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 am thinking that people who regularly have to use words like 'aerobiosis' and 'aerobia' have moved out of the spelling test phase of academia.

But mrz, you said that "Correct letter formation is taught separately in "letter shape families" so c, o, a, d, g, q, e, s would be taught because with the exception of e they all have the same starting point. Letter formation is taught as single letters then in the context of words."

So when you say that you talk about learning to write the sound /c/ in cat one day, do you then refer to it as, eg, the sound /s/ in rice the next day, even when just practising forming the individual letter?

But many an academic and non-academic alike might enjoy eating Aeros!

When looking at myths and legends children may come across Faeries (as opposed to the JM Barrie kind).

Yes, I think we can all agree on that, daftdame.

aer comes from Latin
faerie comes from Old French

It's air/ plane with no sound in the middle for me, to the point where hearing it with a schwa is jarring to my ear.
I also pronounce 'film' without the schwa that many Irish people use (fillm). Despite often hearing the word 'fillum' children in school are required to use the spelling 'film'. The schwa in Hiberno-Irish 'film' is a very strong one.

Prior knowledge and context, and not phonics alone, help in both decoding and encoding. At some point a learner is going to have to actually learn spellings like lose, loose and choose. Some spellers encounter difficulty when their pronunciation tells them the wrong thing about a word's sounds, and there are perils to hypercorrection when it becomes part of an accent that children hear every day.

However, many children manage to spell correctly despite in many communities sounds bearing little resemblance to those on the page (already a feature of written English even before accents or hypercorrection are factored in). Some regional accents make phonetical spelling easier. Those that differentiate between WH and W sounds, and those where R is always voiced make decoding and spelling more straightforward. However, it is counter intuitive to spell a word with the HW sound that is spoken by Scottish and Irish people pronouncing the combination 'WH'. Using the letters in the right order is something learned. Nothing in phonics indicates to Scots or Irish spellers that WH is the correct order.

If children are able to hold all of these balls in the air and still emerge as good readers and spellers I see no reason why knowing the names of letters would hold them back from associating the sounds with the symbols. There is clearly a huge amount of different information in various continuous loops in the brain, their paths sometimes intersecting and sometimes keeping apart -- the processes of learning to read and then spell can never be based on only one 'loop'.

I agree with Cecily wrt good visual memory. It is one of the loops. A good visual memory comes with a lot of daily exposure, and that comes when children can access written language that doesn't put them off by its dreariness and inanity, which is why teaching sight words can be so useful (it enables early access to interesting literature than phonics alone).

Old French comes from Old Low Frankish, Gaulish and Latin.

It's Greek I believe.

But of course Greek wasn't always Greek..

It all comes from the Big Bang.

"I also pronounce 'film' without the schwa that many Irish people use (fillm)." There isn't a schwa in film (even when it is pronounced "filum" as most of my class do).

Letter names are an additional unnecessary ball to keep in the air ... best added later when skills are more refined to cope.

"So when you say that you talk about learning to write the sound /c/ in cat one day, do you then refer to it as, eg, the sound /s/ in rice the next day, even when just practising forming the individual letter?"

No

The sound in fil-um is a schwa that is regarded as a marker of Hiberno English. It crops up in 'filmed' and 'filming' too. In formal settings Irish people often reveal they know the standard pronunciation (without the epenthetic schwa). You are more likely to hear the schwa in 'film' in the speech of older people. The schwa in 'film' also shows up in the English of Middlesbrough and the NE of England in general. Standard, non-schwa pronunciation follows the pattern of 'helm'.

The same sort of schwa arises in 'arm' and 'farm' in many Irish accents.

mrz - so what do you do? Is it always c like the sound in cat when they practise writing it on its own? Or do you just call it a letter to practise?

mathanxiety it isn't a schwa ... a schwa can be represented in writing by any vowel in filum a sound has been added to the word.

cecilyp
our senco has a standard battery of tests, i asked her to check with specific reference to dyslexia. She tested reading age, spelling age, working memory, processing speed and i'm not sure what else. Apart from spelling agevall looked fine. I suspect there is nothing specific, just that glue ear prevented him from hearing sounds accurately around nursery age and lack of phonics teaching added to it. Attitude is if it's interesting - like maths and reading - he's focused but with writing and spelling switches to trying to entertain whoever's eye he can catch.
I think if he'd been caught earlier spelling would have been easily sorted, as it is i'm sending him ill prepared to y6 and need to help formulate a plan. I've met the parents several times and desperately tried to find a suitable app to help him but been thwarted by american accents.
It's a classic case of a middling kid who gets by well enough rather than doing the best that they can.

Young children would not be taught representing the sounds /s/ or /ch/ at first so when they are taught letter formation they are still working at the in cat stage

If 'air' is good enough for 'airbus', why not also for 'airoplane'?

Because learning to spell English must remain difficult?

the history of our language is too important to be lost just because you find it too difficult masha

Thanks, Babies. I don't know about the other tests, but I don't think a reading age test in itself can tell you very much if someone has a good repertoire of sight words, other than that they can recognise those words. Has he recently been tested on a nonsense words - Ruth Miskin has a good sheet starting with individual letters, moving on to CVC and then more complicated words. It might give you a starting point. I am not sure if it could have been easily sorted if caught earlier, but he would probably have benefited by some more focused support, which it sounds like it wasn't offered because he was reading too well.

Thanks will look up the nonsense words. You're right it wouldn't have been easily sorted but much more self conscious of it now and reluctant to be withdrawn for group work or singled out but enjoyed and benefitted from fls for a term...