Yr 1 reading/phonics

[RunsWithScissors]

Hello,

DD (5.5) seems to be doing pretty well. Nearer the top end of reading in her class (on orange band, I know not stunning based on MN standards ;-) but she's moved up leaps and bounds from the beginning of the year.

The phonics test is this week, and her teacher caught me yesterday to say she doesn't think she'll pass it. I know it's for the school to see how she's doing, etc. she's moved her into a different phonics group to help her out.

I'd noticed she doesn't tend to sound things out much, I think she remembers words/word recognition?

I didn't learn phonics growing up, but can't recall the learning process of reading that I went through. I've always loved reading, as does DD.

So, my questions are:

Is the lack of ability/knowledge going to make it harder for her? She seems to be progressing really well with her reading, and has wonderful comprehension of what she reads. Very expressive when she reads a book for the first time, so I know she is understanding it. I'm just wondering if a better grasp of phonics would make it easier for her, or do some children naturally read in a different way?

Secondly, although her spelling is also progressing really well I do notice that some misspelled words reflect her speech (which we are having assessed) eg. 'Wiv' for 'with'. Her hearing test was fine last year, she has a great vocabulary and can explain things really well.

I am a bit confused tjough, as she seems to use sounding out to spell. Is this not a similar skill to reading by sounding out?

I know the school will do a great job to support her, and we are thrilled with her progress this year. I just want to ensure we are doing what we can to support her, and that we aren't missing out on things that might make it easier for her/be a more natural fit for her style of learning.

Thanks if you've read this far!

Well you certainly aren't being guided by experience

Micksy

There are hundreds of academic articles on dual processing, and all the other aspects of the mechanics of reading, produced over a period of 30 years or more. People do PhDs in this subjec, and study for years to become expert.. Picking a few articles off the internet and giving cherry-picked quotations from them does not make you an expert. You have no idea to what extent the articles you are selecting are contentious, not how they fit into the framework of ongoing vs previous research. You have simply come up with a theory and are looking for things that support it. This is the exact opposite of how real science works, where scientists look for the information that will DISPROVE their theories, not prove them. It is unfortunate that you seem to feel the need to accompany this by gratuitous insults to others.

Also: you said earlier that your own grasp of phonics is sufficiently weak that you simply see alien names in scifi books as unpronounceable blocks. This is actually a problem that has been written about. An unknown number of adults go through life "bleughing" over words that they can't identify, getting the gist but missing all the subtleties of writing. This is in part because they never learned sufficient phonics to be able to sound out words, and thus add them to their vocabularies. However it can also arise with children who habitually "round" all words to words they know, until they reach the point where the vocabulary in the books they read becomes more sophisticated, and they no longer know enough appropriate words to "round" to. That's when the "bleughing" starts.

I have found this debate really interesting. I can't say I identified any gratuitous insults, personally. With all of this, there is always a degree of interpretation. And although in an ideal world, it would be great to think that scientists spend their time working to disprove their own theories, in my personal experience of the world of science, it isn't how academic scientists actually work.

When I trained as a teacher "Whole language" theory was very much at the fore and it made absolute sense to me as that was how I learnt to read and how my son learnt to read.
Then I started teaching and couldn't understand why some children struggled. I then had to rethink and go off and research and learn. Strangely enough what I discovered worked and it worked for all kids and as I've researched and learnt more kids have continued to learn and succeed.
Now you may wish to dismiss my experience and that of many, many primary teachers that's your choice but imagine I told you that your successful methods are totally irrelevant because it's just your unsupported personal view ...

I may wellbe wrong, but my reading of this debate (on my phone - so not in depth study) is that the fact that synthetic phonics is the best way to TEACH reading is not being disputed. But rather, that it isn't the only way that the brain may LEARN to read (even if alternative methods of LEARNING to read aren't taught. As such, I honestly don't think the value of your experience of teaching children to read is in doubt Mrz. Potentially the interpretation of what that means in terms of the underlying neurological methods of learning, is being discussed. But not the value in relation to the teaching method. That is my interpretation of the debate.

Kesstrel, my own intuitive grasp of phonics is actually very impressive. At ten years old, during an English lesson, my teacher sent for the head mistress who brought a video camera because they were so amazed at my ability to read Shakespeare with perfect intonation and timing. I read by two, read anything fluently by four, and could debate Tennyson by nine, even managing to provide insights that my mother used in her degree level essays. The only words I struggle to spell are jewellery and occasionally, and phonics won't help me there. i would not generally brag, but I certainly shan't be used as an example of a failing adult reader!
I simply cannot be bothered to phonically interpret words that even when processed are designed to be as thoroughly unpronounceable and truly alien as possible. You clearly haven't read huge amounts of sci fi or you would recognise this and sympathise. Words like Pryghztlbrilf are really not worth decoding.
I've actually been googling "criticisms of dual process models" but it seems that most researchers are in the dual process camp or the connectionist camp, with a few arguing they are not mutually exclusive. I think I've developed a relatively good awareness of how contentious they each are. If you read ten papers, and they all reference the same person, it's pretty certain that person is one of the most influential. It's fairly easy to follow the loops of citations around and see who agrees with who and who is arguing against them.
Indeed, my MAIN argument has been that all this research is contentious and that to claim to understand how children learn is foolhardy. However, I have not in my travels come across a single piece of research suggesting that any non brain damaged human reads using phonic information alone.

Itshouldntmatter, I think that's pretty much it in a nutshell. Although my position on phonics teaching is not that it's the best possible method, only that it's better than any of the other methods currently being used.

As for experience, I'm an ex computer science research assistant in natural language processing, with a background in lots of Chomsky, neutral nets, machine learning algorithms etc. I'm also the mother of a three and five year old who are busily acquiring reading skills under my very inyerested nose.

A reasonable caveat Micksy. Incidentally, I think it is possible my daughter could fail on alien words alone on the phonics test. If she does, I'll let you know (for reasons discussed above I hope she doesn't fail at all, obviously).

With respect Micksy I don't think your concept of phonics matches that of any phonics teacher.
I could have written your description of your early reading experience as it closely matches my own experience and that of my son ...and has nothing to do with an intuitive grasp of phonics (you may have read my posts where I've often repeated my son has no phonic ability).

I hope you were joking about words like Pryghztlbriff not being worth decoding ...weren't you!

Lots of the alien words are cvc, though, which I think makes it easier to see what they're not, if that makes sense. Heres hoping she does well.
My daughter is the opposite: I'm pretty sure she'll pass as she can decode anything she has the phonics for (go phonics!) , but she needs to read high frequency irregular words dozens of times before she commits them to memory.

Prigstulbrif. I actually struggled to come up with a word that was unpronounceable.Trust me, some scifi authors relish the challenge. Hngrfftlmnrrpjkfrytttadftrdxzxt is probably more like it. Half the time they then have a human who says, I think I'll just call you Hing, okay? I know the trope well enough to just skip to the Hing.

Try some of words from the phonics international non word assessment I use with reception:
Storping
Knotion
drecial
scralms
bruisefillious
Palkly
Clambford
spotchful

Micksy now I'm really lost are you saying that "Pryghztlbriff" is your attempt at writing "prigstulbrif" ( to make it difficult) or that "prigstulbrif" is how you would pronounce the combination of letters you posted "Pryghztlbriff" ?

@mrz

Apologies for not noting your earlier link to the Dehaene video

@Micksy

You might find this paper interesting. It also discusses the 'Dual Route' theory

www.edu.haifa.ac.il/personal/dshare/Share_Anglocentricities_2008.pdf

As a matter of interest the topic of 'irregularities' was recently discussed on a mailing list which Max Coltheart actually founded. He seemed to be adamant that reading researchers would only 'allow' one grapheme for each of the English phonemes and that all words containing any other spelling of that phoneme were deemd to be 'irregular'. As you can imagine, this, if true, creates an enormous gulf between synthetic/linguistic phonics teachers & programme developers and the reading research community as it means that they are not sharing a common understanding of the word 'irregular'.

Very interesting paper, Maizie. It was much like Mashabell's position.
You're right that there is very little common ground between those considering everything but one for one ciphers as being irregular, and those thinking every word in the English language can be decoded with the right mapping. Some other languages just wouldn't have that disagreement.
Mrz, you appear to be fixating on the least important aspect of everything I write. There is no benefit in my showing you I can read as well as your reception students, or in discussing the pronunciation of a word I made up to demonstrate the pointlessness of pronouncing every word.

I'm definitely not interested in whether you can read at the level of a reception child or not Micksy but you said that lots of "alien" words are cvc so I thought I'd give you some ideas of words with more than one syllable so you don't struggle to come up with examples and come up with Pryghztlbriff ??or worse

I wasn't interested in your pronunciation of the said word more with your understanding of the English alphabetic code.

It was much like Mashabell's position.

REALLY?!

Prof. Share is a cognitive psychologist. Marsha is a campaigner for spelling reform. Share is describing 'what is', Marsha is trying to change English spelling. I can't see any connection between the two, I'm afraid.

Well, I was rather presuming you'd read the paper you recommended to me. For a start, its called "On the Anglocentricities of Current Reading Research and Practice:The Perils of Overreliance on an “Outlier” Orthography" which pretty much sums up what the paper is about. Basically, all the research on the nature of reading is done on English speakers, but because English is such an outlier in terms of the number of irregularities, this doesn't necessarily tell us anything about languages with more regular orthographies.

This is from the Share paper:

Why Is English Unique Among Writing Systems?
Grammatologists agree that English underwent a series of unparalleled
historical changes. First, Christian missionaries borrowed
an orthography designed to represent far fewer than its
dozen or so vowels. English then absorbed successive waves of
invaders, conquerors, and borrowings before fossilizing spellings
at the advent of printing and on the threshold of the Great Vowel
Shift, yet repudiating almost all attempts at spelling reform. The
upshot of these successive upheavals is an amalgam of subsystems
of spelling (principally Germanic, Norman-French, and Latin-
Greek) that provide a splendid “fossil record” of the geopolitical
and cultural history of the English language (Carney, 1994; Crystal,
2003; Scragg, 1974). Unfortunately for the novice reader,
however, it strays unusually far from the one-letter-one-phoneme
mapping principle that is the norm among the world’s writing
systems (Daniels & Bright, 1996).3 In particular, the major source
of irregularity is the set of only five vowel letters (six if we include
y) representing about 20 vowel phonemes (letters representing
consonants are much less ambiguous). This mismatch between the
number of letters and the number of phonemes is reflected in the
fact that most proposals for spelling reform have called for increasing
the number of letters or adding diacritics (see Carney,
1994, chapter 7; Scragg, 1974, chapter 6).

And Share's main concern with the dual route model isn't that it doesn't work, only that it doesn't necessarily work outside English language speakers:

When Irregularity Is the Exception
If a writing system contains no exception words, is a second
route necessary? Most orthographies are fairly regular in terms of
print-to-sound relations (Daniels & Bright, 1996; Seymour et al.,
2003); thus, a single rule-based mechanism should be adequate for
pronouncing all (or nearly all) letter strings. A growing number of
reading researchers have begun to question the generalizability of
the dual-route architecture beyond English (e.g., Bishop & Snowling,
2004; Hutzler & Wimmer, 2004; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).
Ziegler and Goswami (2005), for example, ponder whether “it
might even be the case that the prominent dual route architecture
(i.e., two separate routes in the skilled reading system) may in fact
only develop for English”

Mrz, here are some alien words from last year's phonics screening check:
vol, teg, jat, ind, tull, shog, frem. Not all quite cvc, but pretty close.

I found this website to explain the unpronounceable name trope.
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheUnpronounceable

The point of this (way back in the thread, and really not terribly relevant to where it is now) is that not all words written in print are intended to be possible to be spoken aloud.

I have read Share's paper. If I hadn't I wouldn't have linked you to it.

The point I am attempting to make to you is that as English is an outlier orthography it is better not to use it as a base for developing theories of reading acquisition.

Marsha is not in the slightest bit interested in the teaching of reading using our current orthography, apart from wildly exagerating its difficulty in order to promote her case.

Share is concerned with finding out how reading works and the most effective mode of instruction. He has a rather more objective viewpoint.

And we know already that a 'transparent' orthography is easier to learn. Nobody disagrees with Marsha on that point.

But as you are taking such a big interest and are reading around the topic perhaps you will be able to find the definitive paper that explains the aspect of the dual-route theory which has always completely eluded me.

In order to activate 'meaning' you have to know what a word 'says'. How can the brain possibly arrive at this knowledge without identifying the letters within the word and the order in which they come?
And. if no 'phonics' is involved in the dual-route why is the area of the brain which processes phonology involved, even in the silent reading process?

Bearing in mind, of course, Dehaene's explanation of the word recognition process which involves letters initially, not whole words...

Dual route generally assumes one path uses phonological information, one lexical. The more general interpretation is that one route is able to recognise pseudo words and regular words, the other is able to recognise irregular words and possibly regular words as well. To be perfectly honest, whilst the Wikipedia entry fudges a few details, it does give a reasonable overview of the generalised theory.
You can easily know what a symbol means without identifying letters. You'd struggle to pass your driving test if you couldn't.

These are a couple of excerpts from earlier in the thread, Maizie:

[other poster]But you did express exasperation at the suggestion that there may be other 'natural' ways to learn to read.

[Maizie]I have to throw up my hands, say 'It's a fair cop' and come quietly. I was, unforgivably it seems, a bit exasperated at seeing that misconception repeated yet again.

[Maizie]P.S Once a child can decode competently and knows most of the letter/sound correspondences the ORT books are perfectly decodable for them. All books are decodable once you know the code

I read from this that your position was that:

• only a phonic route is necessary in order to decode every word
• all words in the English language were decodable via phonics

Am I incorrect on you holding either of these viewpoints (I realise they're almost identical)? I was quite surprised in your choice of paper to show me, because it directly contradicts these viewpoints. However, I grant that your position on them may well not be as hard as I had interpreted.

This is from Share's paper. He actually sounds quite sympathetic to spelling reform. I'm not certain as his claims of the increased difficulty of English are very far from Masha's wild exaggerations.

In English, it takes around 3 years to reach the level of decoding
mastery that is normally attained in a majority of European languages
by the end of Grade 1 (Hutzler et al., 2004; Seymour et al.,
2003). Thus, 3 years of learning to read (Singer, 1978) is not a
myth in the code-mastery sense. Such an unusually long period of
time has far-reaching implications for both the timing and content
of instruction.
In consistent orthographies, the curriculum clearly reflects the
full capabilities that early decoding mastery permits (see, e.g.,
Feitelson, 1992; McEneaney, 1997) with literature studies commencing
in Grade 2. Bloomfield (1933) was by no means the first
educationalist to lament “The difficulty of our spelling [which]
greatly delays elementary education” (p. 500).
Indeed, proponents of spelling reform throughout the centuries have traditionally found an ally in the teaching profession (see, Scragg, 1974, chapter 6).