Writing and phonics

[Notcontent]

Background is that I am a bit annoyed at dd's teacher who seemed to suggest that dd's spelling is not great because she needs to improve her knowledge of phonics.

Dd is 7 and her reading is great, as acknowledged by her teacher, but her writing is not as good as her reading. Before Christmas at meeting teacher said that her spelling is letting her down and gave me a sheet with the phonics sounds to practice with dd. But the fact is that there are so many exceptions to English spelling that a lot of it is just memory work. I think that needs to be acknowledged. We have been doing lots of writing at home and I think her spelling is pretty good actually.

I do agree that phonics helps with reading, and helps a bit with spelling, but that's not the whole story, is it?

[columngollum]

You're right, actually, maybe using any phonics in a spelling programme regardless of how diligent it may be in other necessary respects is so stupid, perhaps I should stop recommending it. I hadn't thought of that.

[columngollum]

I always thought phonics was neutral. It never occurred to me that it might be harmful. Thanks, mrz.

[mrz]

Thankfully phonics has nothing to do with letters making sounds

[Mashabell]

kn is a common spelling for the sound /n/

Hardly.

In the 7,000 most HF words which i examined, only 34 do not use n for the /n/ sound.

n: nose– knot, gone, gnome, mnemonic (2,312 – 34).

[Seryph]

Actually CG, the in knight, and knife were voiced in Middle English (not so much in Early Modern, but some dialects may have kept it), so, while we no longer pronounce it, it is basically the same as the in sword.

[Seryph]

And Masha, it is fairly common: www.morewords.com/starts-with/kn/

[mrz]

knee, knife, knight, knead, knell, know, knitting, knickers, knar, knob, knack, knock, knoll, knuckle, knap, knave etc etc etc

[columngollum]

Knife/knifr comes from Old Norse and Schwert/sword Germanic

[Seryph]

Yeah, CG. I know that. Though it's probable that the Old Norse word kníf-r actually comes from the Old Germanic *kn??o-z.

[flowerwoman]

Mrz, can I ask if you use phonics in the same way when teaching children with EAL? (Children at both the early and later stages of learning English.) Many thanks.

[maizieD]

@flowerwoman,

I can't answer for mrz but I certainly know that Ruth Miskin (ReadWriteInc) had a very high proportion of EAL children at the school where she was headteacher, and where she developed her phonics programme. The school's results showed that it was extremely successful (and continues to be so under the current HT)

The only difficulty I found in my extremely limited experience of teaching EAL children to read (we had hardly any in the area where I worked) was their v poor English vocabulary knowledge. I had to incorporate pictures to aid their understanding of what the words that they were decoding and blending actually 'meant'. (Please note that this is completely different from using pictures as clues to what the word 'says'. Obviously, EAL children wouldn't have had any idea what word the picture represented because it wasn't in their spoken vocabulary!)

[columngollum]

I presume the EAL children didn't know the occasional word. Drawing lots of pictures would be less efficient than locating a dual language dictionary, so I can only suppose it was for the odd word here and there.

[BertieBotts]

Doesn't risqué have the accent, like café?

[columngollum]

Cafe mostly does not have the accent on in this country. And Pate has neither circumflex nor accent, allowing some people to call it pait.

[Seryph]

Don't know where you shop Columngollum, but my Tesco has all the Pâté written as such.

[BertieBotts]

Yeah I think it's just left off due to laziness/ignorance/not knowing how to make the letters on a standard UK keyboard. But the actual spelling includes accents.

[mrz]

flowerwoman as Maizie says we both teach in an area where there are few EAL children so my experience is fairly limited. Those I have taught have responded well to phonics, the main issue is be aware that some sounds may not be found in their home language and the needs to develop English vocabulary and grammar.

[mrz]

I tend to use real objects rather than pictures where possible.

[columngollum]

It's an old book, but Henry Mencken in The American Language has a wonderful chapter devoted to loanwords in both British and American English. But even in that discussion some of the academics he quotes decry the wholesale importing of diacritical marks as impractical.