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?

The other way around. In phonics cat is cu-ah-tuh

and in L&S it's see-ay-tee

but then it's not really see-ay-tee at all, it's just cat.

If you're asked to spell it, then in L&S it is see-ay-tee.

The kids I teach who learnt by l&s struggle more with spelling on the whole. Op I'd be interested in finding out more from the report writer about why they recommended that way

Some fortunate individuals work out for themselves the relationships between spoken sounds and written symbols but that isn't the Look & Say method of teaching reading.

Look & Say relies on memorising whole words by repeated exposure to a small number of words, new words are introduced slowly to aid memorisation. Usually children are given word cards to memorise and when they can read the words they are given a book containing those words and the child is given a new set of words to memorise. The Ginn scheme for example starts with "look" ... all 8 pages contain the single word "look" book 2 moves onto "look here" ...The drawback is that there are roughly 250000 words in English. Phonics plays no part in the Look & Say method.

Babies I'd be interested too, but unfortunately ed phsycs aren't very accessible. That's one reason I posted here.

Vinegar no worries. I'm finding it all very interesting.

"The other way around. In phonics cat is cu-ah-tuh

and in L&S it's see-ay-tee" no in L&S it is just the word "cat" and phonics is never cu-ah-tuh

www.dyslexics.org.uk/main_method.htm

Thanks for that link and the explanation. I think I wasn't expressing myself well with the second stage of phonics thing. I guess what I mean is most readers will get to a stage where they recognise the whole word, although that is an interesting fact about the research showing that words are still "sounded out" but just at speed.

I went to a very progressive 80s primary and have no idea what 'method' if any was used, although thinking about it I'm fairly sure I was reading before going to school so I will have to ask my Mum what she did!

Actually reading more of that link, pretty sure I was "taught" using "whole language" which seems to basically mean let them work it out themselves! Seems a miracle any of us learnt to read! (My spelling is still not great, although fine for most purposes, due to the amount I read as a kid I imagine, and I still don't know my times tables despite having A level maths!)

Unfortunately being a good reader does not guarantee a good speller.

Just got to the bit where MN is quoted, lmao!

Absolutely mrz I think I just read enough and presumably absorbed enough about how certain words "should" look, to cover any obvious deficiencies in my spelling. Still rubbish at ie/ei and things like that.

Well, no, L&S isn't completely random. It assumes that once you recognise a word you recognise it. And in that respect, no doubt it's correct. Phonics teaches you to build a word out of component sounds, (regardless of how those sounds are spelled.) L&S was invented in the 1700s in France to teach deaf people to read and phonics couldn't be used because the pupils were deaf.

Correct, several branches of it do not. But some do.

My elder son has AS, we spent all of reception and half of year one trying to teach him to read using phonics. I tried and tried to tell school that this would never work for him as he is a visual learner, oral learning is by far the weakest. Eventually after him making no progress for 18 months they agreed to use whole word recognition and his progress has been astounding, he has whizzed through the book bands and coming up to the end of year two he is on the gold book band. He does however have an exceptionally good memory, because of this his spelling is great.

My NT son is 14 months younger and has learned to read using phonics. The process of learning to read has been much simpler. I can see the stronger he becomes with reading the less he applies his phonic knowledge. His spelling is also much, much worse as he spells everything absolutely phonetically. Just my experience if it helps.

yay another thread for learnandsay to take over

My DD started learning phonics when she was 18 months because DS was learning Jolly Phonics at nursery and she was copying him.

However, I am a SEN TA and have two children in the class I am TA for who do not get phonics at all but have learnt up to 20 words by just memorising them. This has completely thrown me and I don't know how they'll progress next year. They can't possibly memorise every word for the rest of their lives

well, bob, I guess you'll just have to figure it out then

Figure out something that people who have studied it for years haven't figured out? Ok then

Well, you could start by finding out how the people who have learned successfully to read without using phonics, like me, have done it. It's not rocket science, any more than the fact that not everybody who crosses the road gets run over is rocket science.

"It assumes that once you recognise a word you recognise it." because assuming is a very effective teaching method ... "Well, you could start by finding out how the people who have learned successfully to read without using phonics, like me, have done it."
Learnandsay I honestly don't think there is anyone like you

The whole VAK learning style theory has been discredited in recent years as learners rely on different /combination of "senses" depending on the task ...my LSA keeps saying the child they support is a visual learner and I keep asking if that is why he responds best to music

Well, you could start by finding out how the people who have learned successfully to read without using phonics, like me, have done it. It's not rocket science, any more than the fact that not everybody who crosses the road gets run over is rocket science.

But you haven't, L&S. However much you claim otherwise, you do seem to have a clear understanding of phonics, which leads me to believe that you did not, in fact, learn to read every word by sight. However, if it is the case, how do you manage to read words you encounter for the first time?

When DD1 was born 20 yrs ago I knew nothing about phonics, we did Peter and jane type books and lots of "real" books where we pointed out the words. She was reading by the time she started school, the phonics at school gave her skills to tackle unfamiliar words.

DD2 - did Jolly Phonics at school. Took a long time to learn to read and her spelling (age 10h is atrocious- sort of phonetically correct if you can decode it!

DD3 is 5, she is doing Read Write Inc phonics. She knows all the phonics sounds, but cannot "hear" the word when she sounds it out. She brings key words home the she is supposed to sound out and say, bit we have noticed that she is memorising them instead. Eg she will pick up "and" and say it, but when she was sounding out she'd say ah-nn-d, and guess "had" or something like that

Both have a place but wondering if look-say to get started/confident then phonics to build on this is better

That kind of mixed methods teaching would be fine if we didn't know that it fails around 20% of children - yes, 1 in 5.

Would you care to elaborate, Feenie?

It's probably even more than one in five but that is the figure extrapolated from the KS2 English SATs results over the past decade. The old National Literacy Strategy (mixed methods; some phonics but predominately Look & Say) did initially pull National results up to about 80% of children achieving L4 at the end of KS2 but the figure has never gone significantly higher.

It is my experience (as I work with 'struggling readers' at KS3) that even a L4 does not guarantee that a child is a competent reader. Indeed, from my experience of doing some staff training over the years, not even the possession of a degree guarantees that a person is a competent reader! By 'competent reader' I mean a child or adult who is able to confidently work out what any unfamiliar word 'says', particularly multi-syllable words.

It is one thing for a child to be able to memorise a few hundred words at an early age and so be able to read the 'Look and Say' reading schemes which are specially written in order to both 'teach' (by endless repetition) and reinforce the learning of a very restricted vocabulary, but early 'success' is no guarantee that a child will develop reading competence. In the USA, where Look & Say is even more firmly entrenched than in the UK, there is a recognised phenomenom known as the 'grade 3 slump' where children who have appeared to be learning to read successfully fail to progress any further. Because, however you might try to justify them, Look and Say methods do not teach a child how to independently work out unfamiliar words. The children who are successful are mostly those who manage to intuit the phonics for themselves.

bobthebear

I would suggest that even the children who you think 'can't get phonics at all' actually could 'get it' with lots of practice and effective teaching. If they are capable of memorising whole words and stringing them together to form sentences then they should be equally capapble of learning letter/sound correspondences and stringing them together to form words. It may be very slow going initially but once they have 'got it' the rest will follow.

It is worth making the effort because if they never learn to use phonics they will effectively be disabled readers for life. Children who don't 'get it' are much more rare than is commonly believed.