Does anyone think phonics teaching has any harmful effects?

[housework]

I am happy to be persuaded either way but would be and would be interested to hear all views. Am thinking about dd and whether phonics has worked for her.
DD is 7, reads very well and comprehends what she is reading on the whole. She passed the Y1 phonics test getting the magic 32 so many children got. However, she's a poor speller to the extent that an Ed Psych has suggested testing for dyslexia. I'd like to do some more spelling work with her over the summer holidays. Today I did a bit of the Alpha to Omega placement test with her. She spelt crash as 'Krash' and chip as 'thip.' I let her do the next words 'splash' and 'thrush'. She spelt these correctly. With chip, I think she knew there were 'th', 'sh' and 'ch' to choose from and just picked one of them.
The above and other incidences make me wonder. Does phonics stop a child trusting their instincts? In her case, I think she is not considering how a word looks to help her spell it. She will always fall back on a phonetic spelling unless she already knows the spelling. If school had focussed more on rote learning, regular and rigorous spelling tests, would she spell better. At the moment they're all still ploughing through phonics because the failures have to re-take this year. But there are no expectations re spelling, barely any spelling tests, no words given to learn. And dd is the type that will only do the work if school have set it.
I'm just wondering where to go from here. Thanks for reading.

I don't have an issue with people feeling it's the simplest method - what I didn't follow was math who seemed to be saying it was the necessary method, which I don't believe it is.

rabbit I don't think anyone would say reading to a child, so they can see what you are reading, confuses them.

But daftdame - you did have names for every letter. For a you had ah, for b you had buh, etc, etc, and I suspect that is because you were taught that, not because your genius ears had identified that a says ah, etc, given that it doesn't always say that.... If that is no longer permitted, because a does not always say ah, etc, etc, and real letter names are not permitted, because they are too confusing, then how WOULD you have dealt with that as a child????

learnandsay obviously not the simplest for me...I would have failed at letter names but could read and write before I knew them properly.

Malenky, you learn that some spellings are phonetically fine but orthographically incorrect faster by committing the exceptional ones to memory using the letter names. Otherwise you could wait several years before the SCH and CH pronounced as K or hard C are tackled in the course of your phonics journey.

Learning s-c-h-o-o-l by rote teaches you how to spell school. It doesn't take long.

I am not saying 'learn letter sounds OR letter names' in order to learn to read or spell. I am saying that not only is it counter-productive to stick to letter sounds on their own when trying to spell, it is unlikely that children who are learning phonetically are living in some sort of alphabet vacuum where they never get exposed to the names of letters. Any claims for pure phonics wrt spelling expertise have to be taken with a grain of salt as nobody can measure how much exposure to other methods of learning spelling goes on at home and in the community. Mrz may ask a child to sound out the word 'chair' and expect to hear CH-AIR, but at home, someone's granny may spell it c-h-a-i-r when asked. No school can control that.

KCOctopus -- 'I never had any problems and was an advanced reader reading 3-4yrs above my peers, but i'm also convinced that the fact my mother read to me very very regularly and i would follow along with a finger on the words being read and i think it taught me much much more.

i do the same with my yr1 ds and i read to him daily pointing out the words with my fingers, he's already 18m ahead of his year group and his spelling is very very good'

This is how the DCs learned to read well before school. There are more ways of skinning this cat than phonics.

Rabbitstew you're welcome in my school too. My dc in reception learnt letter names in the autumn term as well as phase 1 and 2 phonics and by November were talking about digraphs - and could explain what digraph meant. Reception age children are learning new words each week if not day so it's no big deal to them. By January we were on to trigraphs and now they're spotting split digraphs all over the place. It seems to be helping enormously with spelling too.

I agree that teacher training is an issue, our local uni keeps experimenting with the amount of time in uni and school and the trainees we've had in the last couple of years have needed intensive support. No lecturer helped me with how to teach reading either- I learnt it myself from books and in school training/ mentoring. It would be fair to assume this varies enormously.

To answer the OP, bad phonics teaching is as bad as any other method that is poorly executed by poorly trained teachers and will do as much harm as inexpert teaching of maths or typing.

'Malenky, you learn that some spellings are phonetically fine but orthographically incorrect faster by committing the exceptional ones to memory using the letter names.'

No, I don't.

Why would I have to?

I learned the shapes and the sounds.

(I am dyslexic so I may be doing it wrong, mind.)

rabbit I would have been fine because I could reliably decode for the phonics test, understand what I read regarding comprehension and could spell well enough for people to understand what I had read and pass tests.

Very flattering of you but nobody has ever commented on my ears being 'genius', I have sharp hearing though,very useful for knowing what people are doing in other rooms!

Daftdame - you also say you remembered how to spell words from imagining them in print and could write before you started school. When you first started writing, did you form all your letters in the same way they were printed in books (including, eg, the letter a)? If not, then how did you know how to form them in the more normal handwritten script? Surely you had been taught a lot more than you remember, rather than picking it up naturally??? Do you really remember how you learnt to read and write before you started school?

^ I mean 'what I had written' !

Yes, I can. I do actually have some very early memories, from being a few months old (wearing a particular dress and a swinging seat).

My mother taught me to read and write. She thought it was important because she struggled at reading, learnt to read at 7yrs.

I remember the lower case 'a' annoying me. Why couldn't they print it properly?

If you are dyslexic then I suppose yes, your experience of spelling may not be that of the majority.

I don't think it can be called wrong if it works for you.

How did you deal with letters that look different depending on the font? Lower case A for instance.
How did you deal with the difference between upper and lower case letters?

"If you give letters sound names then those become their names."

"So school becomes"

"su cu hu oh oh lu"

NO! only if you haven't got a clue and most 6 year olds would know that is completely wrong

A&a are the same letter with the same letter name but can represent different sounds.
A in Amy represents the sound /ai/ but in Africa it represents the sound /a/ just as a in apron is /ai/ and a in ant is /a/.

rabbitstew you can not use sounds as names in the way learnandsay did because English has a complex orthographical system.

We only have 26 letters in the alphabet but spoken English has roughly 44 sounds (dependent on accent) so those 44 sounds can not be written with one letter always representing the same sound as in languages like Turkish as someone mentioned earlier.

In English a sound can be written with one, two, three or four letters, the sound /ai/ can be spelt in apron in train or as in weight for example.
A sound can have different spellings - see beat money he fiels Ian Amy either Steve paediatrics
The same spelling can represent different sounds bread, beat & break.

It's a complex system brought about by a long history of "borrowing" words (and spellings) from other languages but straightforward to learn if you are taught from the start and not confused by poor teaching.

Learning s-c-h-o-o-l by rote teaches you how to spell school. It doesn't take long.

agreed for some children it might not take long for others it might take weeks or months or years but there are 250000 words in the OED so how do you decide which ones to learn and which ones to ignore because you haven't got time to learn them all even if your memory could hold them all.

"Mrz may ask a child to sound out the word 'chair' and expect to hear CH-AIR, but at home, someone's granny may spell it c-h-a-i-r when"
mrz wouldn't ask the child to sound out chair

You learn the different fonts by exposure. The first time you see the letter A written a you may need to be told it is another way to write A (and some children will need reminding many times )

When we are spelling we often say "that doesn't look right" and even some young children do that with words they have read many times. But if they haven't seen the word school in print they can still get a close approximation using sounds which requires only minimum adult support to spell correctly ... what sounds can you hear when I say school? great and in school we spell the /k/ sounds = independent speller rather than a child who needs to be told how to spell every new word.

Haven't read the whole thread but I would say that phonics has been a very effective way of teaching my twins to read. They have just turned 5 and are reading ORT level 5 with ease at school ( and harder books at home ) thanks to the phonics work they have done. I can't see how learning to read using phonics has any detrimental effect - it seems like the most common sense approach to reading. I noticed that a few people have mentioned that the word 'school' is confusing phonetically - I don't think it is, my children were initially taught that CH makes the sound as in 'Church', but as their knowledge improved they were taught that in some circumstances CH can also make a C sound as in 'school' or a SH sound as in 'chef'. They have had no problem understanding this - so normally they will try the word with the normal CH sound and if it doesn't sound right they will automatically try one of the other sounds that CH makes - seems logical to me.

maths It was Malenky who said she was dyslexic (was the comment for her?)

I think everybody's experience of remembering how to spell various words can be slightly different, there are a number of strategies.

My primary one when faced with an unfamiliar word was sounding out.

However I did imagine, for correct spelling, an image in my as head print on the page or wherever I have seen it (still do). Different typefaces do not bother me greatly, I imagine in a variety of them. Although as I said I was annoyed by lower case 'a' (but I got over it ). I was taught upper and lower case letters, for recognition purposes side by side so knew both. My memory will give me a visual image (like a photograph), I still can remember the (pink card, handwritten) flash cards my reception teacher used. She also had words, we might want to use, pinned up on the display board (Mummy, Daddy, house, school, the, was...) Now, if I want to remember a section of a book, I know the vague location of it on a page and visualise the page.

I did not learn very well by rote, and dreaded times table tests, as we were taught by rote initially. Familiarity with my tables (and later having a pencil case with them on) and spotting patterns helped me greatly here.

However I could remember songs and poems more easily (are these by rote? There is more pattern to them, rhyme etc). Sometimes when I want to remember numbers I make up a poem or assign them visual symbols eg tree = three.

I did use my initial phonic alphabet ah, buh, cuh.. to name letters (when talking about a spelling for example) but would sound out when thinking how to spell, in much the same way as children are taught now eg chair has a /ch/ and /air/ sound.

anything set to music is more memorable according to research daftdame

daftdame - so it was your mother, then, who gave you the names you used for the letters (ie ah, buh, etc)?

I do sometimes memorise things by visualising them in the way you do, daftdame. I don't necessarily find things easier to learn if set to music (I never remember the words to pop songs!), but I do find them easier if I create a rhythm for them. As a result, I find some times table "answers" easier to remember one way round than the other - eg seven fives are thirty five is easier than five sevens are thirty five, because the former has an easier chanting rhythm in my head... Oddly, I've always had an exceptionally good memory for relatively random numbers, which just pop into my head again without effort - eg phone numbers, pin codes, card numbers - but an appalling memory for peoples' names. I think the way the memory works must be quite complex!

As a child I was only taught the alphabet/letter names