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 can only imagine how big the mn debate would be about 'correct new spellings' if we decided to change our language!

And if America was the model to follow surely they should spell it culer not color?

just realised I didn't say the /u/ in filum is an epenthesis vowel ...in words like filum, athaletes

It really is a schwa, Mrz. It's an epenthetic (inserted) schwa. A schwa can be a reduction of an existing vowel sound and also an insertion of an extra vowel sound.

Paper.
Another paper.

If you listen closely, schwas are not really alike when articulated. They cannot be represented in writing by any vowel (is that what you meant?) They tend to be transitional sounds -- their pronunciation tends to depend on what consonants surround them, and their phonological qualities. Rises in any given accent can also affect vowel quality of epenthetic schwas.

x-post a bit there -- that's what happens when you leave your paragraph to go and make a cuppa..

I think we are crossing from phonics to phonology ...it isn't a schwa in phonics because the sound isn't represented by a letter/s.

If phonics advocates are basing claims for phonics and its usefulness in spelling on the phonic principle of sounds corresponding to symbols, then the sounds (and accents in general) are important. It becomes especially important when the schwa is an epenthesis, in effect adding another syllable to a word and significantly distorting the way the word sounds. The schwa is the most commonly heard vowel sound in spoken English in many accents - learning which vowel is the correct one to use when spelling is not always a matter of correctly linking sound to symbol since the schwa is so ubiquitous and used to articulate all the vowels in natural speech.

math this discussion about schwa in Irish relates to a question I asked way up the thread which nobody seems prepared to answer properly: how do you teach phonics to a group of kids with mixed accents? The phonology and phonetic inventories of different accents, even just within the UK and ROI, vary enough to potentially cause problems for any teacher who doesn't really understand English phonology.

It's been a while since I did any psychology of language, but visual word recognition (and ultimately written sentence processing) does depend on multiple cues - there are plenty of effects shown in experimental work that can only be accounted for by having a model of recognition that is not just bottom-up (i.e. not just done by putting together the sounds in order).

I am always a bit puzzled why we can't have multiple parallel strategies for teaching reading, seeing as that's how we actually do reading.

How does British AIRways, the world's favourite AIRline, with a large fleet of AIRcraft, spell the word airplane/aeroplane?!?!?! (as I've said before, I'm from the US... apologies for inadvertently inserted an "American spelling" into a phonics discussion (no less!) but it does amuse me that your flagship carrier doesn't use the British spelling....

I agree the history of language is important yet another reason why it is useful to be able to use letter names to discuss the spelling of words as, without them, it is very difficult to explain how to spell a word such as airplane/aeroplane which has as shown above so many possible "phonetic" spellings. I find it hard to believe MRZ addresses her class only with visual symbols and without words. "Here's how we represent the sound /air/ in the first syllable of aeroplane" writes symbols on the board "and here's how we represent the sound /pl/" writes more symbols on the board, etc....

Do you not agree, MRZ, that spoken words is based on sounds and written words are based on letters? How can it possibly be less confusing for a child to learn letters and associated sounds than to be shown a shape and be told "this is how we write the sound /kuh/" and then be shown the same shape another day and be told "this is how we write the sound /s/"????

I am not against phonics -- I just think there is no reason to divorce it from the teaching of letters. As I mentioned before, when my son was little and we read books with him, I would point to the illustrations and say "these are illustrations" and I would point to text and say "these are the words" and, later, I'd ask him to point to the words and I explained words were made up of letters that represent sounds, etc.... To me, this is the logical way to help a child develop an understanding of language and how it works.

I was told that my son's strong connection between the letter and it's name was part of the reason he struggled to read, because when he saw 'c' his mind said 'see', not 'cuh' or 'suh' or any of the other sounds that 'c' represents when translating letters into sounds.

We'd been a bit proud about how little he was when he 'got' his letters, but I wish we'd spent less time with alphabet books in retrospect.

juststartingtothink British Airways uses the term aircraft throughout their literature, as is common with many airlines, indeed I can't think of the last time I flew and anyone talked about either airplanes or aeroplanes.

Looking at the English dictionary I thought I might point out that the 'aero' in aeroplane is French in origin, from the Greek (aero = air). No Latin involved :) Faery/fairy has a completely different root.

Airway, airline and aircraft are all English words. As is airplane:

etymonline.com/index.php?term=airplane&allowed_in_frame=0

The English language is weird and wonderful!

My ds is just about to start learning Japanese. I'll be very interested to see if he does better at learning a non phonetic language.

justsstartingtothink you obviously haven't read what I have written ...

unlike you children don't find it confusing when it is taught in a systematic progression... they aren't taught that the letter represents /k/ one day and the next day taught it represents /s/ as I said a number of times they are initially taught this is how we write the sound /k/ in cat, can, cap (simple 3 sound words) then much later they are taught that the same spelling can represent other sounds in English

and obviously they would never be taught /kuh/

I think there will be a strong focus on the spoken word for quite a while, which suits ds as he is good at speaking (generally!)

For whole class teaching the majority accent would be used but if children have a different accent (and for the purpose of single sound level in English there isn't a great deal of variation) they would be taught that the spelling represents the sound they say - the north /south & being the most common.

and just as children decode = film ("naturalise to their own spoken version) they learn the spelling.

and just as children decode = filum

Ah well, to a novice, none of it sounds a million miles from saying, "c says k in cat, can and cap."

I can at least now see how saying letter names can be avoided, though, if telling a child that the name of a letter can make different sounds in different words is more confusing/taxing for them than avoiding naming the letter at all. I guess by avoiding naming the letter, you aren't giving the children the opportunity to start confusing the letters for shapes, like squares and circles are shapes, rather than contributions to sounds. Mind you, when it comes to writing, learning one name per shape feels like it should be a quicker way to learn how to form the shapes, just not a quicker way to know when to use them.

MRZ -- I try to read everything you write because very often you are insightful and helpful!

In this case, though, I find your visceral opposition to letter names perplexing. Children who are "shown" a "c" in your class and told it used to write the sound /k/ in cat, can and cap will, if they are at all inquisitive, see the shape "c" in other words most notably in "police" on a police car and wonder what the /k/ sound is doing in the middle of the word. I think children in general are much clever than you seem to think and also are capable of grasping more degrees of complexity.

I have no doubt your approach enables children to read simple c-v-c words rather quickly so I can understand why you embrace it in the YR or Y1. I also have no doubt that this simplified approach can have unintended negative consequences, as the OP seems to have observed. (btw -- where is OP?!)

As for spelling, though, I still don't understand how the grounding in phonics helps with "irregular" words. To use my previous example of "chair" a child could write chear (as in bear), chaer (as in aeroplane!), cheir (as in their), chair (as in chair!) and possibly a few others and all would be "correct" applications of combinations of shapes they've been taught to associate with the sound /air/. If you don't wish to talk about letters and you don't wish children to learn whole words (as opposed to component sounds), how do you explain "correct" spelling. Do you, as you do with "c" and cat, say "this is how we represent the sound /air/ in chair" and write "air" on the board or paper or whatever you use in the classroom? If the latter, then aren't you eventually after you get beyond c-v-c expecting the children to learn to recognise words.

Finally -- do you agree that spoken language is comprised of sounds combined into words and written language is comprised of letters combined into words?

I'm not sure written language is comprised of letter combined into words. If it was the pronunciation of 'chair', for example, would be quite different.

Spoken language is comprised of a sequence of sounds, combined into words. Written language is an encoding of those sequences of sounds used to make words.

Are you kidding?

I left this thread but I'm getting sucked back in.

You don't think written language is comprised of letters combined into words?

Btw, if you talk to people who don't use written language, they often don't perceive there to be gaps between words. FWIW.

hypothetically -- if you have a Y1 child who is not sitting next to you (ie you're cooking and child is working at the kitchen table; or you're at work and child phones you; etc) and child is writing a story and wishes to use the word "house". child asks "how do you spell house". you answer: how do you think it's spelled? try to sound it out (or something similar). Child says "/h/ /ow/ /s/". What do you reply? How do you know if child has written the word correctly? or do you care whether she writes hows, howse, hous, or house? do you say "think of how we represent the sound /ow/ in "sound" not the way we represent it in "how"? Or do you say "/ow/ in house is written "o-u"? similarly with /s/, do you say "think of the /s/ in mouse not the /s/ in cats? or do you say /s/ in house is written s-e (and, depending on the child, perhaps remind her of "silent e" and other words with which she might be familiar that have an /s/ represented by s-e. (remember, mrz, hypothetically, you're not next to the child so you can't keep mum and show the child what shapes to use.)

You lot are very impressive

Phonics teaching seems to have done nothing harmful and quite a lot helpful, IME, at dd's school.

And it has given rise to a fascinating debate on MN...

But Elibean - exactly how is it taught in your school? I don't think anyone left posting on here thinks good phonics teaching is harmful, they are just wondering what genuinely good phonics teaching is like and whether giving letters names is really too taxing for most children when they already know the alphabet song and are learning to write letters, or whether making the effort of avoiding referring to letter names is worth the effort (because whilst mrz may not find this a difficult feat, a lot of us would, and we are the people supposed to be supporting our children at home).