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?

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

Cross posted with you now, ApplePippa!

They're not going to leave him struggling with oral blending for speech, though, are they? It seems really illogical that although he will have to learn to blend orally for speaking the EP is recommending whole word teaching for reading. As I said earlier, phonics for reading follows on very neatly from learning the 'mechanics' of speech.

Maizie, yes, the more I'm reading here here the more the EP's recommendation seems a bit bizarre, at the very least until phonics has been tried.

It is only a recommendation though, and it will be interesting to get the school's view on this.

A child with speech delay and unclear speech is likely to find phonics tricky (as I know from being a voluntary helper at a club for people with learning difficulties for the past 32 years).

Many children learned to read very successfully with mainly 'look and say' (Ladybird Jane and John books), although they inevitably learned phonics as well when they began learning to write.

As adults, we all read by 'the look and say' method, not by decoding (except for the odd totally unfamiliar word). Many children learn that way too, although they no doubt cannot fail to notice that most consonant letters have stable sounds (b, ca/a/o, d, f, ga/o/u, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, qu, r, [s], t, v, w, x, z) and so use phonics as well.

Nobody learns to read English by phonics alone, because of phonic inconsistencies like 'on - only, once, other...through, tough, cough...
man - many, manger'.

It's not either or. And for some children 'look and say' works better for learning to read than pure phonics does.
Masha Bell

How many young child with unclear speech have you taught to read using any method masha?

Regardless, what's she's saying about the necessity of sight learning some words regardless of the method by which you learn to read is correct.

Regardless of what you think learnandsay there very few words that contain unique phonic representation that would necessitate learning them.
There are however children in every school with speech delay who learn to read using phonics

Well, phonicsy people do have this ridiculous idea about learning just half the word and having the other half made out of recognisable phonemes. But for all practical purposes if you have to learn part of a word you have to learn it all.

L&S,

So a child cannot read ANY of the word 'guitar' because they have to learn it all, in your world? Or any of the word 'yacht' because the middle phoneme is spelt in an unusual way?

In practice, children sound out and and sometimes have to be told that that 'ui' is an unusual phonic representation and encodes the sound in this case - or encode it gitar and have to be told about the ui. Niether mean that the child has to learn the word as a whole befoire they can encode or decode it - ust the unusual grapheme / phoneme correspondance. Even in 'one', the 'n' is entirely regular.

If you have to remember that in the word guitar the ui is pronounced i then you have to remember the word guitar in order to remember which word requires that spelling of the sound.

Not really - it's also found in biscuit, guilty, build, builder, building, etc.

There is at least one word in English in which the c is pronounced ch
But it's pretty useless knowing that if you don't know what that word is.

Do you mean cello or vermicelli learnandsay? (both are Italian words actually )

Do you mean cello or vermicelli learnandsay? (both are Italian words actually)

And if children are taught that letters are 'code' for sounds then they will understand that the 'c' is Italian 'code' for /ch/ far more easily than if you take the masha/L&S approach of 'it's all a big muddle and you just have to learn it without understanding why sound spellings vary so much' (or, 'without understanding at all that letters represent sounds')

There are far too many foreign words in English to specify them all to emerging readers. The English language is brimming with them. English makes no attempt to re-spell foreign words. (That's one of its problems.)

Unless of course the words come from a non-Latin script.

There are far too many foreign words in English to specify them all to emerging readers

How many emergent readers have you tried it with, learnandsay?

Probably about as many as you, every foreign word in English, hmmm.

So was your mystery word cello learnandsay?

Yes.

I'd say it's an English word. The Italian word is violoncello.

I feel for you OP. Things like what your child's ed psych have said make me feel slightly cross, since (correct me if I'm wrong) your child will have not even really have done a great deal of phonics with regards to learning to read yet. Why not deal with each learning challenge as it occurs?

I think it is far to early to be making sweeping statements like this. As you say he already recognises separate sounds (which means he will hear them and be able to use them as the building blocks for words) and can reproduce them. I would have thought the next step would be to work on blending. Whatever happened to a 'graduated approach' in terms of SEN?

You can say what you like learnandsay but the word and spelling is from Italian

I didn't say it wasn't, pyjama and curry are loanwords too. But now they're English words. We don't say violoncello, but we do say cello. That's my exact point. English is brim full of loanwords.

I thought your point was that the letter represents the sound /ch/ in some words the reason being that those words are from the Italian

I actually think what this ed psych has said is bordering on discrimination since it is far too dismissive of what your child can do.

Why would anyone recommend cutting him off from phonics teaching if he is already accessing what he has been taught with regards to him being able to recognise and reproduce separate sounds?