Can someone explain phonics to me?

[ChangeYouFucker]

My DD is in reception and I am dutifully doing her sounds and blending words with her.

However I've got no idea what is happening and feel a bit about it.

So I'm looking for the wise MN education bods to explain it to me!

I don't want a debate about phonics (lots of other threads with those on).

I just want a Dummies guide to phonics and how I help my DD with them.

Ta very muchly.

Yes masha it would be much easier if all languages had a one sound one spelling orthography but as we know that isn't the case, so harping on about it doesn't help anyone learn how to work with what we have.

Why would you teach he, me, she, we, be as an odd little group? there are many words where the spelling represents the sound /ee/ they just happen to be common ones.

ChangeYouFucker 3 pages is very little for any discussion about phonics.

The Synthetic Phonics Hell one, for example, has reached p.8 already.

Your spelling is probably no more shit than most people's.
If u don't happen to be born with a good visual memory, learning to spell English is just very difficult and takes ages, because at least 4,219 quite common words have bits in them which u have to memorise word by word,
e.g. 'blue, shoe, flew, through, to/two/oo', 'see/sea, me, ski, quay' or 'mole, coal, bowl, roll, soul',
without any rhyme or reason. That's how they have been spelt in dictionaries for the past 259 years, and that's how u have to learn to spell them too, no matter how stupid some of them may seem to u (or as they constantly did to my very scientifically minded son).

And that's one of the reasons
why the subject of phonics creates much debate.

The other is because lots of English letters and letter strings have more than one pronunciation (wo: won, woman, women... ou: sound, soup, southern...). I have a list of 69 of them. Between them, they make just over 2,000 common words trickier to decode than 'a fat cat sat' or 'keep sleep deep'.

Until children have met them quite a few times and can recognise them on sight, as we here do now, many of the irregular pronunciations make them hesitate or stumble, or stump them altogether.

So what is really needed is honest debate about how exactly best to teach children to read words with slightly absurd spellings.

SP evangelists claim they have found the holy grail. Do phonics. End of story. Everybody else is wrong.

But lots of teachers disagree with them.

there are many words where the spelling represents the sound /ee/

Not at the end of words.
In a few longer, less common ones (simile, epitome), but no other short ones. 'The - he, she, me, be, we' are a little group of oddities.

ChangeYouFucker
How to teach reading has been the subject of intense debate in English Speaking countries since at least the 1950s. Intense enough for at least one US researcher to get death threats for supporting phonics instruction on the basis of reading research

When I first started working with struggling KS3 readers and discoverd that explicit phonics instruction was what helped them the most I had no idea that the topic aroused so much passion and that phonics was a dirty word to many teachers. I just thought that it was a jolly good thing if it helped so many children!

Maizie is right about
How to teach reading has been the subject of intense debate in English Speaking countries since at least the 1950s.

I have been trying to explain the reasons for it.

Teachers in English-speaking countries continue to have trouble agreeing on how best to teach children to read and write. The Reading Wars have been raging in all of them with varying intensity since 1950s. They began after various national surveys started to reveal that many pupils were leaving school functionally illiterate, despite attending them for an average of 10 years. One documenting the poor literacy standards of WW2 army recruits caused particular concern, but even in 1999 the Moser Report still estimated that 22% of UK adults were functionally illiterate. The blame for this has generally been put on poor teaching, or the use of wrong teaching methods.

In other countries which also use alphabetic writing systems, phonics is invariably the only method with which children are taught to read and write. They learn what sounds the letters (or letter strings like 'ai' or 'ch') of their spelling system represent and use this knowledge for reading (or decoding) of words and for spelling them (encoding). It works well, takes little time and results in far less literacy failure than is common in English-speaking ones.

Noting this, some educational theorists in the UK and US concluded that it was insufficient use of phonics that was causing higher rates of literacy failure among Anglophones. This led to the development of various phonics courses, such as the still popular Jolly Phonics in 1992. In some US states phonics became mandatory in 1996. In the UK phonics became the government approved literacy teaching method 2007. Yet reading and writing standards have shown no great improvement, and not everyone agrees that phonics should be the only teaching method. There are also differences between the many different phonics courses now on the market.

Why is teaching children to read and write English so controversial?

I would say because English spelling is not like other alphabetic writing systems. Its inconsistencies make learning to read and write exceptionally difficult and time-consuming, e.g. 10 times slower than with Finnish which is Europe's best writing system.

It is a red herring to suggest the debate about his to teach children to read in English has much to do with how other languages, with different features, are taught.

It was a twentieth century phenomenon (not just seen in reading) when 'innovation' was prized in itself. And everyone was bound up in the emperor's new clothes.

Teaching phonics (ie the many:many code of phoneme/grapheme correspondences - by which I mean ordinary sense of 'not 1:1', and do not mean to imply any:any) is of course something that is done only with languages which are not spelled phonemically.

In a language which is essentially phonemically regular (such as Serbian/Croatian), phonics is redundant. When you can teach phonemically, you simply do not need it. You get the best outcomes by starting with the sounds of language (rather than sight of the script), but you need phonics only when the code is many:many.

The debate was derailed. I agree that the time at which children in other countries are taught to read is a red herring.

Responding to Swanhilda's point seemd like a perfectly reasonable thing to do but I never intended it to set marsha off on her none too accurate version of the history of reading instruction; which is also a red herring swimming off in a different direction..

English is spelled phonemically; each phoneme in a word is represented by a discrete spelling. The act of teaching how the phonemes of a language are represented by a symbol is 'phonics' regardless of how transparent or opaque the language's orthography is. Children in countries with transparent orthographies still need explicit phonics instruction, though they will clearly master the necessary knowledge and skills much sooner and may find it much easier to generalise.

Oops. Ignore last message; wrong thread

EdithWeston: It is a red herring to suggest the debate about his to teach children to read in English has much to do with how other languages, with different features, are taught.
I agree. But that is what Ruth Miskin, and other phonics evangelists copying her, did when they first started pushing the nothing-but-phonics approach. They claimed that the higher literacy standards in the rest of Europe, compared to the UK, had to be due to the fact that they use nothing but phonics for teaching reading and writing.

In a language which is essentially phonemically regular (such as Serbian/Croatian), phonics is redundant. When you can teach phonemically, you simply do not need it.
U don't need much of it. But children still need to learn what sounds the letters or letter strings of their language represent. It's just that when the relationships are 1:1 they are much easier to learn. - There is less to learn.

you need phonics only when the code is many:many.
'Many:many' is really no code at all, despite of what phonics evangelists claim.

Masha do you really believe what you post or do you make it up as you go?

Copying Ruth Miskin? Really?

aizie:
English is spelled phonemically; each phoneme in a word is represented by a discrete spelling. The act of teaching how the phonemes of a language are represented by a symbol is 'phonics' regardless of how transparent or opaque the language's orthography is.
That is not what is normally understood by 'phonemic'.

Children in countries with transparent orthographies still need explicit phonics instruction, though they will clearly master the necessary knowledge and skills much sooner and may find it much easier to generalise.

They do. And they learn to read and write faster, precisely because they can generalise. For reading, they can generalise with absolute certainty, because o, ou, ch or whatever always have the same sound, unlike in English (on, only, once - sound, soup, southern or chat, character, chalet).

In English being taught the main alternative pronunciations, like (mean - meant, children - child, home - come) does make it a bit easier to access words - if u have some idea what the word might be. This is less useful with words that have a different sound in only a few words (our - your, four, tour, paid - said, plaid, plait). - There should be controlled research in how best to teach those.

In learning to spell English, there is much less scope for learning general rules (or generalisation). It involves vastly more word by word memorisation of different spellings than any other alphabetically written language, especially for the sounds that don't really have a main pattern at all,
such as the 452 words with an /ee/ sound,
156 of which use ea, 133 ee, 86 e-e, 29 i-e, 31 ie, 15 ei (eat, meet, even, police, siege, seize)

• 13 odd bods (people, ski, key, he).

That's why it takes so long and why lots of people never quite get to grips with them all.

Guys & Change

English is a difficult language percisely because it reflects our history - we have borowed words from our Celtic Roots, from Roman, Viking and Norman invaders, we have adopted words from our past emperial expansion out into the world ... English is a rich language which has developed (you may have noticed Old or Middle English origins for words in dictionaries); it is a language open to trends, influence and new ideas - it makes it jolly complicated to learn fluently because most words have a history - when you look up a word -look at it's origins - often it's borrowed from Latin or Old English or french....

take the word 'onion' by way of example: ed.ted.com/lessons/making-sense-of-spelling-gina-cooke

HTH

English, like all natural language is all about the phonemes.

It is precisely because the phoneme/grapheme correspondences in English are not 1:1 that phonics is needed. The spelling always represents the phoneme, and the grapheme can always has be spoken. Saying 'but spelling could be different, just like it is in other languages' simply shows that the linguistic definition can be used to describe the full range of alphabetic languages and that the phonic approach works in all of them.

Phonics is the way in which you learn the rules of sound/writing 'code'.

And as Masha repeatedly points out, the phonic approach can be used across all alphabetic alphabets. And is the single most successful method (and also outperforms combination methods) regardless of the complexities of the code.

But that is what Ruth Miskin, and other phonics evangelists copying her, did when they first started pushing the nothing-but-phonics approach. They claimed that the higher literacy standards in the rest of Europe, compared to the UK, had to be due to the fact that they use nothing but phonics for teaching reading and writing.

Problem is, marsha, none of what you say here is true. It is very difficult to give anything you say any credibility at all when one sees such very wrong statements about something which one happens to know a great deal about.

And as Masha repeatedly points out, the phonic approach can be used across all alphabetic alphabets.

Apart from the fact that 'alpahebetic alphabets' makes no sense at all, I think it was I who pointed out that the phonic approach is used in many other countries.

Also, it is not confined to languages which use the Roman alphabet. It is a sound/symbol correlation; the symbols can be anything; think Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Greek.

none of what you say here is true
It's impossible to have a serious discussion with someone who makes vague accusations like that.

The arguments of phonics advocates are often not only logically flawed. They are often deliberately misleading, like your comment the other day,
I do find the dispute over phonics teaching a bit bizarre in view of the fact that in many countries all children are taught to read with phonics as a matter of course and no-one thinks twice about it.

This is a clear case of pretending that phonics in other countries is the same as English phonics, which it is clearly not.

Yet when it suits u, u will even argue that there are different kinds of English phonics, e.g. analytic (bad) and synthetic (good).

PastSellByDate: English is a difficult language percisely because it reflects our history.

The English language is one of the world's simplest and easiest to learn, but it has an absurd spelling system, and not because it is an amalgam of from many sources.

English spelling is chaotic mainly because it was at least four times deliberately messed up:

1. Early scribes substituted o for u, as in month, because they disliked having to write a succession of short downwards strokes, as u would get with a sensible spelling of 'munth'.
2. Court scribes in the 15th C substituted ea for short and long e, as in 'tread, treat', because they had trouble, and were cross about, switching from French to English.
3. Early printer often added extra letters to make words longer in order to earn more money (kindnes - kindness) or because they spoke no English and made lots of mistakes (build, friend, guard).
4. Johnson caused endless trouble by making consonant doubling irregular, as in 'merry - very', because he did not like to make Latinate words conform to the English spelling system. He is also chiefly responsible for the utterly pointless standardisation of the likes of 'there/their' or 'stationary/ ...ery'.

English spelling got messed up because none of the people who shaped it gave much thought to logical consistency or ease of learning.

Masha Do you seriously believe that phonics teaching is copying Ruth Miskin?

OP - in view of your last 'post', not only will your children benefit from the book I mentioned, but you also will find in enlightening, and it may clarify things you have struggled with since your own school days.

Mrz
Do you seriously believe that phonics teaching is copying Ruth Miskin?

I have no views on that.
What i do know for certain is that she was hugely instrumental in government ministers adopting phonics as official policy. There was a time when she was always on tv, radio or in the press. Being the partner of ex chief inspector Chris Woodhead helped her greatly with this.

The phonics scheme Read, Write Inc. is hers.

But you did have a 'view', marsha, or have you forgotten so soon?

But that is what Ruth Miskin, and other phonics evangelists copying her,

Have you forgotten what you posted earlier masha?

I meant copying her in the way they promote phonics, using the same logic.