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?

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

I have used both for remediation. Look & Say doesn't work. Phonics does...

Maizie, I think both housemum and feenie were talking about mixed methods, that is starting with whole word memorisation then moving on to phonics, as per the Ladybird scheme, for example. I don't think anyone would disagree that Look and Say methods alone don't teach children to work out unfamiliar words.

For your remedial pupils there would seem to be a time between KS1 and when they reach you when they don't seem to have been taught very much at all.

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.

While I would agree that those who don't 'get it' and continue not to 'get it' beyond the early stages are rare, I don't think your analogy really works because you don't have to blend the individual words into a sentence, the words still remain separate entities. Whereas the letter sounds have to be very much blended together to form the words and there are some people, albeit few, who cannot do this. The thing is if you can't do something, you can't really practice it either. Of course, and certainly in OP's case, you can never know unless you try.

I don't think your analogy really works because you don't have to blend the individual words into a sentence, the words still remain separate entities.

I actually agree with you to a certain extent BUT, the fact that a child can memorise a few symbol to sound relationships (written word to spoken word) indicates that there is no apparent physiological reason why they cannot memorise the phoneme to symbol relationships.

I appreciate that the hard bit is the blending, particularly if the child is not taught to articulate 'pure' sounds (my kids very commonly say /luh/ for 'l', when it should be more like /ul/, /ru/ for 'r' (should be more like /er/) and /suh/ for 's'. Trying to blend distorted sounds like this makes it incredibly difficult to 'hear' the word because what they are producing when they blend isn't the word. Also, few people seem to use the 'progressive' blending technique (blending two consecutive sounds, getting them 'secure' then blending in the next one etc) which is far more helpful for children who find blending difficult.

I'm not sure if it applies still but Ed Psychs were usually teachers before they trained as Ed Psychs. Which means that many of them cling to the methods of teaching reading in which they were trained (Look & Say for many decades) and the myths about phonics teaching which accompanied their teacher training. Could be that this EP is just perpetrating a myth...

www.spelfabet.com.au/about-spelfabet/

Maizie, I think both housemum and feenie were talking about mixed methods, that is starting with whole word memorisation then moving on to phonics, as per the Ladybird scheme

I was - and so was Maizie when she kindly stepped in to answer your question.

L&S,

Like you, I learned to read before 'phonics' was explicitly used to teach reading - but it doesn't mean that i don't use phonics. It just means that the phonic knowledge I worked out through exposure to many, many look and say words was not made explicit in the teaching that I was given.

I was one of the lucky 4 out of 5, who was able to work the phonic code out for myself despite not being formally taught it. No genuinely fluent reader could ONLY have used look and say methods, otherwise every time they came across an unfamiliar word that could not be broken down into familiar ones, then the ONLY way they could possibly read it would either by a) being told by someone what it said or b) looking up the pronounciation in a dictionary. Instead, what these readers do is apply self-taught phonics 'ah, that word pantechnicon - that will be 'pant', 'e as in egg', could be 'ch as in china or ck as in technical- probably the latter because the word has the same 'tech' combination in it', 'n', 'i as in itch' and 'con as in contrast' or some similar justification. If using 'pure' look and say, the reader could not use that reasoning process - it only happens because the reader has worked out their own phonic rules. Explkicit teaching of phonic rules is far more efficient and successful!

It was really interesting seeing DS - a self-taught pre-school reader - then be taught phonics eplicitly. Although it LOOKED as if he had learned to read through whole-word memorisation, the subsequent phonics teaching flushed out the fact that he had simply worked out the phonics code for himself, through the kind of analogies I gave above. Having observed that, it became so much clearer to me that even someone who is not taught phonics explicitly when learning to read does actually use phonics to read in practice especially when reading a complex text.

Having observed that, it became so much clearer to me that even someone who is not taught phonics explicitly when learning to read does actually use phonics to read in practice especially when reading a complex text.

I agree with you completely. Unfortunately a very significant number of beginning readers aren't able to work out the phonics for themselves and one never knows which ones can't until they start to fail. By which time they (and, perhaps, their parents) have gone through some completely unnecessary trauma over the business of learning to read

Maizie, I discovered Jolly Phonics when doing some remedial work with a little boy I was nannying for at the time. What surprised me most, wasn't the fact that he went from pink level at the start of year 2, to white level at the end, but the change in his behaviour that went with it. He went from a very angry little boy who would lash out at others to a happy child who was a complete joy to be around. 'Unnecessary trauma' just about describes it.

He was fortunate that struggling with reading didn't affect his self-esteem long term. I suspect many others aren't so lucky.

We have had specific examples on mn of people who've had trauma using phonics and turned to L&S for relief.

do we?

There's one here www.mumsnet.com/Talk/primary/a1655430-Can-anyone-suggest-a-non-phonics-learning-to-read-scheme

trauma?

The poster explains her problems in the thread.

Maizie, exactly. I would never recommend leaving a child to pick up phonics 'by themselves' through using look and say or any of the 'controlled vocabulary' schemes that use mixed methods. Both as a teacher and as a parent, I am an enthusiastic proponant of phonics (in fact I discovered that DS could genuinely read - as opposed to recite known books from his capacious memory - when I acted on his obsession with words and letters and bought the JP Teacher's Guide [it was before I did my PGCE]. He read me thie instructions for the teacher on the oppostie page when I showed him a page meant to introduce the 'a' sound.....)

I also acknowledge that phonics is often taught badly, not really believed in by schools / individual teachers or undermined by the use of non-phonic reading schemes in the early stages. That can give a false impression that 'my child can't learn to read using phonics, we have to use look and say' - they haven't learned to read through badly taught phonics and through being asked to read non-phonic books from the earliest stages...but that is a criticism of the implementation of phonics teaching, not of the validity of synthetic phonics as a method for learning to read.

yes her problem was she had read Michael Rosen's blog

We shouldn't be knocking people for having problems.

I also acknowledge that phonics is often taught badly, not really believed in by schools / individual teachers or undermined by the use of non-phonic reading schemes in the early stages. That can give a false impression that 'my child can't learn to read using phonics, we have to use look and say' - they haven't learned to read through badly taught phonics and through being asked to read non-phonic books from the earliest stages...but that is a criticism of the implementation of phonics teaching, not of the validity of synthetic phonics as a method for learning to read.

^This.

Although in the case I was talking about it was 2000 so 'searchlights' were very much in vogue. The problem seemed to stem from the fact that no one had bothered to tell him that you could read the letters and blend the sounds together to make words.

Actually OP, he did have significant problems with his speech and forming sounds. I don't think its necessarily true to say that that will cause big enough problems with phonics that you would need to teach using a look and say method.

Well, I never realised it was such a contentious issue! Thanks everybody, that's certainly given me a lot to think about and digest.

ApplePippa,

I've re-read your OP again. I am NOT an expert, but I have had pupils with speech difficulties who have learned to read using phonics. From what you say, your child's issue is with speech production, not sound recognition. Is that right?

If he is able to discriminate sounds, then there is no more reason to suppose that he should have difficulty with the link between the letter 'a' and the sound (in terms of understanding) than the link between the shape on the page that makes the word 'cat' and the spoken word "cat".

The difficulty may be in 'blending' the sounds together to make a word - because that IS different from simply saying the word "cat" when seeing the word shape on the page. He may need someone else to speak the sounds clearly for blending so that he can make the word out of the sounds that he hears IYSWIM. However, it would seem - to me at least - that learning through good-quality phonics teaching with the rest of the class, with this specific support, would be a much better option than it being proposed that he should be taught through a wholly different method. The latter would need wholly different teaching and might achieve only a limited result in terms of ability to read unfamiliar words.

Mrz could probably give more detailed information, as she's a SENCo and Literacy person whereas I am just thinking things through logically in terms of the processes needed in order for a child to learn to read using phonics.

Actually OP, he did have significant problems with his speech and forming sounds.

Speech therapy for children with articulation problems is always at the level of the phoneme! I know that speech therapists have criticised SP programmes for introducing phonemes in a different order from the order in which they teach them; they are approaching it from an ease of articulation angle, whereas SP programmes are looking at maximising the number of words a child could decode at any stage, but it should be, on the whole, a fairly simple matter to move from oral production and blending of phonemes to learning the correspondences for reading.

Though I can see that there might be a problem for an autistic child in having to accept that a letter or letters may spell more than one sound and that sounds may be spelled more than one way.

teacher yes, that's right, he can recognise sounds correctly. He can also produce most sounds independently, but struggles with blending in his speech.

Sorry, cross posted with teacherwith2kids. I think we've said much the same thing...

The difficulty may be in 'blending' the sounds together to make a word..

I think that they do this orally in Sp therapy because the next step up from articulating phonemes is putting them together to articulate whole words. We have had a few children from the local Speech and Language unit and the one thing they can do is blend.