Synthetic Phonics

[Patrica1929]

I am very concerned about the teaching of reading using Synthetic Phonics in primary schools. (This is now part of the National Curriculum.) Yes, teachers may be becoming more successful at drilling children to pass the spelling tests of words and non words learnt by the blending together of 44 sounds, but at what expense. This method excludes and positively prohibits the use of word recognition, reading for meaning, the use of pictures for clues and the learning of key words. It is a mechanical process which can hold up children who are ready to learn to read for meaning and enjoyment and which could actually put them off reading. See the report by the 'United Kingdom Literary Association' entitled 'Children need more than Synthetic Phonics' and if you are concerned complain to schools and to the government.

Lost - I'm stunned schools are still giving out that stupid advice to find spellings in a dictionary. Nobody who's ever struggled to spell would give such dum advice. What kind of makes more sense is either an electronic dictionary (with spell checker) or looking for a similar word in a thesaurus and hope the word your are looking for is in the alternatives, like looking for "sure" you might get "certain" as an alternative.

Apologies mrz, FT is similar level of reading ability I would imagine.

My son is hyperlexic catkind his is a reading disability.

RafaIsTheKingOfClay: I'm not sure that awareness of the problematic nature of ES and why it makes learning to read and write in English difficult has ever been a contentious issue. It's the one thing that everybody on both sides of the debate agrees on.
Not true. There are endless disagreements about how difficult learning to read and write English is.

The issue is whether we
a) decide it's problematic and find a totally different way to teach it.
Since the spellings that cause all the difficulties have not changed for nearly 300 years there is probably no need for a totally new way to teach it. Overall, the approach which James Dunn advocated back in 1766, in his book 'The Best Method of Teaching to Read and Spell English' is probably as valid as ever.
1) Begin with words that are absolutely regular, in the sense that they are pronounced in the way children would expect.
2) Build into the exercises material that unobtrusively revises earlier work.
3) Give special emphasis to the pronunciation of c and g, the first big difficulty; introduce other difficulties progressively....

Given that at least 4,219 common words contain some letters which have to be learned word by word (e.g. boot, brute, fruit, move, group ...) and around 2000 pose decoding difficulties as (boot - foot, fruit - intuit) what it takes above all is lots of repetition.

b) teach some of the Alphabetic Code, but not all of it, using completely different methods to teach the rest, while telling the children there is no pattern to it.
Because the amount of learning involved is so humungous, children's innate abilities make a big difference to how much learning they need or how they learn best. I am in favour of not pretending that all words are equally decodable. It would certainly be good to have some research which investigates, with equal allocations of time, whether after a short course of basic phonics children learn to read the tricky words faster as whole words or by the current SP approach.

c) Teach a complete or almost complete alphabetic code alongside the principles of what makes ES difficult, morphology, some etymology and grammar.
This sounds rather vague and is open to many different interpretations, partly because English does not really have a proper alphabetic code.

Given that at least 4,219 common words contain some letters which have to be learned word by word (e.g. boot

I'm sorry, as usual, you've lost me straight away. Why on earth do you think 'boot' must be learned in isolation? /b/ /oo/ /t/ is perfectly straightforward. To learn it 'word by word' is ridiculous.

'Likewise 'group' - most Year one children will explain to you that 'ou' is an alternative spelling for 'ou', and also applies to 'soup', 'mousse', 'coupon', 'wound', 'routine', etc. Again, there is no need to learn 'group' word by word.

'Brute' - again, why learn in isolation when other words use the same grapheme, a split diagraph? Year one children do this easily by the end of the year one - flute, rude, rule, prune, etc.

I am in favour of not pretending that all words are equally decodable
But without having gone into, say, any Year One class to see how they cope easily with the words you think must be learnt in isolation and how it this works. Why don't you do just that, Masha, instead of doom-saying all day on all the phonics threads on all the talk boards you can find?

Apart from anything else, it must be very depressing to be so negative all the time, not to mention lonely. So much nicer to see children eagerly applying what you say, having never taught a class of Year 1 children to do this successfully? It's the equivalent of sitting in a room with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears.