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.

Only when teachers recognise that they also need to cater for the "lucky" minority who still need some kind of teaching, maizieD.

I don't understand why your perception that your children were badly taught should inform the teaching of reading for the majority of children.

I do kind of get the idea that you have an axe to grind, though...

As for 'dyslexics', you give me a good, universally agreed, operational definition of 'dyslexic'.

And then tell me why for many decades (the idea originating with Dr Samuel Orton in the 1920s) the stock remedial teaching for dyslexics has been based on phonics.

rabbitstew the "lucky" minority and the "unlucky" minority and all those children who fall somewhere between should be getting high quality teaching and if your child isn't then that is something you need to take up with your child's school.

As for children who are "dyslexic" then phonics is the most effective method of reading instruction and has been regarded as such for almost a century, because whether you are one of the "lucky" ones or one of the "unlucky" ones you need to know how our written language works because learning all 250 000 words in the OED isn't an effective option.

Given time the "lucky" minority will work it out themselves but explicit teaching gives them a head start and they can quickly become fluent readers. My "lucky" minority have made over four years gain in reading age in just 8 months using phonics only ... yes they would have worked it out themselves eventually but it would have been a longer journey.

I don't actually believe children who are reading fluently before nursery are necessarily "luckY", in my son's case it masked his SEN and I had 9 years of professionals telling me not to worry because he was a fluent reader.

Assuming that many of these children continue readily happily they're luckier than the ones who later end up having problems.

I've yet to hear a case where a poster has said she taught her child to read and now her child is having problems, (save but to say the schoolbooks are too easy, accepting myself.)

My son continued really happily learnandsay and is a prolific reader but still had problems with writing. I would also point out he wasn't taught how to read but worked it out himself as do the "lucky" ones.
Children taught by parents fall into the in between category, as it doesn't really matter who taught them to read or when and where they were taught, the fact is they needed teaching and aren't in the "lucky" minority of children who pick up reading effortlessly without any form of instruction.

There can be a problem with too much adherence (by teachers) to using scheme books in the way they were designed learnandsay.

Many schemes assume advanced decoding matches a certain level of prior knowledge, life experience, they match interest level to certain age-groups of children, match the questions at the back of the book and any other support materials with those that are covered at a later stage in the National Curriculum.

Then comprehension is questioned, but there is just a mismatch between the scheme book, its intended audience and the actual audience. It would be like trying to pluck someone off the street and expecting them to understand Advanced Pure Mathematics, after reading one book about it.

Until universities recognises the importance of including "how to teach reading" in their initial teacher training courses (and I don't mean a cursory day or less) there will always be those who cling to the "handbook" because they don't feel secure to do otherwise.

If you actually read my posts, maizieD, you would see I think phonics is a good way of teaching reading, so absolutely no axe to grind there. I am not one of its detractors. I do object to you talking about the "unlucky majority" and "lucky minority" however. And mrz has given plenty of reasons herself as to why she and I might object to that.

My only query is whether it is really true that some teachers can't ever bring themselves to say the names of letters. Would they never say that, eg, the letters ai together (naming said letters) can say ay as in maid or eh as in said? How do they introduce that letter combination? Do they encourage the children not to even see it as two separate letters, but a new type of symbol????? And if that's how they do it, then how do they talk about words where the sound is affected by an e, where the e is not right next to the letters it is having an effect on? It all sounds so complicated to always avoid saying a letter's name that as a parent, I would be put off trying to help my children with reading at all if they needed help, for fear of confusing them. How on earth would I help them sound out words, if I didn't know myself how I was and wasn't allowed to talk about the sounds and which letters made them???? Yet we all, I hope, know from the mistakes of the 1970s, that telling parents to butt out of their children's education and leave it to the experts was a disastrous idea and has resulted in a heavy campaign in recent years to try and bully and nag parents back into taking an interest and getting involved with reading, etc, at home.... Now, I'm sure mrz has said at some point that she helps parents with understanding how the teaching is being done so that they can help, but I don't think that happens everywhere, certainly not effectively. If it were done effectively, frankly you wouldn't get OPs like this one, anyway, would you???... So an OP like this one is a very good example of teachers doing a rather bad job one way or the other, by failing to understand the importance of the parents' understanding and attitude to help progress.

I don't know any teachers who can't bring themselves to say the names of letters or indeed any children who don't know the names of the letters of the alphabet rabbitstew

"would they never say that, eg, the letters ai together (naming said letters) can say ay as in maid or eh as in said? How do they introduce that letter combination? Do they encourage the children not to even see it as two separate letters, but a new type of symbol?????"

Personally I would never say that that letters say anything ...
children are taught that is the spelling (and yes letter names would be used not sounds) for the sound /ay/ in day and is the spelling for the sound /ay/ in eight and is the spelling for the sound /ie/ in light .

And my "lucky minority" children still had intensive phonics tuition at primary school and I did not object to them having that, despite the fact it didn't help them learn to read, because I did believe it might help them with their spelling and because, as a natural reader myself, I knew that I made use of an innate understanding of the things they were being taught, so it made sense to me that it was a good way to teach - making explicit what to me was implicit. So don't say that people who have natural ability at reading don't know what good reading looks like, because that just seems silly to me. Understanding how good readers do it is very useful, I would have though, rather than dismissing them as a lucky minority who don't know what they are talking about.

Thank you, mrz. So you do say the letter names, you just don't use the word say.

My "lucky" minority son had no phonics instruction (because he could already read fluently) and still wasn't writing in Y6

Teaching a child that /a/ /i/ says /ay/ would be as silly as saying that the letter A in Amy says /a/ and the letter says /y/.

Your ds isn't a good reader, then - he is a good decoder. Both my children are good readers.

I don't see much difference between saying "the spelling ai in the following words says ...." and "the spelling ai in the following words sounds like..."

No rabbitstew he isn't a good reader he is an excellent reader. RA of 14+ at the beginning of KS1, Level 6 at the end of KS2.

But I wouldn't say "the spelling says ..."

So is it just spelling he has trouble with, then, mrz?

Or structuring his thoughts for writing?

My son is autistic rabbitstew

In what way would phonics have helped your ds? Or are you saying that phonics wouldn't have made any difference to your ds and that's not how he learnt to read, anyway?

I believe (and so do numerous EPs) that had my son been taught phonics it would have helped with his writing/spelling/confidence. Perhaps had the phonics screening check been around his difficulties would have been acknowledged by school before the age of 14.

That's a shame, mrz. Has he been/is he being taught phonics, now? My ds1, who was diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum and then undiagnosed, has always been exceptionally good at spelling and writing, not just reading. I don't know, therefore, whether he actually needed any explicit teaching of phonics to help him, but I'm quite certain it never did him any harm. Ds2 is less good at spelling than ds1 and I think phonics is definitely helping him.

No he was resistant to phonics at age 14 he had become disengaged with school. His ASD wasn't identified until he left school.