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 think the idea is parents don't use the letter name with 2,3,4 year olds either. This is what I was told at my son,'s Montessori nursery.

However, I don't have enough experience with different children to comment on how much difference it makes.

This thread stated letters do not help when spelling. That is false.

Letters names do help anyone, not just children to learn to spell and to spell in general, because spelling involves identifying the correct letters and the names are used for this purpose. Other names could be used but these are the ones that we currently use. Sounds do not uniquely identify all letters.

There is a standard letter sound attached to each letter. When you have a child learning phonics you soon begin to start using letter sounds all the time, even when spelling your name to complete strangers - or maybe that's just me...

But that's wrong, surely, merrymouse? To teach the child the "standard" letter sound and always use that when spelling your name is not phonics, if you are using the wrong sound in that context, its using a common letter sound as that letter's name. Thus, I would have thought it was wrong to say the alphabet as ah, buh, cuh, duh, eh etc. Because those are not always the right sounds, nor are they the right names. That's why I'm finding it confusing...

For example, my nickname is not really "spelt" OR sounded out as "rrr, ah, buh, buh, i, tuh, suh, tuh, eh, wuh."

c and k have the same sound. I'm not sure how the letter q is sounded out or x

But regardless, when letters are used for spelling it's clear what is being proposed. When you spell using sounds there will be times when you have to explain what you mean.

They are the most commonly used sounds, introduced first when learning phonics.

C = curly cuh
K = kicking cuh
Q= cwuh
X= ks

When you pronounce the first three sounds you try to minimise the uh sound at the end.

But you don't say "curly cuh" when sounding out c in the word cat. You say "cuh." "Curly cuh" is a name, not a sound. Yet I'm told names are confusing.

And if it isn't clear you aren't supposed to use letter sounds for ever and ever and you do introduce other variants later on - its just that this method is supposed to get children reading quickly, therefore minimising frustration.

I haven't actually seen the letter Q sounded out in phonics books - it always seems to come with a U so as to say "kwuh" in the early stages.

I don't personally see that saying "C says cuh" is any more confusing than saying "curly cuh makes the sound cuh." Yes, you could point at the letter C in a word and say "this sound likes "cuh" in this word." But I don't think that's avoiding all confusion, either.

Yes, in this thread there doesn't seem to be a distinction between children spelling and adults doing it. (Because it's adults who are arguing about it.) But, yes, for simple words when the children are very young it probably doesn't matter much. But later on in life I think trying to spell using letter sounds could cause a lot of problems.

I think there's a difference between giving the letters and their combinations sounds/phonemes for reading and doing it for spelling, even for small children.

In other words, there's a slight difference between what a child needs to know and understand to read and what they need to know and understand to write and the further you go along the developmental line, the more useful it is to be able to isolate and identify individual letters from time to time.

A number of children will learn to read and spell no matter how you teach them: letter names/letter sounds/ look and say/ phonics. Those children are not so much the problem. Ex-DH's daughter came to stay with us from overseas one summer holidays. The school system in her country was American based. They learned by letter names and look and say. She had been in school 2 years and reading was a complete and total mystery to her. She was very clearly confused by it. She had not had any phonics teaching at all and had no idea about the sounds associated with letters. She clearly had a poor visual memory and no other techniques available to help her make sense of written language. Not being able to read was clearly impacting her ability to learn in other ways.
I found this very sad. I felt certain she would have benefitted from phonics teaching but ex-DH having grown up in the same system felt that introducing her to phonics would confuse her when she went back to school.
Whilst there is no harm in learning letter names or not at an early stage, there is certainly harm in NOT learning letter sounds/ phonics at an early stage.
It is very clear to me that in terms of phonics the balance of risk and benefit lies very very heavily in favour of benefit.

I don't think children are encouraged to spell using letter sounds after reception/year 1. I only do from time to time in same way that I tell adults to look both ways when they cross the road - having children has messed with my brain.

It's just a way of re-enforcing the connection between the symbol and the sound it signifies. Of course many letters make more than one sound, but using these main letter sounds you can teach children to hear the sounds in a word and give them a large reading vocabulary very quickly because they can decode words they have never seen before.

Don't shoot the messenger. My children learnt to read with DC Thomson. However, given that this method is supported by so many teachers and reading experts I think there must be something in it.

It must surely depend on the school. Anecdotally I've heard of mums seeing work by children of all ages glued to the wall in the school hall and what appears there has been written in gobbledegook.

MRZ -- you said "But letter names don't correspond to sounds ... 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"
put another way, letters in spoken words can represent one, two, three or more sounds, which is why "sound names" don't help at all....!!! To me it just seems much more straight-forward to teach children letter names (and associated sounds) rather than to teach sound names (and the multiple letter shapes that can produce the sound).

To hold up this "shape" C and call it "curling cuh" is absurd, given that in some subsequent lesson, you'll have to hold up the "curling cuh" and say it can sound like /s/. and in another subsequent lesson, you'll have to hold up the "curling cuh" and the "huh" and put them together to show that "curling cuh + huh" sounds like "ch".

Abby -- it seems your DH's daughter has suffered from poor teaching of one method, just like OPs daughter seems to have suffered from poor teaching of another method. The key to success in reading, as in all things, is to have good teachers who can adapt their methods to the needs of the children they teach...

math - I can touch-type, not properly but I can type without looking at my hands, if that makes sense? I don't do the agonizing two-finger poking thing. I just picked it up.

I've had my visual memory tested and it's shit, though, which may be why I struggled a lot to learn to read. I don't understand the process you describe but accept it might well be that I'd think it was very obvious if I weren't dyslexic.

I don't get why you think the sounds aren't helpful, but then, I expect by the time I was spelling anything complicated, I'd learned the letter names. I think you're conflatng what children do when they've learned quite a lot, with what they do when they are just starting out? Or maybe normal children learn it all at the same time/close together.

I find it odd, because you seem to find the idea that some letters make multiple sounds a real stumbling block to the idea of using shape+sound instead of a name. I do see that names make spelling out long words very convenient when you've already learned to read, but don't follow how they help when you haven't. How do you know which sounds the letter makes if you learn the name first? Or, I guess I mean, how do you keep clear in your head the name that doesn't do anything, and the sounds that you're trying to learn go with this shape or that shape?

Btw, I do think it sounds as if a lot of people on this thread have children who would probably have learned to read almost whatever was done, other than plenty of reading with mum or dad. I could be wrong. It just sounds as if they were never struggling, but it's being assumed this is because of the teaching method, and therefore that teaching method must be right for children who might struggle too. I don't quite get that. The logic seems backwards to me - if some children are struggling using phonics and yours learned find with a different method, why assume it's the phonics is the issue?

But a lot of this thread has been about spelling. People can argue about phonics and learning to read, but I think it's widely accepted that it's useful, particularly on mumsnet. But I think phonics for spelling, all but the most transparent words, is far more problematical, and that phonics in many cases does more harm than good.

I don't know that I understand that really.

If you can't do phonics, surely you would struggle hugely to learn to spell?

It must be convenient for a teacher who's too busy to point to the letter on the page, or a child with sight difficulties who couldn't look and compare the correct and incorrect versions. But if you couldn't do the phonics how would you ever learn to decode new words and learn their spellings?

Phonics wasnt around when i was at school, but I certainly learnt spelling rules, and groups of words that follow the same pattern - can't see why this wouldn't be helpful.

Well, it was around, it just wasn't being taught. Phonics has been the normal way of teaching for centuries if not more.

I think spelling rules are helpful too.

Yes I agree malenky.