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?

The point is that phonics vastly cuts down the number of options AND makes children (and adults) very conversant with the skills of breaking a word down and putting it back together againm, which are important in spelling unfamiliar words.

Say, for example, someone asked me to write down an unfamiliar dinosaur name.

By 'sounding it out' sound by sound, I would be able to construct a plausible written version. By using my knopwledge of word 'families', I would get closer to the correct spelling - for example, I would choose the family of 'saur' encodings not 'sore', because I know what word family I am likely to be dealing with.

Both of those processes are exactly analogous to the use of phonics for spelling as taught in school.

The final step, the 'did I choose the correct option for encoding 'f' - an f or ph - is a step of 'knowledge', for which I use a dictionary. But what the phonics has got me to is a 'very close guess', and with continual reinforcement I will make many closer and closer guesses in all my spelling. It is a much more efficient process for learning to spell a much larger number of words than a 'word by word' approach, particularly as the latter - like look and say as a way of learning to read - has no process for approaching an unknown spelling.

(Mrz, I do think the inverse relationship to give a correctly spelled word IS more tricky, because when sounding out a word and blending it with different options it is possible to 'hear' which correspondance makes a 'real word' if it is one's vocabulary. Learning to 'see' the correct option when written down on the page is, IME, more difficult - which is why phonetically plausible spellings are an acceptable stepping stone to correct ones in e.g. writing mark schemes)

I agree spelling is more difficult than decoding because with decoding the child is looking at the visual representation of the word whereas with spelling the child has visual clue.

with spelling the child has visual clue

what does this mean?

What if you don't know whether it's miser or misor, viser, or visor, insiser (you know, the tooth.)

Basically, what happens when you don't know how to spell a word!
Do you say, I'll say it out loud a few times and hope the spelling miraculusly comes to me.

Then there's the wether/whether/weather - practise/practice and heaven knows what else. The whole sound/spell thing is just never going to work.

Realistically it doesn't make a difference whether you write misor or miser as people will know what you mean.

If you're writing on a computer you can use spell check. If you're writing in a professional capacity e.g. for a publication you should have an editor whose job it is to know and check. You also just sort of remember it when you see a word written down lots of times (which is why people who read a lot generally find it easier to remember spellings).

Lots of people, myself included, have to write something down to see if it "looks right".

There is a relationship between sound and spelling. You don't misspell "miser" as "niser" because it sounds totally different. People generally misspell things similarly to how they sound, but when you haven't been taught phonics, a hard-to-spell word like "marriage" can be difficult, you can remember, oh, I think there's a double letter somewhere, and there's some weird vowelage at the end so perhaps it's "maraegge" - but to read that out phoenetically you'd probably come up with mar-ray-geh.

You need to be able to spell words conventionally and spell checks have limited use - they can't tell if you mean whether or weather and are just happy you wrote a real word -

presumably if CG writes misor & miser she will recognise which is correct - phonics gets the wrter to the point where they can do that check.

Spelling usually lags behind decoding

Goodness knows how you check the spelling of anything if you don't believe in a sound spelling relationship. You'd have your dictionary in front of you and you'd be checking the spelling of Zoroastrian but you'd have to go through the whole thing starting at aardvark. Must take forever.

Yes, but if you put weather when you mean whether you will get the green wavy line. I guess your luck is out if you end up in front of a piece of paper and pencil though.

But the point is, column, phonics will get you as far as weather vs whether. WITHOUT phonics to break the word down for spelling, you might have written slyterpnm. Or xectdos. Or wthr. Phonics gets you almost there - and without using the sound / spelling relationship at all, you won't even get close.

Some people would argue that in some accents wh and w sound different...

That is phonics versus a monkey on a typewriter. Clearly phonics can spell better than a monkey can.

But I had spelling rules, i before e, except after c and all that, spelling practise and so on... in mind. (The way I learned to spell. What many people would consider the traditional method.)

Apparently when you don't distinguish it's called the whine wine merger.

nifdi.org/news/hempenstall-blog/390-feel-like-a-spell

Spelling rules don't work -i before e except in receive, either, ceiling, seize, Keith, Neil, Madeira, Sheila, Reims, caffeine, ... abseil, veil, rein, vein, deign, beige, geisha ... Einstein, heist, Heidi, feisty, eiderdown ...

nifdi.org/news/hempenstall-blog/390-feel-like-a-spell

Sorry, forgot to convert that link. Try again.

nifdi.org/news/hempenstall-blog/390-feel-like-a-spell

Oh, apologies for triple post. Something not quite right with my connection to MN. Thought it hadn't posted the first time.

Eiderdown, mrz, good choice! I still call my duvet an eiderdown whereas MIL calls it her 'Continental Quilt.'

Sorry, digressed...

I was taught "i before e except after c, or when it says ay, like in neighbour or weigh." Longwinded!

Unfortunately phonics doesn't help with ei vs ie because in English they can often both make the same sound.

(I think. Confused now.)

I did not learn with phonics and often get double letters/single letters wrong or the wrong vowel order in odd vowel sound words.

I think MN is dodgy tonight. Keeps timing out for me too.

The /ay/ sound in neighbour and weigh is spelt eigh

But it's spelled 'ei' in 'rein' and 'vein' and 'eig' in 'reign' and 'feign'

Can I do a masha list, please?

and 'feint'