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.

rabbit Yes, my mother introduced me to a roughly phonic alphabet with my first alphabet book with pictures. Although the sounds are only rough representations they worked for me, they did have context with the book and its illustrations and then when I learnt how to apply the initial letter sounds for other words.

From that my mother taught me words that 'blend' easily like 'cat' and 'mat'. With 'cat' for example, I remember her just lengthening the way she said the 'cuh' so she could then change the shape of her mouth to form 'ah' and finally finish with the 'tuh', I copied and ''got it' quite easily. Another method she used was repeating the sounds quickly so they 'ran' together.

She then told me (rather proudly) I could read and introduced me to more simple words. After that I remember reading to her, her reading to me and starting school, coming across more difficult words but just being told about 'ch' etc and accepting it.

She also taught me how to write the letters and words. Interesting with the 'a' I couldn't write the one with an ascender at the top, which is why it annoyed me. I remember having to flick out the short descender because otherwise I thought it was difficult to see.

I think music just provides extra context rabbit which can evoke a memory, as smell or visuals can. I expect a strong rhythm can work in a similar way.

For centuries children learnt by chanting and singing their lessons (back to the alphabet song)

Matilda was published a couple of decades too late to be useful

are you in the UK KCO?

Is there a UK version of the fridge phonics song?

Yes I've seen them, I just find it annoying that so many of these things aimed at young children are US versions and the manufacturers make no attempt to adapt for a UK market.

Mrz:
^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.^
Most people are probably aware of that.
But these irregularities are NOT BECAUSE
We only have 26 letters in the alphabet but spoken English has roughly 44 sounds.

The shortage of letters can be overcome by combining some of them (ai, ch, sh). And if done in a regular, predictable way, English would have just 44 spellings for its 44 sounds. Perhaps something like

a, ai, air, ar, au, b, ch, d, e, ee, er, f, g, h,

i, ie, j, k, l, m, n, ng, p, o, oe, oi, oo, or, ou,

r, s, sh, t, u, ue, v, w, y, z, si,

and one for the unstressed half-vowel, as in 'decide, flatten, flatter'.

It could do with unique spellings for short oo (could put wood) and the two th sounds (thing thing) as well which it hasn't got despite using a huge number of different graphemes.

English has gradually become further and further removed from the alphabetic principle of spelling speech sounds in a regular, predictable manner, with 205 spellings for 44 sounds. Because of this, learning to read and write the language now takes an exceptionally long time and is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT for roughly 1 in 5 children.

Although some of the irregularities are due to borrowings from other languages, without anglicising their spellings (as used to happen earlier: beef, mutton, battle), many of the irregularities, such as mOnth, wAs, thrEAd, were created quite deliberately by scribes and printers who did not give a fig for ease of learning.

You missed this bit masha It's a complex system brought about by a long history which is why your reform will never gain popular support.

math - to answer your question - with great difficulty. I have terrible visual memory anyway. And I hit the exact same problem when I tried to learn languages with different alphabets. If you spell something out to me, like 'aitch, ay, ar, em', I find that really difficult to put together.

I don't get the issue with there being many possible sounds for a symbol, though. That is obviously something we're good at coping with, isn't it? Take something like the national speed limit sign: sometimes it means 60, sometimes 70. It's not a problem. When you learn to read, you learn that there are several sounds each letter makes. That narrows down the possbilities immensely.

I don't follow how letter names would have an intrinsic benefit? I can understand for you and others they seem to, but I don't see why. They are just names. There's nothing to tell you 'school' is correct and 'skool' isn't.

Btw, the demands of modern English aren't that complicated. There are other language systems where children have had to learn a much more complicated set of sounds and symbols, and still seemed to do it phonetically. Various types of phonetic teaching have been around for such a long time, it wouldn't have lasted as a method if it didn't work for many.

My ds failed to learn to read despite two years of teaching with mixed methods. He was a frustrated little boy who thought he just couldn't do it. After six sessions (in fact it might even have been four) with a synthetic phonics tutor he 'got' reading because for the first time he understood that there were rules he could apply and a code that makes sense. He is now a voracious reader. He is also dyslexic, with an extensive verbal vocabulary. His writing/spelling is still terrible.

I learned to read before I went to school, and I have no idea how I did it. I really struggled to help ds learn to read because I don't tend to consciously break words down.

Mrz -- you teach the ones that are used most often to begin with (220 variety words + 95 nouns) and then you move on to explore patterns and a second tier of words that are used frequently, with third and subsequent tiers of words and patterns learned as set spellings, all of which takes place alongside exposure to text featuring the words and patterns in graduated fashion.

Malenky, what tells you 'school' is correct and 'skool' isn't is memorising 'school' and getting a red line through any other version in your spelling test. Then you go home and correct your mistake.

Daftdame (yes, I was posting to Malenky, hadn't refreshed my page and a few posts intervened) When using sounds to get a picture of a word in your head, how do you decide which symbol to use for the S sound? What about vowel sounds that can be silent (E for instance) most vowels change their sounds from word to word.

In fact when you start school these days, scool, skool, skoole (as in Poole/Dorset) skule, sckule and scule are all correct.

That is very limiting mathanxiety

math I don't really understand your question, however I'll attempt to answer it.

Although I could 'read', as my mother put it, as soon as I managed to sound out and blend letters of very simple words, I continued building upon knowledge and having combinations pointed out to me.

I have always read voraciously, a lot of what I was taught was so gradual, it seems almost implicit. I shared books and read to my mother and she would point out rules for anything I could not read. Once I had these (rules), I remembered them along with visually remembering words I had seen written or printed. The visual picture is often a memory, I still can remember some of the display board in my reception class. I can also remember (I think Ladybird) Alphabet book and as I mentioned before the flash cards my reception teacher had.

I haven't seen it limit the DCs or any other children who were taught this way. Once they could read they never stopped. Their reading reinforced what was taught in school and what was taught in school reinforced what they read at home (where they spent the vast majority of their time). School was a springboard for them.

If children do not get exposure to the written word and to a rich vocabulary outside of school they do not sustain their progress and they do not succeed in subjects that require more reading skills than the decoding that phonics does so well. Children who get that exposure and who develop a wide vocabulary tend to do well when texts and reading skills become more demanding.

'Malenky, what tells you 'school' is correct and 'skool' isn't is memorising 'school' and getting a red line through any other version in your spelling test. Then you go home and correct your mistake.'

Yes, but you said before this had to do with letter names. It doesn't.

How long does it take a child to learn 315 words?

I haven't seen it limit the DCs or any other children who were taught this way.

Do I recall correctly that your children were taught to read in the US?

mrz
How long does it take a child to learn 315 words?

Dr Morag Stuart has this to say:

Jackie Masterson, Maureen Dixon and I carried out a training experiment (Stuart, Masterson & Dixon, 2000) to see how easy it was for five-year-old beginning readers to store new words in sight vocabulary from repeated shared reading of the same texts. It turned out to be much harder than we expected! We tried to teach the children 16 new words, which were printed in red to make them identifiable as the words to be learned. There was one of the red words on each page. After the children had seen and read each red word 36 times, no child was able to read all 16 of them, and the average number of words read correctly was five.

(Can't give you a reference as it is an extract from a document sent me by the author)

It continues:

We were quite shocked by this, because we had made a database of all the words from all the books the children were reading in school, and so we knew how many different words each child had been exposed to in their first term reading at school. This ranged from 39 to 277 different words, with a mean of 126.
Hardly any of these words occurred frequently in any individual child?s pool of vocabulary: on average fewer than four words occurred more than 20 times ? yet 36 repetitions had not been enough to guarantee that children would remember a word.
When we tested children?s ability to read words they?d experienced more than 20 times in their school reading, on average they could read only one word correctly.

As this is peer reviewed research I trust it more than MNetter's anecdotes of their exceptional children who remember words after one exposure.

It does, Malenky -- otherwise skool would be acceptable. School with the letters C and H is the correct spelling. Trying to spell it by using letter sounds distorts the sound of the word as a whole so much it becomes virtually unrecognisable. You have to know you need to use C and H and not just C, or K, or CK, and you have to know it's OO and not U for the vowel sound.

Depends on the child, Mrz. Since these words comprise approximately 75% of the words on any given page a child will encounter in any reading material aimed at children aged 8 and under, they tend to be learned pretty quickly if a child is being exposed to the written word.

The point is that you have to identify the six correct letters and the correct order in which they appear in the word school. You can call the letters of the alphabet weeny-number-1 all the way up to weeny-number-26 if you feel like it. What you call the letters doesn't matter. But you have to be able to identify the correct letters and the correct sequence.

You are talking about look and say (guess) there MaisieD. I am talking about mixed methods (yes, in the US) done in a very systematic way. Perhaps 'mixed methods' suffers somewhat as a label since it seems to suggest randomness, but systematic mixed methods in school plus practice at home will do as good a job as phonics. And as remarked on this thread, 'phonics' is not well taught or consistently taught in a lot of British classrooms. And there is also the question of children taught phonics in school being taught in different ways at home by family members.

No, am I not talking about exceptional children who remember words after one exposure and I am pretty sure I did not say that.