I don't understand phonics and reading

[Catinthebed]

Ds is P1 Northern Ireland. Didn't know any letters or sounds when he started due to speech and language difficulty.

Has now done a number of phonics and had a few picture only readers. Today he got his first reading with a word in it and he knows it say "look". However he hasn't done L or K as a phonic.

He is Dc 4 and I am bit lost as none of the rest did phonics and it's complicated by speech and language complications.

Should I teach him to sound out "look" or is that going backwards given as he already knows it?

and no maizieD our Eastern European pupils have all developed local accents

Northernshores

should I be encouraging my daughter to learn some common words at all? Or expect her to pick them up with repeated sounding out in her books?

Many children learn some common words by sight (e.g. Tesco) long before they start learning to read. This knowledge can be a very useful basis for teaching them decoding.

There is nothing whatsoever wrong with picking up words with repeated sounding out. After the initial phonics stage of laborious decoding, that's exactly how children learn to read: with repeated exposure they recognise them as wholes and don't need to decode them any more; they can read them by sight, instantly. That's the final aim of all reading instruction.

And as everyone knows, many English words have a spooky look: tough, cough, through..., so phonics is of limited use in becoming a really good reader.
Masha Bell

HF words

High frequency words are words which we use most of all.
Of 100 most HF ones, 42 are phonically not totally simple (in descending order from the most frequent):
^ he, of, the, to, was,
all, be, are, have, one, said, we, you, by, my, call, before, come, could, do, down, into, look, me, more, now, only, other, right, she, some, their, there, two, when, want, were, what, where, which, who, your.^

The other 58 simpler:
a, and, as, at, had, has, that, an, back, can,
in, is, it, if, did, him, his, with, big, little, this, will, first,

get, them, then, well, went, her
not, on, from, off, so, go, no, or, for,
but, much, must, up, just,
they,
been, here, see, came, made, make, I, like,
our, out, about,

new, over, old.

But the main pronunciations for some graphemesl, such as 'ere' in 'here', often get undermined by irregular ones (were, there) and make even basic phonics trickier than could be.

ThisIsBULLSHIT - don't worry, I get what you are saying! As a teacher, you teach the sounds but some kids do just learn the shape of words by themselves and use this as a reading strategy (even though the teacher hasn't taught them to do this or even encourage it)! I have never heard of a teacher teaching children to recognise the shape of words, some children just do it and it helps them!

Also, as adults we don't sound out all the sounds in each word when reading because we recognise the words from memory...so I wouldn't discourage a child from doing this either.

Of course we wouldn't discourage a child from recognising words but we wouldn't expect them to memorise over a million words (approx number in English language) by sight when they can learn the 180ish spellings for the 44 sounds they need to read and write. The whole aim of phonics is to reach "automatcity" but to have the skills and knowledge to fall back on when you meet unfamiliar words.

"As a teacher, you teach the sounds but some kids do just learn the shape of words by themselves and use this as a reading strategy" as a teacher I am definitely NOT saying that!

I would like to add that many children learn to read without being taught any phonics, or with only very minimal explicit phonics instruction.

They work out the basic letter-to-sound correspondences for themselves, from learning to read a few dozen words like 'stop, hospital, post office' and some rhymes and poems which they know by heart. They realise quickly that many English phonic correspondences are variable and so concentrate instead on imprinting the look of whole words on their memory. - For those who are able to learn to read with a mixture of phonics and imprinting, this is a very efficient way of doing it.

All children have to learn to apply phonics more rigorously when they learn to write, but beyond the most basic level, a good visual memory provides a big advantage with the likes of 'blue, shoe, flew, through, too...' as well.

Having a good visual memory is very advantageous for both learning to read and write English. Discouraging children who are lucky to be born with it from making good use of it is silly.

Masha that's really interesting - I wonder why "he" is the top word when "she" is 30th!

I have heard that we do tend to take the shape of a word into account when reading it. THAT'S WHY READING IN CAPITALS IS MUCH SLOWER BECAUSE ALL OF THE WORDS ARE BASICALLY RECTANGULAR.

And of course, it looks like you're shouting :)

and yet in other English speaking countries it is common for children to be taught using capitals first.

The idea that word shape helps has long been discredited, quote “Word shape is no longer a viable model of word recognition. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word’s component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word.”

Surely Masha it is better that the child is taught the sound/letter combinations rather than having to work them out for themselves?
Quicker and easier.
We don't say to children that 3+5=8 and 4+6=10 now work out what '+' means and what '8' means etc.

You said, "I just hope the Weejies are not teaching him to say "definEHtly"," Euphemia, and it reminds me of the old joke: that 'sex' is what people who live in Hampstead have their coal delivered in!

Some children manage to work out the relationship between sounds and written symbols for themselves but others won't and unfortunately there isn't anyway to identify with children will fall into each category.

LittleMissGreen
it is better that the child is taught the sound/letter combinations rather than having to work them out for themselves?

Yes, for those who cannot do it themselves, like one of my 3 oldest grandchildren. They take longer to learn to read and need more help.

But for many children the laborious plodding through phonics for reading is largely a waste of time.

Two of my granddaughters did what they were asked at school but learned to read mainly at home, with help from their parents, lots of encouragement and a little help from grandparents, but mainly doing lots of reading aloud, by themselves last thing at night. The one who enjoys reading most, reads most and is the best reader. (Chicken and egg?)

I still ask them to read to me occasionally, to see how they are progressing. At 8 and 10, the only words that make them stumble are ones with daft spellings which they have not met, or met only rarely before: marine, chaotic, ravenous...

They always try to decode those logically first, by analogy with the main English spelling patterns (define, chat, raven) and get tripped up. It's only when they recognise them from repeated exposure that they eventually read them straight off.

So in the end it comes down to recognition of whole words. Phonics can be a stage towards it, but it is not the only or most efficient way to learn to read English. If I remember rightly, Mrz's son was a fluent reader by age 3 without any teaching whatsoever?

It's only laborious if you teach it badly masha and for those fortunate few who are able to work it out for themselves it is a slower process than implicit teaching

No masha you remember incorrectly my son was a fluent reader before the age of 3 but that is a co morbidity of HFA he also struggled with writing/spelling throughout primary.

But for many children the laborious plodding through phonics for reading is largely a waste of time.

Probably far less laborious and less of a waste of time than your favoured 'whole word' method, marsha

Jackie Masterson, Maureen Dixon and I carried out a training experiment (Stuart,Masterson & Dixon, 2000) to see how easy it was for five-year-old beginning readers to store new words in sight vocabulary from repeated shared reading of the same texts. It turned out to be much harder than we expected! We tried to teach the children 16 new words, which were printed in red to make them identifiable as the words to be learned.
There was one of the red words on each page. After the children had seen and read each red word 36 times, no child was able to read all 16 of them, and the average number of words read correctly was five. We were quite shocked by this, because we had made a database of all the words from all the books the children were reading in school, and so we knew how many different words each child had been exposed to in their first term reading at school. This ranged from 39 to 277 different words, with a mean of 126.
Hardly any of these words occurred frequently in any individual child’s pool of vocabulary: on average fewer than four words occurred more than 20 times – yet 36 repetitions had not been enough to guarantee that children would remember a word.
When we tested children’s ability to read words they’d experienced more than 20 times in their school reading, on average they could read only one word correctly.

From a book chapter written by Prof. Stuart

Maizie
I don't favour any particular teaching method.

For beginners of average ability, phonics is undoubtedly the best one to start with, but some children need only minimal or no explicit phonics teaching.

Because of the nature of English spelling, phonics is of little use beyond the first year of learning to read and write, as even the Rose review concluded.

As long as a child learns to read, it does not matter a jot by what method.

Parents should certainly not worry if their child can read fluently but fails the phonics test. To fluent readers, the phonics test is a completely irrelevant waste of time.

For beginners of average ability, phonics is undoubtedly the best one to start with

Doesn't that all depend on what we mean by start? Surely we all start with our abc (some of us using the phonics sounds some using the letter names and some using a combination of both.) Next comes the concept of blending, which I'm sure some children understand immediately and others require persuasion of. Supposing a child appears to naturally understand blending (or put non-phonetically, spelling) then the amount of phonic assistance required will vary depending on the child. My children were perfectly happy to recognise short words in entire books, like Dr Seuss. But reading dinosaur names was (and still is) a completely different process. My youngest calls out some pretty ugly-looking dinosaur names instantly. But I'm convinced it's because she's looking at the picture of the creature, not its name. She's too young for me to experiment on her. So for the moment I'll let her continue with it unexamined.

And, once again Masha - how many children have you taught to read, using any method?

marsha, you're completely wrong in everything that you write. I do hope that Mnetters have more sense than to listen to you.

columngollum of course all children are different and some learn to blend and segment with little effort (naturally if you like) others need lots of repetition before it clicks.
Experience, backed by research tells me that children using letter names or combination of letter names and sounds struggle.

I suppose it sounds like a truism, but for an individual child that might depend on how rapidly she learns to read. I don't know how necessary it is to know the letter names when learning to read if you learn phonetically, (or even using whole words.) Where explanations are required I'm sure the teacher needs to call the letters something.

But, say the child learns at such a pace that she has learned to read more or less anything placed in front of her before she starts writing to any real extent, then when she's writing, the letters have to have names of some sort. In my brief experience, as long as both child and teacher know what letter is being referred to the name itself isn't so important. We use names for letters in certain circumstances that no one else would recognise, but we know what we mean.

You don't need letter names at all they are just a convention we use.
Why do the letters have to have names for writing?

In phonics decoding for reading and encoding for spelling at taught together.