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.

learnandsay But the letters 'ch' can make a 'k' sound in school or scholar.

Well, I'm now feeling confused by the explanations as to how the squiggles in front of children (what adults call letters, but which children shouldn't have names for until they can read) can ever make sense to children! Particularly if there is absolutely no pattern to any of it.

Because the word school already has a perfectly good cu sound in it with just a letter c. It's just stupid to add the aich and call it the sound cu.

It's better to say that the word school has a bloody great aich in the middle of it. It's unfortunate but it's life. Don't forget it when you spell the word school.

Do the children know what "diagraph" means? Or is that just another complicated word designed to confuse everyone? If explaining how to teach reading is that complicated, I'm not surprised it's so badly done by so many people.

So they can cope with digraphs but not with the letter "C".

I guess it depends on who you're teaching. Mine seem to be picking ui up with no problems.

Euphemia - I think teaching it badly is easy and that's how most schools do it, with or without phonics.

Also, you are not inspiring me with hope that all schools will become good at teaching phonics any time soon - you make it sound far too difficult. Which isn't good teaching, really, is it, if you can't teach others how to teach?

My evidence for what?

If you spell using sounds you're going to end up with some things which don't make sense like "school has got a hu in it." Well, it clearly hasn't, but there is an aich in it, clearly.

If you're spelling 'school' using sounds you say /k/ (not 'cu') and write 'ch'. Children manage to grasp this quite easily.

If you are insisting on assigning a 'name' of some sort to every letter in the word it is no more illogical to say that school has a /h/ in it than that it has an aitch in it.

I rather think that LandS is a potential convert to marsha's cause...

the word school already has a perfectly good cu sound in it with just a letter c. It's just stupid to add the aich and call it the sound cu.

Etymology. It's because the word comes from Greek and that's how the /k/ sound was written in Greek. Likewise chemist, chloride, chlorine, christian, christmas, psychiatrist etc. etc. they all have a bloody great aitch in them which isn't sounded as /h/.

Are you going to continually going to give your dd the impression that written English has no rhyme or reason to it?

learnandsayand rabbit I think it actually appears worse when you see the separate sounds written /x/ in terms of sounding out purposes. We are so used to seeing the language as written. As an aside with the OED way of representing pronunciation I have to look up every time, if I need to refer to it.

When you are taught the letters for example 'ch' make a (person makes a sound similar to steam train) sound it makes sense. It did for me in the 1970's, even with all the 'mixed methods' around.

It is one of the patterns we learn and can apply to other (although not all) words. Like 'magic' 'e', although not really magic and not used any more, it gave me an idea of what was written.

When splitting words into composite sounds whether children know all their letter sounds concurrently to me doesn't really matter. I do think having to learn all the letter names is a bit of an aside, as you primarily have to be thinking in terms of sounds when learning to read and write. When this is written you say this sound or when you want to say this sound you can write this.

Personally I always knew the names existed (like the Latin names for flowers) but knew I would not be expected to remember them until later on in my life.

What is the first sound in Christmas, Christopher Chrysalis what is the second sound in scheme, schism & scholar ... and how is that sound represented in writing .... just because you don't understand it learnandsay doesn't mean that it is wrong.

"So they can cope with digraphs but not with the letter "C"."

If they had to factor in that the digraph is "see" "aitch" at the same time they probably wouldn't cope.

^ that should be letter names concurrently ...duh!

My evidence for that is: I've volunteered in quite a lot of schools now and seen all sorts of ways of teaching phonics that mrz would howl in disapproval at, and inappropriate reading books given to children (ie books they clearly neither understand nor can decode properly), and a whole mismatch of techniques used by people to help the children when they read with them (including parental strategies, which can only be wrong given the degree of complication apparently involved in doing it properly... which does to me seem unfortunately reminiscent of the 1970s when parents were told to back off and leave it to the experts, who then showed their inexpertise in the matter by failing to teach lots of children to read properly). It also comes from mumsnet: lots of parents not thinking phonics teaching is working for their children, or not knowing how to help their children themselves because they don't understand what their children are being taught so can't clarify things for their confused children. I haven't yet been into a school that appears to teach phonics in the way described by mrz.

You are welcome to visit my school and see any of our staff teaching phonics ( as I describe it) if you are ever in the area rabbitstew.

Thanks, mrz.
So you've worked in most schools, have you, Euphemia?