Sythetic phonics hell: any KS1 teachers/parents with soothing words?

[Notnowcato]

So, DS2 is learning to read. He loves books. We read them together ever day. Lots of them. All sorts. Just as my DD and DS1 did.

He has 'learned' quite a few words because he recognises them. He makes others up, from context. The story moves along. He 'reads' aloud with expression and he laughs at the jokes. This is at home. At school, he crumples into tears in front of 'b-a-t' and says he can't do it and he's rubbish at reading. [I know because I help in the classroom.]

So I say to the teacher: "What are we doing here. We are destroying his love of stories. Why do we have to do synthetic phonics? You [teacher] and I didn't learn to read like this. My older daughter (now 12, level 6 reading and writing in Year 6 and is currently at the top of her 'Accelerated Reader scheme in Year 7) didn't learn to read like this. Leave him with me (he reads at home to me every day, I read to him every day). By the time he is in year 2 he will be reading fine." But no. She says he must sound out words so that he "understands" them. But he doesn't understand 'the cat sat on the mat' because he is crying. He does understand Alan Ahlberg's Crazy Fox stories because he tells me all about the silly fox and the lovely dog for hours afterwards.

Now were I being cynical (who me?), I might say that the teacher is more concerned with getting my son to 'pass' his phonics test at the end of the year, than she is in keeping the love of reading alive in him.

Thank you for the space to vent! [I hasten to add that I say nothing to undermine the teacher in front of my son, either at home or at school. We read his Read Write Inc. level 1 books very quickly and then go on to more interesting books.]

More practically, what can less angry parents/sympathetic teachers suggest about how I tackle this, given that my darling boy has another two terms of this teacher to endure. I really think that he is starting to hate reading at school. I really don't care if he fails his phonics test, I just want him to enjoy reading as much as his siblings do.

Yes LePetit 4th grade slump/dip ...

Charles your hopes are futile

Unless you're going to divulge further Mrz perhaps you should stop dropping it into the convo,smacks of playground tactics.

Guessing words from the context is not reading.

Having a good memory, so therefore able to recite familiar stories from familiar books is not reading.

Synthetic phonics, properly taught, equips children with the tools to decode new words they come across. How empowering for those children.

Of course it isn't going to work for every single child - no system does - but it is a very effective mechanism for the vast majority of children, that far from removing the joy of reading, opens up new texts to them, incl. books with no pictures to guess meaning from.

It also helps with spelling.

Oh and Y1 children have a Phonics Screening Check, not a test. Children struggling can then be picked up very early & interventions put in place early. This is surely for the best.

Goodness knows how I was taught to read. At nursery school I distinctly remember chanting "Ay is for apple, Bee is for bed, Cee is for cat..". I could read a few words together by the time I went to school (competitive Mum with scholarship brother) and remember seeing plenty of flashcards that I didn't need help to read at infants. Then I also vividly remember sitting on my parents' bed crying my eyes out (probably age 5 or 6) because I couldn't say the alphabet as Ah, ber, ker, derh (or however it goes). Then I moved to Junior school

I continued to devour books.

Has this ever let me down? Actually yes...with foreign languages
French and German were easy enough in my teens....plenty of simple rules to follow....shift forward to my 30's (okay, by then I had also had to learn to speed read) but the poor lady trying to teach me business Spanish really couldn't understand why I often didn't read what was written (saw the first syllable and the last and guessed the middle).

DD's old infant school can only be described as "hardcore phonics". Boy, we struggled for the first 9 months (Mr Thorne became my "go to" resource). As a Mum, I ducked it (TA volunteered to hear DD read the Read, Write Inc hideous books) and focussed on the "suddenly the magic key began to glow" books (within the tricky words it was great to praise daughter for a bit of fluency and expression). I didn't dare volunteer at school because DD was always correcting my pronunciation of digraphs etc.

Now she is 7, books have so much vocab that is drawn from other languages. There is no doubt that she reads and writes in a phonically feasible manner, but I need to correct it.

The love of reading is ironically nothing to do with the symbols on the page we have given meaning to but fundamentally a love of stories. We have stories because we are enamoured by them, we wrote them down because we evolved to develop a written code for the sounds we make. I think phonics is an excellent tool to learn how to read, it works for the majority and even if you do not really ever decode (lots of children just memorise phoneme to grapheme correspondence) you are phonetically aware of how to spell and orally read unknown words. Phonetics doesn't work for every child and teachers should use their judgement to help that child read and if they can to also get them to learn an acceptable amount of letter sounds. We are motived to read because we desperately want to read, we want the stories, the information, the ability to gain independence in this world so dependent on the written. If your child is dissolving at phonetics, the characteristics of effective learning are weak and there is little joy in learning. It is something the reception teacher should have mentioned and attempted to tackle. And in answer to the question about strategies for unknown words, most adults and children aged 9 and 10 over rely on root word knowledge (if the reading level is age appropriate). Morphology should replace phonology at this stage and phonics still used as a spelling and oral reading tool. Unsurprisingly the oral reading of most adults with a weak knowledge of phonics is not good. Today's children won't have this issue.

Madcats: the poor lady trying to teach me business Spanish really couldn't understand why I often didn't read what was written (saw the first syllable and the last and guessed the middle).
Because that's what u have to learn to do with many words to become a fluent reader of English, e.g. mean - meant, read now - read yesterday, count - country, mood - good, children - child .... At least 2,000 common English words are similarly not completely decodable.

Phonics works very well with consonants, but not with vowels. They don't exactly need to be 'guessed', but they are certainly not decodable in the way that all letters in all other European languages are. As most words contain more consonant sounds, phonics is very useful, but nobody becomes a fluent reader or competent writer of English with phonics alone. It's much more a matter of lots of practice - of seeing and writing all common words over and over again.

Even Maizie explained on the thread about reading speed:
Some children need to sound out and blend words many many times before they become secure in long term memory and are 'instantly' recognised.
In the end it comes down to instant recognition for reading and being able to see if a word looks right for spelling. Phonics helps children to get to that stage, but is neither a sufficient or only way of getting there.

My daughter taught herself to read mainly by learning lots of poems and stories by heart, from being sung to and read by us from babyhood, then learning to read them to herself in books. Her biggest reading teacher was Browning's Pied Piper. My husband first read it to her when she was about 5 and she became completely hooked on it. It had a similar effect on one of our granddaughters, but not the other grandkids. Horses for courses.

Sorry LePetit I thought you were capable of reading the research yourself

CharlesRyder :
The shitty tone mrz, maizieD and Feenie use on these threads is getting close to bullying and is really unpleasant.

Agreed.
What is so sad is that those kind of people have persuaded education ministers to endorse the nothing but phonics doctrine as official policy, without any understanding what it means in practice.

But this is largely because the inconsistencies of English spelling ensure that there is no method for teaching reading and writing which works equally well with all children. Hence the endless reading wars and changing of teaching methods. SP is no more the holy grail than anything else.

I am not entering the phonics debate again. My post has nothing to do with your opinions about phonics. So, no Masha I don't agree with you either about those kind of people.

What I do see, over and over again, is people starting threads and mrz, maizieD and Feenie popping up together to browbeat and belittle people.

Phonic knowledge is incredibly helpful for ensuring most DC learn to decode and encode correctly. It is, rightly, part of the NC and teachers in KS1 must spend time teaching phonics.

My DD is in Y6 in a French-English bilingual school which taught phonics in French but not in English (DC were supposed to guess transfer their reading knowledge from French to English in Y3). My DD had private lessons to learn to decode and encode English, from the age of 4. Her reading and spelling in English are way better than those of her peers with a similar family language profile.

Yes Mrz I am but not entirely sure what it adds to the conversation.

What Charles said.

Bonsoir I am by no means anti phonics.

I can see a reasonable debate with many posters on both sides of the debate discussing the matter quite amicably.

As I said, there are a few unpleasant posts - but not from named people.

At least CharlesRyder is honest about not wishing to take part in the discussion, I suppose. Not sure what use those kind of posts might be though, other than to perhaps encourage a bit of ironic rabble rousing.

The reason the Labour government reintroduced phonics to schools, and this government did not dismantle that change back to the traditional method, is because of the evidence that it works. Or rather, works better than any other single method or combination of methods.

(masha's posts are about spelling reform, not teaching children how to read in the language as it currently exists).

taught phonics in French
Of course she was. Because French spelling is completely decodable, just as all other European languages. That's why u don't need anything else for learning to read them.

The usefulness of phonics for learning to spell varies, depending on the spelling system. In French it is also not enough, although of greater help than in English.

The one thing that has changed profoundly in UK schools over the past 20 years, and especially since 2007, is the amount of time and attention given to literacy teaching. Ever since the rolling out of the literacy hour in 1998, and enormous increases in spending on it, schools have been spending more time on teaching children to read and write.

Time and individual help make all the difference in English. And the number of classroom assistants has risen from 60K in 2000 to over 200K now. That had to have some effect on standards too, irrespective of teaching methods.

And if it wasn't for the inconsistencies of English spelling, it would have been much greater than it has been.

Masha - French spelling is very, very far from being "completely decodable". It is marginally easier to learn to read French than English but way, way harder to learn to write French than English.

AuntieStella
I admit that i would love to see learning to read and write English made easier, and i am not ashamed of it. I can't see that having to spend an exceptionally long time on it (10 times longer than in Finland) does anyone any favours, and especially not children at the lower end of the ability range. But my views on that are quite irrelevant to my post on here.

My posts on here are about putting discussions about how best to teach children to read and write, with due regard to the nature of English spelling - not pretending that English spelling obeys a code and therefore needs nothing but phonics for teaching reading and writing.

They are about debunking a blatant untruth and about promoting honest, unblinkered debate about the value of phonics, their limitations and how best to cope with non-phonic spellings.

Nearly all my work over the past 20 years has been about putting debates about how best to teach children to read and write English on a more rational footing.

The phonics approach does however cover all the joys of the idiosyncrasies of the orthography of the English language.

It's not about one-to-one correspondences, and it is a straw man argument to suggest that it ever was.

Bonsoir
Having learnt both English and French as L2s, I disagree completely about French not being entirely decodable. With very minor exceptions, it completely obeys teachable rules. U are never faced with conundrums like 'only once other woman women womb'.

I never had much need to write French beyond O level and remember that being fairly tough, but nowhere near as bad as English.

Masha - you cannot disagree: it's not an issue of personal opinion but one of scientific fact, largely demonstrated and proven!

I do disagree with u, Bonsoir.

The scientific fact, largely demonstrated and proven,
according to a cross-European study for the OECD led by Prof. Philip Seymour (2013) which compared ease of literacy learning in 13 European languages is that English spelling makes it the hardest and most time-consuming, with French and Danish next, buty some way behind.

And only yesterday a friend drew my attention to the book
Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read
26 Oct 2010 by Stanislas Dehaene (a Frenchman) which points out that
errors in word reading at end of first grade were:

English (UK) 67%

French 28%

German 3%

Italian 5%

Because of the irregular nature of our spelling!

bonsoir was talking about writing, not reading, marsha.

Are you going to read the book? It gives a very good neurologically based explanation of how words are processed during reading and fully endorses phonics instruction as the optimum method for teaching reading.

Maizie: bonsoir was talking about writing, not reading.

She claimed It is marginally easier to learn to read French than English
which is clearly not true.

That aside, u have somehow gained the impression that i am against phonics. I AM ABSOLUTELY NOT AGAINST PHONICS, in the normal sense of the word phonics.

I merely question the 'nothing but phonics' doctrine and the wilder claims of phonics evangelists, such as that English spelling obeys a 'code'. I know too much about English spelling to swallow that.

I am well acquainted with all the work of Stanislas Dehaene, have all his books in both French and English on my bookshelves and am delighted you are going to acquaint yourself with his work, Masha. He is the greatest proponent of phonics out, IMO!

Masha - if you never went further than O level French how on earth could you possibly know whether it is harder than English or not? O level French didn't graze the surface of the French language!