Supporting a good reader who struggles with sounding out/blending new words

[DebbieFiderer]

DD1 is in Y1, and a pretty good reader (Gold level), but I think she has mainly learned to read by sight/memory, meaning that she struggles occasionally with new words. She has a bad habit of guessing what the word should be, sometimes by looking at the first sound then substituting a word she knows which starts with that sound, sometimes by just making up a new (non-existent!) word which shares some of the same letters as the word she is trying to read. I tell her to sound it out, which is fine, she can sound out each letter, but she can't go from there to blending the full word if it is long (short words are fine).

We have tried breaking it down into segments, but she still can't make the leap from there to the full word without a lot of help. For instance, the latest book we read had the word 'desperate' - hard enough using the phonics she has learned so far, but even if she sounded the last syllable as ate rather than at, she couldn't join des-per-ate into a word until I said them for her. I am planning on raising this at parents' evening tomorrow, but in the meantime, does anyone have any ideas of how I can support her at home?

On a slightly separate note, can anyone point me to a link where I can get an idea of what is required at various NC levels, specifically for reading?

No they don't! If they ever give coelocanth, then they explain how to read the word. And it would be given in a presentation about them. L&S does identify different species and sub-species of animals, you know. Just because one is an Indian Elephant and the other an African, that doesn't mean all children have to be content to call them simply elephant because a picture can't be any more precise than that!

If they explain how to read the word it isn't Look & Say ... the clue is in the label!

Um, let me think for a minute.....

perhaps by reading it first, maybe? How do you explain how to kick a soccer penalty? By breaking it down into digraphs?

Are we talking PE or reading columngollum?

Is this wilfull obtuseness?

My list (starting Noel) has only two words that my DD hasn't come across, one of which I doubt any of you have come across before today (I could be wrong).

MaizieD came up with a new list starting amoeba, which I then said my DD had come across 2 of those words (phoenix and coelacanth).

So mrz why are you sceptical about my DD doing something I never said she had done (i.e. come across all of the words in MaizieD's list) I don't know - hopefully you just read the thread a bit too quickly.

And to clarify the L&S in my previous post stood for Letters and Sounds NOT look and say (ffs no flash cards in my house it's been phonics all the way).

Finally, and at risk of getting repetitive, you (general you) are still missing my point. Adults use phonics too, not just children. I was taught with look and say (I think, 70s child recalling Peter and Jane) but in the mean time I've learnt phonics with my DD. Nowhere, and I've looked a lot, have I come across a phonic alphabet code that includes /ee/ for oe, or /i/ for u. I have even gone through the special tome mrz linked to, listing the 180 odd spellings for sounds and guess what, loads are missing, including the two I just mentioned.

This is also relevant for children too - I've had to teach my DD the best synthetic phonics programme I can because school hasn't. And I don't know if there are other words where an u represents /i/ as in busy because there's no comprehensive list of the words that use rare(ish) spellings. I'd like to be able to say - ah that's a fairly rare spelling but here are some other words using it. Of course it's all fine for the common correspondences but there are enough rare ones that I sometimes loose the will to say yet again, in this word ...., as if that's the only word that's like it.

Last example, from reading book tonight (lime level) irrigation - sounded out no problem then nutrients sounded out as n/u/t/r/igh/n/t/s I don't know how many possible 'phonically correct' permutations you can come up with but rather than have her struggling through oo and yoo etc. I sounded it out for her. She then independently looked it up in the glossary and then we chatted about the meaning a bit more. The problem with this approach where I sound out is she now knows nutrients but not how or when to apply /ee/ to i because I don't know and I've yet to find something systematic and useful for complex, long words, with the rarer (I say rare, some are really common but just not referred to at all). Which is almost as bad as look and say because she's just learnt one word and can't apply the knowledge elsewhere. Surely that's a problem?

Column - I think kicking a penalty is a great analogy ... for the benefits of phonics .... what coach worth his salt would send a beginner out to kick the penalty. In real life they first spend an age learning lots of skills, small concise exercises to work on one specific skill component at a time, which eventually can all be put together to use in a penalty shoot out. Coaches don't just sends kids out onto a football pitch to play a game and expect them to learn to play by only watching and playing matches (which would be more like a look and say equivalent).

And mrz I knew you'd bite - sometime in the new year I will lay down my phonics screening check for adults gauntlet and see who's brave enough to try it and not to cheat by using Google ... and yes it will have pseudo words as well as real words and if you can prove me wrong and use just your phonic knowledge to provide the correct pronunciations then I will forever hold my peace (and ask you to share all of your knowledge)

tiredbutnotweary do your daughters school reading books contain the words coelacanth /ee/ oestrogen /e/ toea /oi/?

Your phonic screening check will of course depend on your phonic knowledge

tiredbutnotweary,

Perhaps there is, indeed, a place for a list of the more uncommon correspondences to help parents in your situation.

Your particular query about 'i' in irrigation - you will actually find 'i' as /ee/ in a great many multisyllable words, in fact, I've just written one in 'multisyllable'. You will also find it in words which end with 'y' (happy) but in which the 'y' changes to an 'i' when a suffix is added 'happiness'. It isn''t really uncommon at all. It does seem to me to be possible that you are using texts for reading which are in advance of your child's phonic knowledge if you find such a common correspondence to be unusual.

I am not for one moment saying that you are doing anything wrong, you have bright and interested child who you want to share knowledge with, but in that situation you are bound to come across words which she cannot decode without help. In that case you tell her that it is code that she hasn't yet been taught but 'in this word 'x' is spelling the /y/ sound'.

The list of 'oe' words you gave us was interesting but it mostly was uses of the 'o' /'e' combination which she should cover during normal systematic phonics teaching.

What I would suggest, until that chart of 'tricky graphemes for parents' is produced (and don't, for heaven's sake look at anything marsha produces because her grasp of letter/sound correspondences is very shaky), is that you take a paragraph of text from an adult book, newspaper, magazine..anything that is fairly literate, and have a go at analysing the words into their component sound spellings. I'm sure that you are able to segment the spoken word into phonemes, just do that with the words and then look to see how each phoneme is spelled; dot under each 1 letter spelling and underline those of 2 or more letters. I think you'll find that whatever text you choose the percentage of rare correspondences in it will be very low. Or, in other words, you'll be amazed at just how 'regularly' most English words are spelled!

Not only that, but you may identify some 'rare' correspondences and be primed ready for when you encounter them in reading with your dd. If you're not sure the 'rule' is 'Identify the sound spellings that you know in the word and the letters that are left will be the spelling of the remaining sound'. e.g the word 'light' has 3 sounds /l/, /ie/ /t/. The spellings of the /l/ and /t/ are obvious, so the /ie/ must be spelled 'igh' because that's what you have left. (and if you're wondering, the 'gh' is the spelling for a gutteral sound that we don't say any more, think the Scottish pronunciation of 'lough'.)

MaizieD Thank you

You mean nutrient not irrigation surely? We say happiness and irrigation with a short /i/, unlike nutrients.

DD knows the /ee/ and /igh/ for y & has done since reception and they are both common and regular sounds for y at the end of words. I do agree the i representing ee is common in multisyllabic words (material springs to mind as she's already encountered that) but you say that children are taught such correspondences during their synthetic phonics teaching at schools.

If this is true, what programme are these schools using? I mean you say yourself that a list of these correspondences and/or rather the words using them doesn't exist and suggest I do so myself (I'm afraid I've already started hence asking for help as I can't believe I, a lay person, am having to do it). But you also make it sound as if teachers already have access to such a list. If teachers do have access (and surely they'd need it to be able to teach the rarer correspondences) then it already exists so why do I need to spend my time doing it?

Maizie please will you specify exactly which of the correspondences in my list are taught as alternative spellings because as some (if not most) don't even exist on the alphabetic codes I've seen then I am surprised to hear this. I know RWI, L&S, Phonics International, Floppy's Phonics and SoundsWrite.

beckclasswiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/SpellRead+Lexicon.pdf not a complete list and currently under review but a good starting point

Sorry mrz meant to add DD has NOT encountered two words from my list (the last 2 - but she has encountered all the rest from my list) and conversely she has encountered only 2 words from Maizie's list (Phoenix and coelacanth but none of the rest). Sorry if that's clear as mud, it's the best I can manage at the mo!

I know my test will depend on my own knowledge - I am always learning & will gen up further!

Maizie these kinds of words come from her lime school books - her reading for pleasure books are standard Rainbow Magic, mermaid this & that, puffin books etc. and are far less challenging (as they should be when for fun)!

we are all learning all the time

You mean nutrient not irrigation surely? We say happiness and irrigation with a short /i/, unlike nutrients.

Sorry, was I misreading your post? Anyway, I would say happiness and irrigation with an /ee/. It's a matter of accents as much as anything else. Just go with what is right for your accent. We all read the same words and they all mean the same thing, however we pronounce them

The words on your list?

noel /oa/e, poem /oa/i I'd say that they were both /oe/ /e/ but perhaps it the accent thing. This isn't explicitly taught as far as I know, but help with pronunciation should be given when they are encountered. Most children will remember that they are 'different'. Though don't lots of people joke about reading 'pomes'?

shoe /oo/ An unusual spelling of /oo/ (moon) Taught when encountered, as above.

does /u/ doer /oo/er These are parts of the verb 'to do' and would be taught when prefixes and suffixes are introduced. Incidentally taught if introduced earlier.

coelacanth /ee/ oestrogen /e/ Once again, I'd have these as the same /ee/ sound.

toea /oi/ Definitely a cheat! What does it mean and how many children are going to meet this word in their everyday reading?

If you are interested there is a research paper here on a computer model of learning to read which sets out to simulate a 'self teaching' strategy. The theory proposed by a number of reading researchers is that children start 'self teaching' once they have started acquiring letter/sound correspondence knowledge. Certainly the computer seemed to be able to do it with about the same amount of 'external' help that you might expect a child to get.

rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1634/20120397.full

The interesting thing about phonics taught children is that most of them do self teach once they understand how the 'system' works. It is inherently logical, even though our spelling makes it more complex than ion other languages. (watch marsha quote that at me in a future post)

I am curious, the scheme books your dd is reading aren't 'decodables' are they? Do you think they are the right level for her or too challenging?

Lime band would indicate a child reading at NC level 3C maizieD

That's amazing, mrz. The Y7s I worked with who were supposedly L3 (some even L4 for 'reading') couldn't have read words like 'irrigation'.

Sorry for delay, having lots of computer problems so this is also roughly written as computer keeps crashing.

mrz – it’s good to hear it’s being updated as I find some aspects quite confusing. For example the idea that because ‘of’ is used so much, ‘f’ representing /v/ is regular. The same for ‘uy’ representing /igh/ because the only two words this sound/ spelling correspondence appears in are guy and buy, it is stated that these are therefore regular.
I find the premise that because a word is frequent its unique or extremely rare spelling becomes regular.

To me this conflates regularity of usage with regularity of spelling / sound correspondence and I don’t think this is accurate or helpful. This is then followed with the idea that as soon as a spelling / sound correspondence is no longer unique, i.e. is used for literally more than one word, it is not unusual. Seriously? I’m fairly sure the scale from unique to usual has a few steps in between. Say, extremely rare for 2 to 10 words, then rare for 11 to 30 words and so on.

The idea that if there are just two words with a particular sound / spelling correspondence, the fact that they are frequently used words the spellings are now seen as usual for that sound (when they clearly are not) seems nothing short of bizarre to me, and extremely unhelpful for someone trying to unpick the code because it doesn’t come intuitively.

In addition, despite listing a range of what I (just using plain common sense) would categorise as rare spellings / sound correspondences (i.e. where say less than 30 individual words or less use that particular combination) the document doesn’t list what I would consider more common ones. For example where is ‘a’ spelling /i/, as in cottage, palace and many other words? Or how about the ‘i’ spelling the /schwa/, as in fossil, pencil etc.?

Maizie, it’s fine to say go with what’s right for your accent, but how does that help DD know when a new word contains a long ee, as in nutrient or a short i as in happiness (which is how we say it). Of course if the word is in her vocabulary and is phonetically regular (such as happiness) it’s no problem.

The problem is words that are not phonetically regular. At no stage has she been taught (other than by me) that ‘i’ could ever equate to an ee. Even though this is quite a regular spelling for a lot of names ending in ‘ia’. It is actually quite a frequent correspondence so why haven’t I seen it referred to elsewhere? Even Phonics international’s complex code chart only lists it with ne added to it (as in ‘ine’ = /ee/n/), but at least there is an acknowledgment that there is a basic and fairly transparent code, as well as a more opaque complex one (although I would term this, usual spelling / sound correspondence and then progressively rarer ones).

How does phonics help a child to decode ancient, where ‘ci’ represents /ch/? Or how about the first time a child comes across digestion – unless you’ve been explicitly taught that whilst most (all?) tion words are /sh/u/n/, stion are /ch/u/n/?

Toea is not a trick word (as if!) – it is to illustrate my point that as adults we need phonics to read new words too – but in actual fact it does only take you so far. I don’t think phonics will much help my appalling spelling because I don’t have a good visual memory, I am always trying to spell things phonetically and there are just too many possibilities for me to remember anything other than the most regular or the words I use most frequently.

As for that computer model, I can’t help wondering if that’s representative of the 80% of children that learn to read whatever method that’s taught, or the other 20%?

Sorry if this sounds negative, I don't mean it to be, I just really want to be able to support my DD (and myself too) in a systematic way, not on a word by word basis ... for example, are really and theatre the only two words where 'ea' represents /ear/ or are there more....?

"Toea is not a trick word (as if!) – it is to illustrate my point that as adults we need phonics to read new words too" not a trick but not an English word either

"How does phonics help a child to decode ancient, where ‘ci’ represents /ch/?" 'ci' doesn't represent /ch/ (there isn't a /ch/ sound in the word ancient it's /sh/)

"At no stage has she been taught (other than by me) that ‘i’ could ever equate to an ee." perhaps you should ask her teacher as she should have been
adios Anita casino idiom chilli Maori alias arias cerise iliac corgi Ian
mini albino audio curious machine deli Miami alien avian Denise odium Gobi sushi amigo axiom Elliot opium khaki Toni amino bikini icier suite kiwi Vicki (from that special tome you have gone through that I linked to p80)

As for that computer model, I can’t help wondering if that’s representative of the 80% of children that learn to read whatever method that’s taught, or the other 20%?

Please do not think that that figure of 80% means that the children within that 80% have learned to read with phonics instruction. Most of them have learned to read (many of them 'after a fashion' rather than 'well') despite having been taught with very little phonics. We don't even really know how accurate that figure is as it is based on the %age of children achieving a L4 in English at the end of KS2. There is no real testing of reading involved in this as the 'Reading' level is actually based on comprehension in which a) many children have been intensively coached throughout Y6 and b) it is possible to achieve a L4 by 'getting the gist' without actually being able to read very well. I have tested reading ages of children entering Y7 over the past 12 years and believe you me, there are children who have achieved 'L4' with amazingly low reading ages. On Reading Age data we probably had more like 30% -40% of children reading at below chronological age.

To return to my original plea; the figure of 80% has been constant since about 2002 and was actually use by the pro-phonics lobby in order to highlight the ineffectiveness of the old 'National Literacy Strategy'. The author of one big research project which had phonics as its core proposed that there are probably some 3 - 5% of children who may not learn to read with phonics instruction; which is a massive difference.

Although 'phonics' is now the Dfe 'guidelines' for the initial teaching of reading it has not been universally implemented. I wrote a long post a few days ago about this on another thread. I sometimes wonder if I shouldn't just have a blog to link to! It is extremely irritating to get the 80% figure thrown back at us as if it is phonics instruction that is failing.. It is not; it is the perpetuation of 'mixed methods' which is still failing children.

coelocanth??????? What is god's name is this word. I have long since suspected that I am dyslexic. My daughter has been diagnosed and it all rang true with me but mainly I have overcome any issues I have but that word has me totally stumped.

It's a big and ancient fish!

'Coelocanth' = see/low/canth

The 'oe' for /ee/ is an uncommon spelling of the /ee/ sound. The fact that the 'c' is pronounced as /s/ is also highly unusual; you'd normally expect that when it is followed by an 'e','i' or 'y'. I can only think that it is a /s/ in this instance because it is followed by an /ee/ sound.

The fact that you didn't know that doesn't mean you are dyslexic, it just means that you were not familiar with that word and it couldn't be decoded without the bit of knowledge which you didn't have.

'Dyslexia' is often really just a lack of phonic knowledge...the BPS definition has in it the words '.....despite adequate teaching' That is the bit that is usually ignored and even if it is noted there is no operational definition of 'adequate teaching' so accounting for the effect of 'inadequate teaching' is problematical.