclear and his sound production very poor. His understanding however is way ahead of his speech.

The ed psychologist thinks that given the level of his speech, he may well struggle with learning to read using phonics. She has recommended in her report that he is taught using Look and Say.

From googling this, it appears that this is a method using whole word recognition rather than decoding using phonics. I can see definite pros and cons in using this approach.

Does anyone have any experience of either teaching or having a child learn to read using Look and Say?

My daughter learned to read using look and say. She was reading books far in advance of what she is reading now at school when she was in kindergarten. But, clearly, now she will read any book whereas back then she would only read the books she knew.

Well, to be fair to her, she would be willing to learn to read any other book. But it would take time to work through a new book.

Learnandsay that sums up the pros and cons very neatly . I can see it being a great method for getting DS started with reading, but not sure it would be so great in the longer term.

I guess I didn't realise whether or not that might have been a handicap or not back then. (But since it was pre-Reception, it probably wasn't.) I would write new books for her. So I always got the impression that she was progressing. Having said that, her rate of progression then was doubtless faster than her current in-school-rate (out of school rate is another topic) albeit from a base of 0. But the standard wisdom is that there comes a tipping point at which acquiring new reading skills under L&S becomes much much more expensive in terms of effort than acquiring them under phonics. Maybe my daughter worked that out for herself because one day she switched to phonics.

My daughters have both used Peter and Jane books which work on look and say. I tried to do phonics with both of them too as I wanted them to have an all round ability. DD1 struggled with phonics - now has clear dyslexia signs and irlen syndrome (visual processing problems) but has worked hard to overcome her problems with phonics and reads exceptionally well for her age now. As she struggled with phonics she literally just learned to recognise the words and by doing that was on book band 5/6 before she started school.
my DD2 isn't at school yet but is learning with both. She is good at decoding for her age I think but she has also learned a lot of words by sight (she loves Peter and Jane books)

my 2 both recognise the words rather than the story and positioning of the words. i think that is what you need to watch if using this method. however it does sound like this might be best for him with his needs.

I'm totally unqualified to comment but vaguely interested in the topic, but how do you actually "teach" using this method. Is it literally pattern recognition ie look at a written word/symbol/hieroglyph enough times and you associate it with the word? Do you use flash cards? How do they learn to recognise the words?

(Must admit phonics appeals more to my own "learn from first principles" instinct but I'm no teacher).

I guess learn & say would also be like the second step of reading using phonics? As in, you don't sound out every letter of every word once they become familiar. (I can see this happening already with my toddler DS.) So it's kind of skipping the "working it out" phase to try and get to the "familiar" phase. Is that right-ish?

Oops look and say not learn and say !

There are lots of methods from the very simple, cat is the word cat. You show the word and say cat - (to the complicated rhyme & shape recognition/spelling)

I didn't start with cat and dog, but

pee
wee
dee

moo
boo
poo

written on A5 paper spread over the floor and I would call out a word and my daughter would fetch it. I think we got to over 100 words that way over several months before we gave up. The point of giving up was when my daughter insisted on writing out the Five Little Monkeys song in this fashion which required the floor space of the whole flat. At that point I thought there has to be a better way.

yes I think that is kind of how it works vinegardrinker. I didn't actively teach them at all with it, we just had a couple of the peter and jane books and they liked them and picked up the words. I think some children just 'do' pick up the words. a lot of children don't. how you would teach them I am not sure, repetition I suppose, just more of it. Look and Say alone didn't work for many people hence them moving on to phonics but phonics alone doesn't always work for everyone either. mixed methods doesn't work for some people because it is confusing, for others it gives them more methods to draw on and they adapt to it well. Look and Say alone can lead to guessing with reading, ie they look at the pattern of the letters in the word but not at the actual letters in the right order and just produce the word they think it is but it doesn't in all children.

I think all kids just have different needs and abilities and what works for one doesn't work for all.

As I say we did phonics too, we always read to them anyway and they knew the alphabet phonetically and by name before we showed them the Peter and Jane books. We started by spelling out words like c a t etc as you would with just teaching with phonics. both mine just happen to have been good at memorising words.

That's interesting, thanks both. I guess some words that are very common eg child's own name will be picked up by recognition by the majority of children with no "teaching" as such? (My DS "reads" his own name, Mummy, Daddy, Nana, all the kids at nursery's names etc like this, despite most of the names being nonsense phonetically. I think he does it mainly by initial letter + pattern recognition, as he is only really starting to "get" blending. I wouldn't actually call it reading but I guess in a sense it is).

It just seems, as you say learnandsay a LOT of work if you are going to cover every single word they will ever come across, with enough repetitions!

"I guess learn & say would also be like the second step of reading using phonics?" not at all VinegarDrinker!
Look and Say relies on memorising whole words by sight by constant repetition - flash card and repetitive format, think Biff & Chip highly predictable text, often children were encouraged to learn by the shape of words

Er, yes, it would be! Suffice it to say that if you use such a method you put a lot of store in the works of people who promote the Dolch (roughly 220) word list as vital and words beyond it as optional, than you do in those who remind you of how many million words are actually possible!

yes exactly - an enormous amount of work in many cases and it doesn't leave them any skills to tackle unknown words, they often have to use context to work things out but that isn't a bad skill to have.

however some children just really take to this method much better. like you say both methods really end up being used in general reading it is just usually phonics first.

the mistakes they might make with it are things like split and spilt where they are looking at the pattern/shape of the word.

IMO you need both to be a fluent, confident reader.

Did you read the rest of the post? Children, or adults, who learn to read phonetically don't continue to sound out every letter of every word forever, do they?! So at some point that word must be assimilated in their brain as being immediately recognised as X? Which is the stage the look and say method is trying to jump in at?

Yes, DS can "read" his own name, and a handful of other words, just because he sees them all the time.

Ironically, the speech therapist uses Jolly Phonics pictures with him, but that is all about getting him to produce the sounds rather than learning to read. It's been great for his letter recognition though!

Sorry, x posts, that was @ mrsz

No, L&S isn't trying to jump anywhere. Of course people who are familiar with words don't sound them out any more than people who know the way to work look it up on a map. The two approaches are fundamentally different. One uses sounds as components of words and the other uses letters. (Some branches of L&S do also use sounds/phonics, but not all do.)

There will be critics but do what you think is best. There's pros and cons of all methods (DD read fluently long before being taught phonics, now uses a mixture of several different methods).

Yes VinegarDrinker I read the whole post ...
"I guess learn & say would also be like the second step of reading using phonics? As in, you don't sound out every letter of every word once they become familiar. (I can see this happening already with my toddler DS.) So it's kind of skipping the "working it out" phase to try and get to the "familiar" phase. Is that right-ish?"
no that isn't rightish ...as current brain research indicates that good readers process every sound in words but so fast they don't realise that they are doing so.

Funny you say that Apple - DS's speech has always been pretty clear but since he's known the phonic alphabet and understood about which words start with which letters, his pronunciation has noticeably become clearer (esp tr/ch, s/th, l/y etc).

My ASD son didn't learn phonics and was hugely disadvantaged when it came to writing

Look and Say does not use phonics Learnandsay

Happy to be corrected, mrz - but how does that work for those of us who never learned using "sounding out"? Just curious!

learnandsay when you say L&S teaches using sounds rather than letters, what do you mean?

(Sorry for jumping in OP and feel free to ignore my amateur attempts at educational theory!)