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.

Did that happen at the same time (I honestly don't know).

But yes - I know the letter-names but I have to think about them (as I said upthread, if someone spells out a word to me in letter names I have to think quite hard to write it down correctly). I'm aware I'm a bit odd. I'm just curious that for you, this was obviously the normal way of learning, to learn the names and use those without thinking about the other things, whereas I struggled so much with the names.

It is strange.

Do all alphabets have letter-names as well as sounds?

Btw ... I should say, I'm not a learner any more!

So the names I assign are not really what I did when I was learning.

Sorry, I just find it easier to imagine at least being able to rely on all children being able to call every letter of the alphabet something before they know every sound every letter can make - it's just easier to talk about the letters in general, then, and identify, eg, which ones you are going to be talking about today, given that you are going to be talking about them making several different sounds. It just gives some kind of firm ground to work from, to my mind. How else do you talk about words that end in e, for example, where said e changes the sound of a large part of the word it as at the end of???

Yes, I'm sure I wasn't an 'easy' child to teach.

Luckily for me, someone did in the end decide that I and the others who weren't 'easy' might still benefit from some lessons.

particularly given that said "e" does not actually make any sound by itself in the word, but just affects the sound the other letters make?

Would you not just say exactly that?

I'm sorry, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that calling the letter 'eee' made you suddenly grasp that pronunciation rule. I am sure someone will have had to explain it to you before that!

Would I not just say exactly what? If children don't know that the letter e is called eee, then how should I refer to it? I can't refer to it by its sound, because it has more than one sound, and you claim children don't have to know its name. So how do I refer to it????

Exactly what you just explained - that 'e' on the end of these words changes the preceding vowel sound.

Would you not be using written language at this point?

If so, the 'e' is a distinctive shape, so you can point to it.

I'm not saying it's not useful for adults and confident readers to know letter names. Plainly, it is. What I don't follow is why anyone thinks that you couldn't learn to read without knowing them.

There's nothing about the letter name that tells you the rule, and no reason you couldn't simply show a child which letter it is. If you think about it, pointing to the letter on the page is actually much more helpful, because you can show that it's the position that makes the difference - if you're merely using the letter-name, you also have to explain about the position.

I am quite certain that someone explained that pronunciation rule to me by assuming that if they explained to me that the letter ee had an effect on the other letters, they wouldn't have lost me at the first hurdle, with me asking, "what is the letter ee?"

Oh, yes, I don't disagree - I can see that might have been very useful to you.

I'm not in the least denying that people are different.

All I'm surprised by is this idea that it is necessary to know letter names, for absolutely everyone.

Sorry, but human beings have an intense desire to label things - we have names for everything. I fail to see how pointing to things that remain nameless is less confusing for a child - particularly a child in a class of 30 who can't necessarily see what you are pointing at, because there are so many other heads in the way.

What, other than letters, should remain nameless? It's amazing that the means for producing names for everything else in the world should have no names for themselves, because, apparently, their names are confusing.

Well, I fail to see your way too, so we're in the same boat.

Children learn the names later anyway - what people have been discussing is the early stages of learning, isn't it?

Would you find it totally impossible to teach even for a short time, without names?

I mean, I don't know many people who'd teach a child 'oh, use the first person pronoun' when teaching them to write simple sentences. Human beings do enjoy naming things, but we don't always start out with the name, do we?

I'm not suggesting anything should remain nameless.

I don't think letter names are confusing per se, I'm merely surprised anyone thinks they are necessary.

Am I not being very clear in what I'm saying, or do you suspect I mean something different from what I'm saying, so you're trying to respond to that?

The first person pronoun is a description, not a name! Obviously, it's not impossible to teach without names for a short while, since so many teachers obviously do it, I just think it's weird and that it disenfranchises parents who think in letter names... and there is nothing worse than turning something that, in reality, is NOT a colossal issue for the majority, into a complex mystery that turns parents off trying to get involved in their children's learning process.

Mmm, I think it's a name really, TBH.

But if you say so, maybe you're right. I hadn't thought of how it might make parents feel. I really did just get into this because I was interested in what math said. I am trying to think about it all because I struggle, and because I'm interested in the history of how people learn to read, and absolutely not because I think I have the answers.

I absolutely don't think I have the answers, either, but I do think that the best readers (bar severe dyslexia) are those whose parents read an awful lot with their children and for whom reading is important. They are therefore important people not to confuse and alienate!!

There's nothing about the sounds that tells you how to use the letters in many cases though. Having names for letters allows children to put a variety of sounds into the same category. All the different sounds represented by A can be called A when you spell even if the sounds represented by A change within the same word. Same goes for E, even those Es that are not pronounced. It's a shorthand label.

Introducing the sounds before the official names helps children associate sound and symbol without clouding the matter, but I don't think any teacher can assume students know nothing of letter names so I'm not convinced of how essential this is to successful teaching using phonics.

I can't wrap my brain around not assigning any name at all to a symbol when every single other thing in the environment has a name and presumably you use those names. Do you say 'large thing that cooks stuff we eat?' when you mean oven?

Not saying that by way of disparagement -- I assign colours to people's names based on how the individual letter colours blend together. Dominic is a brown name, for instance. I only do this with names, so 'chair' has no colour...

There, we certainly agree. My parents read loads to me and thank god they did.

math, I never said there was anything about the sounds that tells you which letters to use. You simply have to learn.

I agree names are a shorthand, but am I right you're moving away from the idea letter names are necessary, to the idea they're useful? If so, I certainly agree - that is what I've been saying.

You needn't wrap your brain around a false scenario - it's not relevant, just ignore it.

I learned by using the letter names which I understood corresponded to sounds. The DCs also knew the alphabet song long before they went to school. It didn't hurt them to know the names. Two of them started reading without any exposure to phonics, just a lot of reading by me with a finger following under the text. Three picked up reading during kindergarten but before phonics had got under way. I think knowing the names of letters is necessary in order to spell because of the lack of straightforward letter-sound correspondence in English. Relying on the sounds isn't always going to point you in the right direction and I really don't think most children can hold shapes in their heads at the level where that conceptualisation is useful for writing without naming them. Again, you may be an exception.

I am interested to know if you touch type and if so how did you find the learning process.

But letter names don't correspond to sounds mathanxiety as I explained before the sounds in spoken words can be represented by one, two, three or even four letters, which is why letter names don't help at all.

First can I say that the letter on the end of the word doesn't change the sound of the vowel ... give, have, house, love, choice, loose, care, more, there

secondly phonics isn't about pronunciation rules

thirdly no one has said letters should remain nameless - they have names

what people have said is that letter names do not help a child learn to read and spell. They are a convention we use (because we like labels).

I think the idea is that you use the main letter sound as the letter name to begin with. You just forget that a separate name exists. So rather than saying 'see' can sometimes make a 'ssss' sound, you say 'cuh' can sometimes make a 'ssss' sound if for instance your child is called Cyril.

In my completely unscientific and untrained experience, (2 primary school children), reading takes off when children have a large enough vocabulary of words they can read. No phonics programme is completely phonetic - they all have 'red words'/'tricky words' etc., however, phonics attempts to build the number of readable words more quickly than 'look and say' by focusing on words that can be easily decoded.

However, all reading methods work when they go at the pace of the individual child being taught and adapt to that child's aptitudes and learning style. Sometimes it is difficult to do this when you are trying to teach 30 children to read.

I didn't say the letter e changed the sound of the vowel, I said it had an effect on other letters in the word without appearing to make a sound itself (even in the ones mrz used), although sometimes it does affect the vowel sound - eg grate, state, late, chute, lute, tote, all of which would sound entirely different without it. That may not be phonics, but I find it useful to think of it in that way and self evidently I'm not the only person who does. I am a parent, I would naturally explain to my child what made sense to me, as daftdame's mother did to her (in fact, quite a lot like that, and I don't think that was anything like synthetic phonics teaching). If phonics is not explained properly to me and doesn't make sense, I will NOT help my child that way - I will instead do all the things phonics teachers seem to hate. Apparently, therefore, I will confuse my child - except, of course, my children didn't ever find reading confusing.

I agree that if a child arrives at school as a blank slate, from parents who have no interest whatsoever in reading to them, or pointing out words as they read, or commenting on letters or numbers in their environment, they may well be easily confused, because it's all a bit new, and that giving letters labels is obviously not the most important starting point for such children by that stage. However, I also think such children are at a colossal disadvantage generally and I wouldn't want all parents taking that attitude on the basis that if they got involved, they might confuse their children, because they don't know how to teach phonics properly...