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?

as an alternative you could show them how to decode the words they don't know (which is how the tricky words are meant to be taught) for example there's an early ORT with the word concrete - break the word into 2 syllables 1st c-o-n is easy and if you tell the child the e-e is a spelling for the sound /ee/ the 2nd can be decoded easily too - very empowering for a young child.

Can you do that mrz? I thought that would be too confusing because, using the example of the word "some" the o_e isn't the (I would guess) more common form like in cone, stone etc but is actually a schwa sound. I would have thought that would be confusing, plus, I'm not really sure how to explain split phoenemes although we haven't got to that part yet.

He did pick up that s can be /s/ or /z/ because this was shown very often without explanation very early on.

All words in l&s are sight words, so, all words will have a strong association in the eyes of parents who learned via l&s with sight words.

the sounds in some are /s/ /u/ /m/ spelt s-o-me

I was educated during the 'Peter and Jane' era, so we didn't use a phonics system to learn to read.

However, we learnt many, many, many spelling rules including at O-level.

I think 7 is far too young to abandon spelling rules. They might not cover every eventuality, but they do make life easier.

think about the sound represented by the letter o in son, won, other, mother etc

You don't need to labour over it but when they are taught the sound/spelling later it will hopefully make sense

I think 7 is far too young to abandon spelling rules.

157 yrs old is too young to abandon spelling rules. When you abandon spelling rules you get:

Ei went too th beyootifwl shop fore ai kupp ov T

That reminds me. Yesterday DD asked how to spell 'once'.

I thought I had been quite clear but she wrote

"wontce".

It was a fairy story told from two points of view so their was quite a lot of "wontce" in it.

Spelling by sound sucks really badly.

I analysed the 7,000 most used English words - the sort of words that an average 16-yr-old is likely to have come across - for spelling regularities and irregularities and found 4,219 with one or more unpredictably used letters, from 'said, friend, head' to 'azure' and 'xylophone'.

In one study they analysed 17000 masha and concluded 84% regularity and only 3% were so unpredictable they would require learning by sight

Which study was that?

It's cited in a number of works including How Language Works David Crystal if you want to look for the details

It surely depends on what criteria you use to define regularity. Someone said earlier that 85% of words in English follow a phonic pattern, but if we want to be really picky, nearly 100% of English words follow a phonic pattern - the only real oddballs are 'one' and 'once'. However which phonic pattern will vary from word to so you cannot say English spelling is predictable in the way you can with, say, Italian spelling. You really do need to know how to spell a word to know which spelling to use - you take pot luck if you just go by the sounds and nothing else.

All words follow a phonic pattern. It's just that a word might be the only example of that pattern. The only point worth worrying about is whether or not any individual pattern is useful. (The fact that it exists can be beside the point.)

" but if we want to be really picky, nearly 100% of English words follow a phonic pattern"

True CecilyP I'm happy with that conclusion

Unfortunately, mrz, it doesn't follow that the phonic pattern is one of yours.

The only word which will not follow a phonic pattern is one which cannot be spoken.

So we are agreed ALL words are phonetically regular great!

No, all words are phonetic but they're not necessarily regular. In fact some are irregular, like ghoti.

Phonetic patterns exist which are not the ones favoured by some current teachers, but they were enjoyed by some now dead authors.

not by your definition CG - "The only word which will not follow a phonic pattern is one which cannot be spoken."

So we are agreed ALL words are phonetically regular
No.

Some sounds, like the short a of cat sat mat, have very few exceptions (plaid, plait, have, meringue), and can be said to have an almost completely regular spelling.

The long oo sound on the other hand is spelt with oo only in half of all common words, it is therefore completely irregular:

Brutal, brute, crucial, crude, fluent, fluid, Fluke, flute, frugal, glucose, guru, intrude, jubilant, July, June, Jupiter, Jury, Juvenile, lubricate, ludo, ludicrous, lukewarm, luminous, lunar, lunatic, plural, prune, recluse, ruby, rude, ruin, rule, rural, secluded, truant, truce, truly, truth, Zulu. Gnu. Bruise, cruise, sluice; fruit, recruit.

Acoustic, bivouac, boutique, coupon, group, recoup, route, soup, toucan, tourist, troupe, wound, youth.

Shrewd, strewn. Brew, crew, drew, grew, screw, shrew, slew, strew, cashew. Clue, glue, rue, true, accrue, construe. Do, lasso, who. Tomb, womb. Lose, move, prove. Gruesome. Manoeuvre. Sleuth. Canoe.

Blew/blue, flew/flue/flu, poo/pooh, shoo/shoe/choux, threw/through, too/to/two, you/ewe/yew.
Baboon, balloon, bloom, boom, boon, boost, boot, brood, broom, cartoon, choose, cocoon, cool, doom, droop, food, fool, gloom, goose, groom, groove, harpoon, hoof, hooligan, hoop, hoot, lagoon, loom, loop, loose, loosen, loot, macaroon, maroon, mood, moon, moor, moot, mushroom, noodle, noon, noose, pontoon, poodle, pool, poop, poor, proof, roof, room, root, saloon, school, schooner, scoop, scoot, scooter, shoot, smooth, snooker, soon, soothe, spoof, spook, spool, spoon, stool, stoop, swoon, swoop, tool, tooth, troop, whoop, zoom. Boo, coo, goo, loo, moo, woo, zoo, bamboo, cockatoo, hullabaloo, igloo, kangaroo, shampoo, tattoo, voodoo, yahoo.

having more than one spelling to represent a sound doesn't make it irregular masha