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.

mrz - I'm not saying anyone learns to spell or works out spellings by saying letters' names (although when I do spell things out for people like that, I do actually create a visual image in my mind of the letters I am saying to check over what I have said afterwards, and when I spell my name, I do NOT sound it out, I check it out visually for the correct "look"... unlike long, complicated words, when I might check them bit by bit according to the "sound"). I AM saying that it is useful to know the names of letters. Otherwise what the hell are you supposed to call an isolated letter, given that it makes different sounds in different contexts??? I, personally, would call an isolated letter by its name so as to avoid the confusion caused by saying it says "k" when actually it can sometimes say "s" etc, etc, or saying it says k and s and all sorts of other things, when actually on its own all it "says" is its name. Surely when children learn to form their letters, they learn to form an "a" or a "b" or a "c" on their own as well as joining them to other letters to make words?

I really object to the idea of children being so easily confused by the names of letters when they can apparently cope with those same letters making lots of different sounds in combination with other letters, but can't cope with the sound of the letter's own name. Not ever mentioning a letter's name just seems a bit like someone being scared of being politically incorrect - a bit like not mentioning the colour of someone's skin when describing them, because you've forgotten what's acceptable these days: white, black, brown, Asian, dark, swarthy, Southern European... too many ways to get it wrong...

And given the Victorian (and before...) obsession with alphabet samplers, I really don't believe that teachers of phonics in the past had quite such an intense phobia of the existence of letters in isolation as is apparently now the case...

DS learnt phonics but now he spells using letter names, he will of course use phonics to sound out words he may not have heard of, as do all the other children on his class. I really can't understand the problem people have with phonics. I learnt it 20 years ago at school also.

MrsMelons -- I don't have a "problem" with phonics; clearly it works for some children (though over what seems to be a rather long time). I do think, as rabbitstew said, it could at least be combined with teaching that letters have names.
Cecily -- yes, indeed, before the age of 6 I knew letter names and the sounds they can make and could read fluently in two languages; as could my son (by the age of 4) as could my parents judging from the books they read at that age (and, no, I wasn't there so can't be sure they are correctly reporting what they did at the age of 6. I was very glad my son learned to read before starting reception because I have no doubt the phonics approach would have held him back and deprived him from the enormous joy he has derived from reading voraciously throughout the early years of school.

I shall now bow out of this discussion. Hopefully, OP will have seen by the comments on this thread that there can, indeed, be unintended consequences from phonics teaching -- unless, of course, you are lucky enough to have mrz as your teacher!! ;)

I don't understand the problem people have with phonics, either. I also don't understand the problem people have with letters having names... The two can quite happily co-exist in most adults' minds, so I don't see the problem for children...

The letter names are taught though, DS could read fluently by the time he was 4 by learning phonics, he did spelling tests in year R and they had to spell saying the letter names, I can see it could be an issue if schools are not teaching both but I have not actually heard of this in RL.

Neither had I until this thread, but this thread most certainly gives the impression that some teachers have an allergy to letter names in all contexts.

Its all a bit odd tbh

The current phonics system did not work well for my dyslexic DS, if anything it confused him.

I went into the phoincs system open minded and have no axe to grind, but I suspect it may not work that well for dyslexic kids?

So that would include OP's child.

English is a pain- in-the-butt, irregular language. Superimposing a phonics system ( with many exceptions) can be helpful. My DS gets on much better by learning words as a whole though.

I guess when it comes down to it, to be helpful, phonics has to be taught well. Whether badly taught phonics is better than other methods (whether well or badly taught) is debatable. You could say the same about modern maths teaching methods, which have the laudable aim of ensuring that children understand why they are doing what they are doing. However, if the result is that they still don't understand and are also confused by all the different ways of getting to the same answer, then that isn't really better than being taught the quickest and most efficient way first off and not understanding that.... it does at least result in less confusion...

"I really object to the idea of children being so easily confused by the names of letters"

Perhaps that is because you haven't met the many children who write mAd (made) lIk (like) hOm (home) etc

I agree rabbitstew, bad teaching is bad teaching, and I'm afraid there is a lot of poor quality phonics teaching taking place across the country.

children who write mad and hom for made and home are three quarters of the way there.

Still seems like lack of practise, lack of experience and poor teaching to me.

Sorry for spelling mistake!

I haven't read through the whole thread so am probably repeating what has already been said but as a primary school teacher I can say that phonics for segmenting and blending is an important tool that children should be taught. It only becomes a problem when children are taught that it is the only tool. Children need to learn a number of strategies that they can call on for spelling and the aim with spelling if for children to remember how words are spelt without having to think about it just like we do most of the time as adults. Telling children to ignore this skill for words they have learnt and revert to spelling things phonetically is nonsensical but teaching this as a skill to spell words they are not familiar with makes sense. I don't think phonics is the issue more a case of a bad workman blaming their tools...

No rabbitstew it is being 4 or 5 years old and arriving at school confused so the teacher has to sort it out

Children need to learn a number of strategies that they can call on for spelling and the aim with spelling if for children to remember how words are spelt without having to think about it just like we do most of the time as adults.

Yes, but that is mainly a result of kinaesthetic memory of the unique 'feel' of the word. Which can as easily be developed with phonics as with letter names.

Ah. My children didn't arrive at school confused. Fortunately, the school didn't go on to confuse them, either!

I imagine your children didn't attend the same nursery as the OPs daughter rabbitstew.

My children's nursery didn't really do much in the way of phonics with them. They could both read fluently before they started school, though - two of the lucky minority who don't really need active teaching to learn to read. We did have an alphabet peg puzzle, though, and I did my best to confuse them by telling them the letter names when they were little.

I'm glad you recognise that your children are part of a lucky minority, rabbit stew. Could you also recognise that the experience of the lucky minority is not particularly useful for informing the teaching of the unlucky majority?

Only when teachers recognise that they also need to cater for the "lucky" minority who still need some kind of teaching, maizieD. And when teachers recognise that not all learning disabilities relate to verbal IQ - I didn't find any teacher teaching my ds1 how to use scissors properly. Apparently he could teach himself through play... but you just keep on concentrating on the majority and ignoring the rest, why don't you.

I wouldn't have thought the majority are particularly informative for dyslexics, either.

This just came up on Active threads.

I haven't read all of it (sorry), but I did think this might be relevant: I don't know how widely known it is that some form of phonics has been the usual method of teaching reading for a lot of the time during which people have been reading English books. 'Look and say' is a bit of an abberation so far as I know. It's just worth saying because I know people who see phonics as 'new' and untested. I know current methods will be different from older methods, but in details, not in the principle, I think.