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.

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno?t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghi t pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Don't see how memorising whole words or word shapes helped you just read that...

I can read it. Maybe it is my familiarity with my terrible typing though? They seem to the sort of mistakes I make quite frequently.

I think lots of us can read it. But babies is adhering to some research. If we all started jumbling letters up to our hearts' content I suspect the results would be very different, (otherwise solving anagram solving wouldn't be any fun.)

I don't think many people really remember letters just by their shape. I'm sure most people remember the shapes because the shapes have a meaning to them, and in the case of letters, it is a "sound" meaning - ie they are not random squiggles, but symbolise something, and something more than a pretty pattern. Just try remembering 26 genuinely meaningless, random shapes and see how easy it is... a much harder memory trick. So I really don't think many people can separate written letters and words from the sounds they are intended to produce and claim that they have learnt the letters from their shape alone.

As for learning spellings off by heart and correcting spelling mistakes, I do clearly remember a teacher circling my spelling of definite in red pen. This taught me for all time that it is definite and not definAte, because I found the red pen so embarrassing! However, whilst I remember the big red circle, I don't remember the LOOK of the word when written correctly in red pen, I just remember to remind myself that I may say definAte, but I should not spell the word as I say it, but remember that it is relating to things that are finite and thus spell it as though it sounds like that... so I still remember the spelling by sound, it's just that I remind myself that the sound it should make isn't the one it does make when I say it out loud!

math - that's really interesting. As I say, I struggle like mad with languages in different alphabets.

rabbit - but the letter-shapes are connected to sounds, so it's much easier.

babies - I thought that was a myth, most everyone can read those.

Btw (and I know, rabbit, you might not be meaning my posts) ... but I was being surprised by math's claim that letter names are necessary. That's not because I think they couldn't ever be useful, or that people remember the shapes alone. I'm just surprised if most people find it absolutely necessary to know a letter's name before they can spell, and no-one has yet given me an example that makes sense (this may well be me!), which is why I keep wondering what is going on.

No, I agree with you that you don't have to know a letter's official name before you can spell, but it goes back to the connection between the letter and a sound - you have to know the letter is contributing to a sound to be able to spell anything. So you have to have some noise going on in your head, surely, as you spell out a word, rather than just an image of a shape?

I never said anything else.

And I think some of the confusion comes in when people try to talk about the sound connection - complaining that someone shouldn't say that a letter "says" a sound, or that a letter's "name" isn't important is talking at cross purposes more than anything else, it's just different peoples' ways of expressing the fact that the letter is making a noise to them in their heads!...

Sorry, Malenky, I must have misunderstood you when you said, "It's the shape that I would use to distinguish one written letter from another. I had no idea this wasn't normal."

Well, I don't follow but you may be right. All I know is I found the sounds and shapes much more helpful and still can't really cope well with letter names.

Cross post.

Yes, it is the shape I'd use. Lots of sounds could be made using various letters, so you can tell which letter to use by the shape.

I must be missing something massive because this sounds incredibly obvious to me. I don't follow how on earth we'd have developed a phonetic system of writing if these weren't the basic elements to notice?!

Because where you would distinguish one written letter from another by its shape, I would distinguish them by the sound those shapes evoked in my mind, which in the case of individual letters is their names, but within words is more likely to be their sounds.

But is there a reason you couldn't distinguish letters by the combination of the shape and the sound?

I can totally see that some people might find the name very helpful, but I don't follow why math thinks it's absolutely necessary. Isn't it an add-on that might be helpful, but some might struggle with?

In other words, the minute I see a letter, a noise goes off in my head!

I can't guarantee everyone hears the same sounds I do, but if everyone learns the same names for the letters, it can avoid confusion. I certainly found it exceptionally useful to learn how to say the alphabet in French!!!

But the sound and letter correspondence in English isn't straightforward so I don't understand how you could know where to use S and where to use C without at some point memorising the right spelling for words with the S sound. Or that many words have an E at the end that you don't hear.

I'm sure that's true, that it can avoid confusion. After all, that's why letter-names were developed.

But if we are talking about young children learning, that's a bit different, isn't it? Unless you mean you're bilingual and had to learn to clarify whether you were spelling a word in French or English?

Even then, I don't quite follow why you wouldn't just have had a teacher who noticed which language you were using.

math - because they are different shapes.

That's the point.

That's why we developed a written system with a whole set of visually distinct graphs representing a range of sounds.

^ That was in response to 'I must be missing something massive because this sounds incredibly obvious to me. I don't follow how on earth we'd have developed a phonetic system of writing if these weren't the basic elements to notice?!'

But math, the letter names wouldn't help you know how to spell a word, would they? What is there intrinsic to calling that graph 'ay' not 'ah or aaaa' or whatever, that teaches you that it is the third letter in 'teaches'? There's nothing.

It's a convenient system for spelling out words once you know the names, I see that.

I think knowing the official names for letters can help avoid confusion at any age!

I'm sure that's true, rabbit. I think, though, it's less helpful to think about what the really good readers need? Obviously if you had someone who was already very confident at an early stage, it'd be helpful.

But do you not assign any name at all to the shapes? We didn't just develop systems with different symbols for different sounds, we gave them names.