Avoiding " mixed" reading methods

[MrEBear]

DS is still in preschool but will be one of the oldest in his class when he starts in 2016. I put the question here rather than preschool as I thought I would get better answers.

The schools around me all seem to do Jolly Phonics and the old Biff chip books. Which seems daft. They also start giving out reading books before the kids have learned all the letters.

I had the idea to try to get him reading using phonics before he starts school. Therefore avoiding the confusion that mixed methods can bring and he can also go at his own pace. I've got the jp activity books at home currently working on book 2 and we have the Songbirds books but not looked at them yet.

Am I doing the right thing or should I leave it until he starts school?

Thanks. There seems to be so much mixed advice it's hard to know what to do for the best!

Darcourse
I don't think that there is any hard and fast advice on teaching the "tricky words". There is a certain amount of opinon, but that is difficult from educational fact. There is certainly research that shows that statistically fewer children have reading difficulties if taught synthetic phonics as the sole reading method in the early years. There is quite a variation between different phonics programmes.

I think almost all phonics schemes go down the route of pointing out the decodable parts and the tricky parts to children. The extent to which they do that can vary though. As can the extent to which teachers stick to the scheme they are using.

Personally I would go with:
-identifying the regular and tricky parts for/with children
-teaching children to blend and segment the word at the same time to utilise muscle memory, with adequate practice reading and spelling as words/captions/sentences
-grouping 'tricky' words with the same 'tricky' part together e.g. no, so, go
-revision of the reading and spelling of the high frequency tricky words when that spelling pattern is taught ad the word is no longer tricky

Others may do it differently.

Most children will be fine with a few words taught as sight words, but it will cause difficulty in some. Better to get the teaching right for all children, than to risk harming the reading of some because most children will be OK

Stick with the phonics based advice Darcourse. It's the best

I like rafa's summary there.

Darcourse, to me "said" has an aa sound rather than an ee sound, so its like s-aid, which follows the 2 vowels the first says its name. And "the" should be taught after kids have learned "th" sound.

Rafa, I like your summary. Most kids will be fine, I know my luck, mine will be the one who just doesn't get it.

I'll take the logic of I have 11 months before he gets given lists of sight words. If he manages to get most of the way through Jolly Phonics at his own pace (with stickers to help) then it is bound to make the process so much less painful.

Consonants (b, d, f, h, l, m ...) have mostly stable pronunciations. Not many of those are like 'girl' - ginger or 'supper' -sugar. So it's worth really pushing the boat out with those.

With vowels phonics is fine to start with (hop not on hot spot), but in many words their pronunciation is different only, once, other, woman, women, who.

Phonics evangelists claim that they teach those with phonics too (by teaching the alternative sounds and pupils then working out the right one for each word). I suspect that regardless of what teachers claim they are doing, children simply learn to recognise such words as wholes.

In other words, after initial pure phonics learning to read English gradually becomes more and more a matter of learning to recognise words as wholes, as we all do now.

Perhaps you can explain how children can read words they haven't seen or heard before purely using their knowledge of how symbols represent spoken sounds masha ??
I'll be interested to hear your explanation.

Mrz,
They learn the single sounds which all the spellings (or graphemes if u prefer) of their language represent, be they single letters or combinations of them. This enables them to sound out any word accurately, regardless of whether they have seen them or not, or whether they know their meaning.

No other European language has phonic inconsistencies like 'great, treat, threat' or identically looking whole words with different pronunciations, like 'read, tear, minute'.

That's why children of average ability take around 3 years to become moderately fluent readers of English, while in other European languages they do so in 3 - 12 months, depending on their spelling systems.
Finnish spelling is one of the world's best and nearly all Finnish children can read fluently by the end of their first term at school, and more fluently than many English children can after 3 years.

English speaking children have to keep learning the pronunciation of more words even after they have become moderately fluent, e.g. marine, echo, cello, chord.....

In English, both reading and writing need far more teaching and practice than in other languages. Hence also the disagreements about how best to do it.

And parental help and children's innate abilities make a much bigger difference to progress. It’s a bit like different runners having to cover the same distance. When the learning route is extremely short and easy, as in Finnish, all participants complete it in much the same time, with only minor variations. For an exceptionally long and difficult course, as in English, their native talents and disabilities have a much bigger impact on the time they need for completing it.

Make up your mind masha, phonics can either enable children to read words or it can't (as you claimed earlier).
Children learn new vocabulary all the time (in every language) it's called language development.

How many words that kids have never heard can they read correctly with just phonics? Only if they're completely regular surely. And how often does that happen? Good for alien names and other made-up words. Beyond that we find a lot of un-heard words are foreign or irregular. And they need to ask an adult anyway to find out what the word means.

Not saying you don't need phonics in the toolkit, but to say it lets you read never-even-heard words on its own seems optimistic to say the least.

It depends on your definition of "irregular" children are taught to try the alternative sounds represented by the spelling when decoding so can read many words that aren't in their vocabulary and some posters/critics would define as "irregular" with very little effort.

Yes if they've heard the word, if they haven't they have no way of knowing which alternative is correct.
Hence that thing where you learn a word from a book then discover 5 years on that you've been pronouncing it wrong in your head all along. I have one that always bothers me, teind. Not in my dictionary, from context I know the meaning but I don't know how to say it and suspect it's Gaelic or something so I can't even trust the nd.

If a child comes across a word they don't recognise then regardless of whether they've learned purely phonically or mixed they'll make a phonically plausible attempt, because that's all that's open to them. A well educated adult will do the same but a) will adjust for foreign pronounciation depending on context and b) will make a leap to a less plausible pronounciation matching a word they've heard but not read. The many made up words a child finds in Roald Dahl or Harry Potter will be decodable (albeit possibly using foreign rules like Beauxbatons) because how else would the author decide how to spell them?

Something else you could do OPis to highlight the decodable words in everyday picture books. Sound effects in pictures are good because they're always decodable. Pick out one teaching opportunity per book for them to help you with.

OT but Apparently I used to help my DM read her Dorothy L Sayers when I was 3 by picking out the word Peter on each page I was taught phonically but using Peter and Jane books so I presumably memorised that word as a block.

Even made up words are often adaptations or combinations of existing not necessarily regular words. That accounts for a lot of the Harry Potter ones, together with some cod Latin. The foreign words are possibly decodable as the languages used are quite decodable, but mainly they're combinations of real words. Vol de Mort, Durm und Strang, beaux batons etc.

Mrz
phonics can either enable children to read words or it can't.

It provides an excellent start on the road to fluent reading.

Moreover, 5 out of every 7 English words pose no decoding difficulties. So phonics enables children to decode many words.
But unfortunately, over a third of the 300 most high frequency ones are trickier.

That's what makes teaching children to read English much trickier than in other alphabetically written languages, where teachers and parents can use absolutely any book they fancy.

As u yourself say, a lot depends on the definition of terms.
I think that u mean by 'phonics' much more than most people understand the term to cover.

That's why we reach children how to decide those words masha instead of making lists

Tea Has!

Teach! Which just shows that technology isn't the answer ??

Interesting on the 'unknown' words.

I can well remember this happening to me, with the word 'automobile'. Aged 8 or so, I could read the word, in any normal sense - I could look at it on the page, know what it meant, never mix it up with any other word (my DB had a book entitled 'Automobiles of the World') etc. But I had NEVER heard it said. When asked to read out a story i had written, which happened to contain the word 'automobile', I read it as I thought it was said - best represented as auto + mobile, rather than the correct punctuation.

So a child can 'read' a completely unknown word, in the sense that they can 'decode' it, recognise it, spell it, understand it ... but may not know how to pronounce it aloud. It depends on our stage of reading whether we regard that 'lack' as being of primary importance - we do in beginner readers, where reading aloud is key, but adult readers read extremely fluently and accurately for understanding, but may not be able to pronounce utterly unknown words correctly.

Rudolf Flesch and Denise Eide say that English is 98% phonetic, more or less. They get to this number by conceding every debatable point.
The point being that EVERY English word stands for sounds and is therefore phonetic.
Bruce Price wrote a piece entitled "Is English a Phonetic Language? Of course! 100%"
In it he explains that a genuinely non-phonetic word would be something like QG7R pronounced "shuffleboard." Now, THAT is a non-phonetic word. (But not found in English)
Teacherwith, children are quite capable of decoding technical /scientific words they haven't previously encountered/heard if they have been taught the alternatives and how to use that knowledge. Sometimes with very young children it takes an "expert" ( and by that I mean an adult or child) to supply the missing knowledge "in this word that spelling is the same as in ....{insert word they know already} or "this word is from the Greek" so they know that /k/ is spelt ch ...

Does phonics account for regional variations in accents? So many words that work phonetically with a Northern accent don't work if you are in the South. Grass, class etc, but there are others I can't think of now that come up in Year 1 DCs books. She sounds them out but they don't make a word she knows. They have to be 'translated'. And 'put' is another - To me it does not seem to work for every word.

Phonics teaching reflects the child's accent. Children in some areas of the north would be taught that the a spelling in grass is the sound /a/ whereas in other areas children would learn that it us /ar/ for example

If your child is being taught otherwise it's poor teaching/teacher knowledge

'a' as spelling for /ar/ is one of 3-4 alternative spellings that I think really need to be taught in YrR even if you decide not to move onto phase 5 with the children. Significantly increases the number of words that young children can decode. Odd IMO to leave it until year 1.