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.

rabbit I think schools can rely altogether too much on volunteers for reading, which is fine as long as teachers do hear children read on occasion.

Too often questions are asked about specifics and the teacher does not know because the TA / volunteer hears readers , changes books etc (like they never speak together ).

Sometimes, as a parent, you just know comments in the reading diary are not read. They are obviously skimmed to check you are 'doing your bit' at home. This would not be so bad apart from the importance given to practising at home and writing in the diary by teachers. Added to this if you question what they are doing re. reading book levels etc, evasive would be a nice way of putting it!

My recent experience suggests that rabbitstew is right far too many schools do teach phonics very badly and it won't change until universities get their act together and improve ITT content and schools start to invest in high quality training rather than handing some poor teacher a tatty copy of Letters & Sounds (because it is free) and expecting them to get on with it.

mrz I think you are correct re. the universities.

This wastes money because it makes schools absolute sitting ducks for commercial companies selling 'reading scheme' resources. These may look good (lots of lovely data and easy tracking) but are totally inflexible, costly and do not necessarily match the national Curriculum.

Then when they do not match an individual child's development, as a parent you have to find out about the NC, find out about the scheme, on top of knowing what your child can do, just to converse with the teacher in any way which is meaningful.

My sisters and I all learned to read during the late 60s and early 70s through phonics (we went to a convent school in Ireland and my mother reinforced phonics at home). I am the only one of the sisters who can spell. My two sisters had varying degrees of difficulty and I think if sufficient attention had been paid to dyslexia at that time they could have been helped. Of my parents, dad couldn't spell to save his life but mum could tackle anything.

DS went through a phase where he spelled words beginning with TR as if they started with a CH sound -- truck = chruck and train = chrain. I don't know where he was getting the CH from but at least he was consistent. In his case I think he wasn't hearing the TR sound clearly. When he started reading more fluently and was exposed to TR words in texts he corrected his mistake. Another factor in correcting this mistake was encountering the words in lists of spellings for weekly spelling tests.

My DCs went to elementary school in the US where a combination of Dolch words and phonics were used with great success to teach reading and spelling. Dolch is a list of 220 'service words' (excluding nouns, which have a separate 95 word list) that readers need to be familiar with in order to arrive at fluency. I know the phonics purists look down their noses at Dolch words /sight words as most of them are straightforward phonetically and could be approached that way, but the beauty of learning them separate from gradual phonetic approach to the written language is that because they crop up so frequently they allow fast access to text once learned. Children can read books that are more interesting than the average very limited phonics reader.

In order to learn spellings and reproduce the words with pencil and paper, the letter names need to be known. Otherwise 'skool' should be just as acceptable as 'school' in a sentence. The DCs learned letter names and letter sounds in the same year.

I'm not sure how knowing the letter names is essential for spelling the word school correctly.

If I knew how to write the word school it wouldn't matter whether or not I knew the letter names (I would just write the letters not say the names) and if I didn't know how to write it know the letter names would not provide a single clue to anything like the correct spelling.

The type of phonics you were taught in the 70s was very different to the methods used in schools in UK now which is one of the reasons I suggest parents avoid US phonics packages.

Euphemia - I don't actually think it's that unreasonable to assume, having volunteered in a variety of schools in London, in two different boroughs, and outside London in two different counties, that, if none of them taught phonics effectively, this might be part of a wider problem rather than an unbelievable coincidence that I only ever volunteered in schools that couldn't teach phonics.

If you give letters sound names then those become their names.

So school becomes

su cu hu oh oh lu

those are the letters in the word school. You can do stupid things like join the letters together and give those joinings stupid names too, but it doesn't change the fact that the word school has six letters in it which all have to be identified by a name of some sort.

I'm still reading and spelling very successfully and so are my classmates who are now doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, civil servants, etc. .

If you didn't remember or know the letter names for 'school' then 'skool' would look just as good as 'school' when you tried writing it. It you learned it as s-c-h-o-o-l using letter names, then writing it would be easier than a process that involved figuring out whether it was one of the rare words that wasn't straightforward, with nothing to jog your memory except a dim recollection of seeing it written down somewhere as the sound of it would lead you to assume it had a K or a hard C and nothing else.

I don't think I was actually using letter names until I was in the Juniors.

I remembered by writing spellings out or using my initial, vaguely phonic alphabet, or I just remembered from imagining the word in print, as I had read it, before then.

I did learn some basic letter combinations in the 70's.

I don't think it's possible to say children learn to read and spell without ever knowing the alphabet or letter names or using memorisation of words as a strategy in spelling. Even if a school follows a pure phonics approach and avoids letter names it has no control over what a child is exposed to at home and in the community.

'If you didn't remember or know the letter names for 'school' then 'skool' would look just as good as 'school' when you tried writing it.'

That makes no sense.

By that I meant - if you are spelling it phonetically, 'skool' is a perfectly good attempt. But it is wrong.

If you thought 'school' was pronounced 'ss-chool' (ch as in chair) then you would be pronouncing it wrong. At some point you have to suspend disbelief and accept that in this case CH is pronounced K and you have to remember this when you go to write it down. You have to remember the letters to use and the order in which to use them, and the sound of the word will not help you unless you distort it significantly in your head. You need the letter names.

I still think that reading and writing relate to both sounds and symbols and that each symbol needs a name to make it feel less like a random squiggle that produces an array of different sounds - something to identify that symbol shape each time you see it. The name of the letter symbol relates to its shape, which is unchanging (unless you want to be told off for messy, inconsistent handwriting), it does not relate to the letter symbol's sound, which does change according to the context in which it is written. That's why, when spelling something out for others, it is kinder to spell using the names of the letters, because then the person copying down what you tell them will then be certain to copy down the word you are spelling out for them correctly, because they will have copied down the symbol shapes you told them, as identified by their names. They can then convert those symbol shapes into sounds using phonics in order to read what you have spelt out for them. Surely, when learning to write, therefore, it helps to know the names of the letters you are learning to form? And the government wants children learning to form letter shapes before they even start school, doesn't it? So surely you have to learn to identify the names of the letters BEFORE you have gone through an entire phonics programme and learnt to read fluently?

malenky I remember what it looked like on the page, visually, from reading. I used my knowledge of letter sounds to write a word I did not know how to spell. I knew the alphabet as a song, loosely, but would have to work out the proper names for letters by singing the whole thing in my head until I got to the correct one. I was more familiar with the first 'phonic' alphabet I was taught, ah, buh, cuh etc.

PE are letters names or do children do pu eh?

^ so I didn't learn the names first. I could read and write before I started school.

math - but that's nothing to do with letter names.

You could go through exactly the same process learning with letter sounds as letter names. Nothing to stop you.

There are multiple possible combinations of letters that could be valid phonetically but not orthographically, but using letter names surely wouldn't provide the magic answer 'ah, it must be 'school' not 'skool', would they? It's just that you have to learn some combinations are phonetically acceptable but happen to be incorrect spellings.

But daftdame - I think being taught that A says ah, B says buh, etc, is now frowned upon, isn't it?... Because you are neither giving the letter its proper name nor necessarily identifying its proper sound within the word. You are, basically, just giving it the wrong name.

learnandsay Ironically we had gym, sound and movement and games.

rabbit it is my post was just by way of explanation. Phonics are also taught now, with or without letter names it would seem.

I don't think I was disadvantaged by not knowing the letter names, until later, personally speaking.

KansasCityOctopus - you'll just be told your child is one of the lucky minority who isn't confused by that sort of thing...

You're right, malenky; in order to spell you just have to remember the correct sequences of letters for each of the words that you want to spell. How you do that is entirely up to you. You can scratch them all on your armpit and call each letter a hagoo if it helps. But no matter how you do it you have to come up with the correct sequence. I happen to think that giving the letters names and remembering the sequence of letter names in each word is the simplest method.