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.

Masha if you believe that ITA method has any similarities with how schools teach SSP today you really need to visit more early years classrooms.

Um, phonics teaching has not ' just happened since 2007' . What do you think was being taught prior to then...?

The National Literacy Strategy/Framework "Searchlight" mixture of methods .

- in support of early explicit phonics teaching hempenstall.pdf

I give up. The negativity of some posters is just too depressing.

"When they say decodable they don't mean a 1:1 code they mean a many:many code."

No they don't! they mean an alphabetic code which has a limited number of alternatives.

Bonsoir:
That’s a good point you make regarding the fourth grade dip being due to these particular group of children having much lower vocabularies and therefore not understanding the text, rather than a decoding issue.

I’m especially interested in this as I have a bilingual son myself and continuously wonder about what his language proficiency would be in years to come and whatever can be done to counteract the fact that he is not living a fully bilingual life both at home and school as you point out.

I taught him how to read in the minority language (Spanish) before he entered school, using the same method I was taught at school when I was his age. I supposed it must be called phonics as well, since I understand Spanish is a phonetic language and once you know how to read the syllables you can pretty much read anything you come across. Syllables have only one way of reading them, no exceptions to the rule.

Whether knowing how to read in one language was beneficial to learn his second language, I don’t know for sure. I expect some of the skills might have been transferred from one to the other up to a point. But I can only assume the phonics teaching at his school must have been amazing, because he took to reading in English in no time.

Now, I like to think of myself as someone that likes to keep an open mind, and would think that phonics (SP) might not necessarily be the only method to learn how to read, and that to some extent word recognition, sight reading, etc, could also have a part in the process.
I learned English as a second language, and I don’t remember that I was taught with this phonics method. So I’m not sure how I learned exactly, but I have a good visual memory and I think that by hearing how the words were pronounced and seeing them written I eventually managed to read to a level that in a test was equal to the comprehension skills of a native speaker. However, my pronunciation of words is not always native speaker like, and I think that if I had learned properly with this phonics method that everybody seems to praise so much, I would have benefited from it.

I’ve never found that spelling in English was so much of a problem despite not knowing any phonics. I think a visual memory is of great help for spelling in any language.

The fourth grade dip is due to DC from less privileged homes having much lower (oral and written) vocabularies and therefore not understanding text. It's not a decoding issue.

I think I have to disagree with you there to a certain extent. While it may indeed be partly a comprehension issue there is still the fact that US schools are not great fans of teaching phonics.

What you have observed may well be more specific to bilingual children.

I won't repeat my previous post by I think you should consider the historical aspect of improving literacy, too.

But Elle, you do know lots pf phonics, you just seem unaware that you are using it. You wouldn't be able to read this thread if you didn't know ANY phonics. You can't read without using phonics!

Not true. You cannot read aloud without knowing phonics. Most adult readers do not sound out in their heads. We are aware of phonemes because we know how to read. However, the phonetic knowledge of most adults who were not taught phonics is low. They would not read half of the alien words that Y1 children are asked to read correctly as they were never explicitly taught the rules.

I suppose I must have a phonetic awareness then (like poppy70 suggests), being that my first language is purely phonetic as well.

But as poppy70 points out, I don't know the rules that explain why I pronounce some combinations of vowels and consonants in one way or a different way depending on the word.

I notice this when I talk with my mum (who is now learning English at college) and sometimes she says or reads a word to me in English and I say that's not how you pronounce the vowel in that word. And she asks why not, and I say, I don't know but that's just the way it is. So I instinctively know the pronunciation for most words, but don't know the rules that explain what I do.

And it was the same with DS, when he first started reading in English and occasionally read his school books to me rather than to DH. I could correct some of the difficult words that he didn't know how to read despite his good grasp of phonics knowledge. But I couldn't explain to him why the correct pronunciation was the one I was telling him rather than the phonically plausible one he came up with (whether he hadn't learned the necessary phonic sounds for that word yet, or that it was a "tricky" one), so those he just learned from hearing the right pronunciation and remembering it from then on (word recognition?). Luckily that was not often the case, as I tried my best to leave the English books to DH so as to avoid that situation.

But Poppy what about children like mine who learnt to read fluently before having even .come across Letters and Sounds,SP?

No they don't! they mean an alphabetic code which has a limited number of alternatives.

"Many:many" just means that there may be more than one grapheme that corresponds with the same phoneme and there may be more than one phoneme that corresponds with the same grapheme. It's a technical term for a certain sort of relationship. It doesn't say anything about how many alternatives except that there are sometimes more than one in either direction. Apologies, I thought it was a terminology most people would know or be able to figure out from the context.

Are you telling me that there are people who can read, yet they can only read known words? So they couldn't read glopper, for instance, out loud? How do they cope with reading brand names for the first time? You might not pronounce a new word how it was intended to the first time you meet it, but surely you have a go, and if you do you are surely using phonics.

Can't resist that one.

Yes they can read and yes they use phonics. But they didn't learn to read by being taught synthetic phonics. They just worked it out because they enjoyed reading. And had plenty of exposure to every possible variant of phonic through spoken language and printed word on the page magically combining (ie: being read to, and then making sense of what someone had just read to you)

Perhaps if you are turned off reading by synthetic phonics (which is what some practitioners would argue) which is what OP is suggesting is happening with her son, then your desire to read and try out your phonic skills evaporates.

Despite what I said downthread I still feel that you can kill children's desire to read by forcing them to spell out words. So many secondary children really have no interest in reading for pleasure. Is that a by product of synthetic phonics or just of poor reading skills?

Ellle, I think you may be ascribing more logic to the English language than it actually has there. There often isn't a logical way to deduce which of the alternative correspondences to use in a particular word, you just have to know it from familiarity as you do.

MaizieD - the issue about phonics teaching not preventing the fourth grade dip (which is short hand) is pretty widespread. I have read quite a bit about it in French.

Despite what I said downthread I still feel that you can kill children's desire to read by forcing them to spell out words. So many secondary children really have no interest in reading for pleasure. Is that a by product of synthetic phonics or just of poor reading skills?

It's a byproduct of years and years of confusing 'mixed methods. Which in most cases consisted of lots of guessing words from pictures, initial letters and context with a tiny amount of unsystematic phonics instruction thrown in for luck. This is the 'method' which huge numbers of teachers are still utterly convinced is how one teaches reading.

I'm going to shout:

SYNTHETIC PHONICS HAS NOT BEEN TAUGHT IN MANY SCHOOLS EVEN THOUGH IT WAS MADE 'OFFICIAL GUIDANCE' IN 2007. VERY FEW SECONDARY CHILDREN HAVE HAD SP TEACHING. STOP BLAMING SP FOR THE LEGACY LEFT BY MIXED METHODS.

That is why SP is now mandatory, to try and prevent schools from ignoring the 'advice'.

Bonsoir

Didn't the French get seduced into Whole Word teaching, too? I seem to recall that they had their own 'reading wars' .

itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004261.html

That would also explain their 4th grade slump

Interesting catkind the dictionary defines name as a large but indefinite amount rather than more than one

many

MaizieD - there have indeed been all sorts of fashions in the teaching of reading in France but there have also been plenty of reliable studies of the impact of socio-economic status on learning outcomes. The failure of phonics to eradicate medium and long-term differences in reading ability is quite widely documented and attributed to variables independent of decoding skills.

the impact of socio-economic status on learning outcomes
is quite easy to explain.

The parents of children in the higher groups are generally better educated. And it is well known now that there is a very strong correlation between the educational attainment of mothers in particular and their children.

The higher classes are generally more interested in and supportive of their children's education, or they pay someone else to be so. They pay much more heed to their children's language development. They also expose them to more sophisticated vocabulary (in the conversations between parents, Radio 4 v radio 1, Panorama v Coronation Street, etc.).

It is the latter which makes a huge difference to their children's ability to cope with less familiar words with irregular pronunciations:
fruit, bruise - ruin, choke - echoing, later - lateral.

Knowing the words makes English more decodable. It's as simple as that.

Are you referring to French studies, Bonsoir, or English ( or both)?
I couldn't mnage a paper written in French but do you have a link to any studies in Engish which specifically refer to decoding v. comprehension skills? It strikes me as being unusual for a study of that sort to go into so much detail about reading skills. I'd be interested in reading some.

'The higher classes' marsha
What century are you living in?
(And don't now give me a history or sociology lesson please, I studied both for my degree.)