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?

You and masha seem to believe that "u simply have ti remember how words are spelt" unfortunately remembering how to you seems to be a problem.

spell you

I think that's her protest spelling.

Then you don't know masha

I'm rather objecting to one of Britain's literary giants being referred to as a 'pompous prat'.

Mrz
I can remember how to spell 'you' (and 'to' as well).
U and i (not capitalised, when not the first word in a sentence) are my protest spellings.

I am sure that no one else misunderstands me, or chooses to misunderstand me, as much as u do. Perhaps u are simply unable to do so?

Maizie
I could give u a long list of reasons why i regard S Johnson as a pompous prat, but the 2 main ones are

1. He regarded Latin as much superior to English, wrote poetry in Latin rather than English and tried to force English into a Latin mould grammatically.

• Which languages has died out and which survived?

2. He had no patience for pupils who did not have his phenomenal memory. He was a total failure as a teacher and had to close his private academy after a year.

As for being a literary giant, which work by Johnson, apart from his dictionary, does any still read or can even name nowadays?

hmm, the pompous prat argument gathers momentum.

Was he or was he not? Debate:

Personally, I think that while he might have been pompous (or misunderstood, literally) he wasn't a prat because he constructed his dictionary with the help of half a dozen assistants while those of other countries were written over a much longer timeframe with entire staffs.

Well, cg. For once I'm with you!

He was a man of his time.

CollumnG...
he wasn't a prat because he constructed his dictionary with the help of half a dozen assistants while those of other countries were written over a much longer timeframe with entire staffs.

It was because he insisted on working alone that he made such a mess of it, and why no other European countries have ended up with a spelling system as bad as the English one.

The assistants were merely copying out for him on little cards bits from books which he had underlined and sorting them alphabetically. The decisions on spelling were his alone.

He wasn't just a prat but an arrogant prat.

in the preface he writes

Thus have I laboured to settle the orthography, display the analogy, regulate the structures, and ascertain the signification of English words, to perform all the parts of a faithful lexicographer: but I have not always executed my own scheme, or satisfied my own expectations. The work, whatever proofs of diligence and attention it may exhibit, is yet capable of many improvements: the orthography which I recommend is still controvertible, the etymology which I adopt is uncertain, and perhaps frequently erroneous; the explanations are sometimes too much contracted, and sometimes too much diffused, the significations are distinguished rather with subtilty than skill, and the attention is harrassed with unnecessary minuteness.

certainly not the words of a pompous man

Well, to switch sides in mid argument,

his contemporaries didn't seem to support that modest self portrait at all:

Richard Hurd wrote: Johnson exhibits a striking likeness to a confident, overweeing, dictatorial pedant...

and Sir James Mackintosh wrote of Johnson's influence that is was: only on account of the popularity of his writings, but by that colloquial dictatorship that he exercised for thirty years in the literary circles of the capital.

I would suggest that the truth lies somewhere in between

a confident, overweeing, dictatorial pedant..
... is how i would describe him from reading the preface to his dictionary and most descriptions of him by his contemporaries.

He even had the nerve to look down on Shakespeare for his lack of Greek and Latin.

He had no interest in ordinary mortals. His dictionary was aimed at the erudite readers of the Gentleman’s Magazine for which he wrote for 10 years. Boswell tells us that he was
‘irritated by unavoidable slowness and error in the advances of scholars’. His dictionary was not meant for them.

Worst of all was his attitude to spelling inconsistencies:

“spots of barbarity impressed so deep in the English language, that criticism can never wash them away: these, therefore, must be permitted to remain untouched. Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves once unnecessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human things... being once incorporated, can never be afterward dismissed or reformed”.

That view became ingrained in the English psyche, and generations of schoolchildren have been paying a heavy price for it ever since.

In modern German words of the same old German origin as English ones now all have phonically regular, easy spellings
(e.g. Mutter, Bruder, Brot, Kamm, durch) but almost invariably trickier, irregular ones in English
(mother, brother, bread, comb, through).

When the Grimm brothers (of fairy tale fame) produced the first definitive dictionary of German in the early 1800s, they did a much better job of standardising German spelling than Johnson did.

That's why German spelling poses no decoding difficulties whatsoever and far fewer spelling ones too. - The German-speaking countries have taken better care of their spelling system, improving it on a fairly regular basis. English has been left to rot.

Notcontent - (Just LOOK at what you gone and started!)

If you look in the MN book reviews section, under "Children's educational books and courses" you will find my review of a Phonics Spelling Dictionary, which I think you and DD will find interesting, useful and even entertaining; give it a try.

Rosie
"flawa (flower)" is not phonetically plausible as surely it aw sounds like or.

Flauer is though

sorry meant flouer

Depends on your accent, though. Flawa sounds absolutely fine phonetically for where I live. And move me ten miles east and you could easily get away with flah as a phonetic spelling.

I was reading flawa as flah-wah, btw. If you say it out loud, it makes perfect sense.

85% of words in English follow a phonic pattern. The rest have to be learned. Phonics helps children and adults decode words that they do not recognise by sight.

I love how everyone is throwing percentages around - I bet it's much higher than 85%. Does anyone have an actual percentage with some kind of source?

Most of the words taught as sight words to beginning readers are not actually sight words. She for example or are or the or some. They are all words which can be decoded but they generally need to be used/encountered before the children have come into contact with this phoneme (or whatever the word is)

Bertie, I think that is a very pertinent point.

In schools that use non-phonic readers (e.g. Biff and Chip) alongside the teaching of phonics, the problem arises that the books available for the children to practise their decoding skills on cntain a large number of words that cannot be decoded with their current knowledge [note they may well be phonically regular, but will contain e.g. digraphs or alternative grapheme-phoneme correspondances that have not yet been taught].

Therefore, because children DO need to practise reading, and rightly most schools want to encourage home reading as quickly as possible, schools introduce 'sight words' to enable the books that they give their pupils to be read.

If schools junked their non-phonic readers, and had progressive phonic readers instead, then the need for these 'mixed methods' would be hugely reduced. Children would quickly move on to the proper introduction of those 'initially tricky' graphemes, and ths the "sight words" would never be necessary as they would be decodeable at the point at which children encountered them.

I realise it's different when you have one child one on one rather than a whole class, but I'm using songbirds with DS and they don't have "sight words" as such but at the beginning of each book the not-yet-decodable (or "tricky" words) are listed. And although it is an excellent scheme it does still need tricky words. There are only so many words which can be formed out of the initial sounds and "I am top cat" (the very first story!) becomes boring very quickly. How we deal with it is that I tend to read the word for him when it comes up in the story. But in fact we are on book 4 now, and he consistently recognises I, the, of, she, he and possibly a few others I can't remember. Essentially, he is reading the whole story barring one or two words and that seems fine for him.

But I do agree. When you have non phonic readers the actual "reading" becomes meaningless if the parent/teacher has to tell them all of the sight words every time they see them because they end up with hardly any that they can actually read.

Bertie, I agree that a very small number of words that have a 'temporarily tricky bit' are needed for an author to be able to write even a very basic meaningful text.

However, I do think that everyone - schools, parents - should be clear about their 'temporary' status: it is not that they are non-decodeable (and therefore need to be rote-learned as 'high frequency word lists'), but that they are, for pragmatic reasons, introduced a little in advance of the pertinent phonics to decode them all through. Perhaps some ritual 'crossing off' or 'burning of the wiord cards' is needed to reiterate the point. I can see how even a tiny number of such words do have such strong association in parents' and schools' eyes with 'sight words' from look and say that the two systems get confused.