Do parents have low expectations?

[mrz]

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/12206787/Parents-low-expectations-condemning-toddlers-them-to-a-life-of-underachievement.html

Can I just clear up two common myths

There are NO phonic rules even though I'm sure we've all heard them I before E except after C ...not always so not a rule
When two vowels go out walking the first one does the talking (says its name) no it doesn't bread said view etc etc

There is no research that supports the belief that early phonics puts children off reading for pleasure absolutely none. There's nothing more likely to put you off reading for pleasure than being unable to read the words.

English is complex we don't have a one to one correspondence between spoken sounds and written sounds making it more difficult to learn than Swedish for example.
Being able to read the words however is just one part of the puzzle. If we don't know the meaning of the words we struggle to understand what the writer wanted to convey.
It's the second strand that Save the Children are highlighting. A child with a vocabulary of hundreds of words when they start school will have an advantage over a child with a vocabulary in single figures and not just in reading but all aspects of development.

Yes Hermione is Greek (she was the daughter of Helen of Troy) it's female derivation from Hermes

mrz I don't see how a child having a large vocabulary has anything to do with phonics, a child can have a massive vocabulary without ever have seen any phonics or being able to read.

I support enlarging a pre schoolers vocab, I just don't support learning about phonics until 6 or 7.

And there are phonics "rules" - my point about the name Hermione was that you can't blend it applying what you learn in reception about blending. That produces Her-mee-yone. You and I might know that there are no phonics rules, but that's not what we teach kids. We teach them the sounds and we teach them to blend.... which is pointlessly simple really as they still have to learn hundreds more words by sight anyway.

To add, I'm not talking about "i before e except after c" - I teach primary and hasn't heard that in years!

Just meaning how we teacher reception etc to blend sounds.

Did you read it in the new National Curriculum?

Please read what I actually wrote

Sounds in Hermione /h/ /er/ - /m/ /ie/ - /o/ /n/ - /ee/

(i spelling of sound /ie/ as in triangle bicycle find etc)
(e spelling of sound /ee/ as in he, she, me, we, be etc)

No we don't teach children rules we teach children how sounds can be represented in English rather than teach them a rule only to have to say but in this word that isn't correct.

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

Yet again you'd rather have a tit for tat than a proper discussion. I know how this goes and I'm not going to lose an hour of my life to a circular argument.

Perhaps you'd like to explain how I'm being deliberately obtuse?

Did you actually read what I said ...it's seems not from your earlier post!

I'm sorry, I think it was me who mistakenly used the term 'phonics rules'. I meant that as a short-hand version of 'possible phoneme-grapheme correspondences' or 'how phonics works in English, so how sounds are represented in writing'. I didn't mean trivial "rules for spelling" such as 'i before e'.

So when DS developed a working knowledge of phonics through teaching himself to read, what I meant was that he developed a fairly sophisticated underlying knowledge of how sounds are represented by writing in English. i didn't mean that he had a knowledge of lots of trivial spelling rules.

teacherWith my comment about rules was a general one aimed at no one in particular I'm not sure why English has taken it so personally

I posted this yesterday so I'm not arguing with her about teaching phonics even though she seems determined to make an argument where none exists
Add message | Report | Message poster mrz Tue 05-Apr-16 21:14:06
sorry 😳

For what it's worth speaking as someone who taught reception for many years I think it's totally unnecessary for parents to teach their child prior to school unless the child shows a strong interest . Talk to your child share stories songs and rhymes but don't feel under pressure to teach your pre school child.

My post this morning was referring to the Save the Children report as I made clear which isn't about phonics but vocabulary.

I think it's interesting that a debate about vocabulary can turn into a debate about phonics, though, because it is a phenomenon that I have noticed when teaching rather older, KS2 children (in general MC, in general with supportive, decently educated parents).

There seems to be a feeling amongst these parents that to 'support their children's academic progress' means to do some very specific, narrowly-focused things: to do workbooks, maths worksheets, online learning such as MyMaths or repetitive offline learning such as Kumon, to practise spelling in isolation. They often react in surprise when i suggest that to improve their child's writing they should read books together or discuss their child's currrent reading book with them, visit places of interest or watch TV documentaries together and discuss them.

Similarly, I wonder whether parents are 'doing phonics' with children - watching alphablocks or online games, working through phonics readers, pointing out words and letters - almost INSTEAD of reading books for enjoyment, singing nursery rhymes, talking and discussing around play and general experience of the world around them. Or 'doing number work' rather than playing dice games, hopscotch, number songs etc. So doing 'pre school school work' in a narrow sense rather than developing vocabulary naturally IYSWIM?

I don't think it's confined to MC parents often the first thing I'm asked as a SENCO is will I send home some worksheets to help child catch up.

My ds learned to read without phonics simply because I had no knowledge of it. He learned to read common words from exposure. He wanted me to follow words with finger when I was reading to him. He loved subtitles on TV.
But since he learned phonics at school, it benefitted him a lot on tackling more difficult words he come across. I think both worked for him really well. Once he can read general things in life, he gained so much vocabulary from it. But I don't feel like I actually taught him to read early on purpose, it just happened, because he was interested. If I had knowledge of phonics, I still don't know if I taught him or not, because I'm not native English speaker and I don't feel comfortable teaching him.

I think that threads about vocabulary often end up with discussions about phonics because people confuse the two. I was watching a video of the ATL leader's speech in which she read out a letter from a parent who was quite/very indignant about her 6 y old having to to do extra phonics 'because he understood many quite complex words' (examples were given but I don't recall them). Well, understanding complex words hasn't really got anything to do with phonics; that's receptive and expressive oral vocabulary, not a reading vocabulary. If the parent had said that her child could read those words it might have been been more pertinent.

I'm at a loss to understand why a child has to learn hundreds more words by sight ... after phonics teaching. The whole point of learning phonics is that they don't have to do that.

"English is complex we don't have a one to one correspondence between spoken sounds and written sounds making it more difficult to learn than Swedish for example."

Can I clear up another myth? Swedish does not have a one to one correspondence between spoken sounds and written sounds. Just saying..

jul, ljus and djup all start with the same initial consonant sound in Swedish

as do sjuk, skjuta, schema and (for many speakers) chaufför

also syna and cykel

Closer correspondence than in English, yes. But not one to one.

Am also slightly wondering why mastering English spelling doesn't seem so terribly difficult to those of us who learn it as a second language.

I didn't say Swedish did, but it has a much more transparent orthographical structure than English making it easier to learn to read and spell.

Your comment about finding learning to spell in English (as a second language learner) is very interesting as there is a certain poster who campaigns for spelling Refirm and continually claims the opposite. Thanks for an alternative view 🙂

Like teacherwith2kids wondered at the end - my impression is a lot of parents around me and on forums are obsessed with a very narrow range of intelligence - basically colours and shapes then letters and numbers. So they'll do lots of things related to those, at the exception of other stuff - they'll let them have "screen time", but only if it's about those few areas - and age limited TV programmes etc. are always available now, unlike in the past.

All of which is so limited that even a fully engaged parent while it's happening won't have any vocabulary expanding conversations as a result of them, because you're just talking about the same few things. I don't think of course that this is the prime reason for kids arriving at school with limited vocabulary etc. as I'm sure more explicit neglect is likely, but I can certainly believe mrz's experience of educated involved parents not creating a kid with large vocabulary.

"English is complex we don't have a one to one correspondence between spoken sounds and written sounds making it more difficult to learn than Swedish for example."

You did come rather close, mrz. Not that it matters. You are right about it being more transparent.

As far as the spelling goes, I think a lot of it is psychological. I and my Swedish peers had it drummed into us from an early age that no educated person makes spelling mistakes.

My dc, brought up in this country, have internalised that spelling is very difficult and something that you have to be naturally good at, rather like foreign languages (again, nobody told us that).

I should add that there are other things that are expected of British children, where Swedish children are given a lot of leeway, particularly when it comes to oral performance. Swedes are far more liable to think that some people are naturally shy and therefore cannot be expected to communicate verbally to any great extent. I am always amazed at how verbally confident dc and their peers are compared to what I was like as a child. We had no drama lessons and virtually no training in speaking in public. Also far less training in how to structure a good argument and be persuasive. Come to think of it, that explains a lot...

My dc, brought up in this country, have internalised that spelling is very difficult and something that you have to be naturally good at,

Agree. Also that it is something that doesn't matter very much, because handing in pieces of work with spelling errors doesn't provoke much in the way of correction from teachers. Of course, this is a chicken and egg problem; when schools teach spelling ineffectively (ie via Look cover write check rather than via phonics strategies), then children make so many errors that teachers worry about correcting them damaging their creativity and self-esteem.

I'm worrying confused you cory

Very frequently it is well educated people who have no time. Hence the reliance on work sheets and narrow goals that can be accommmodated at the kitchen table rather than taking the children out for the whole day and talking to them, showing them things, discussing what they see and giving them a good general knowledge. Lots of children have little to talk about except gaming and TV. It still comes back to lack of time, parental energy and an understanding of what they can do to give a child better language skills.

It really is not all about drilling spellings or phonics "rules", especially in pre-school where these children are first seen to be behind. Phonics was only part of the reading strategy when my DC were at primary age. I am actually rather glad about that as it did not occur to me to give them work sheets on phonics. In fact the people who did, and used Jolly Phonics at home, we thought were rather odd! Not that their children did any better than those of us who just went along with what the school asked us to do. However, I do understand that many children benefit from phonics and why it is used now. The teaching of reading evolves over time.

However, none of this gets away from the fact that a lot of children are being short-changed by their parents and are not spoken to, not read to, not conversed with, and generally allowed to scream and make non-word noises to get attention with no correction and no-one saying the appropriate words to them. I am not sure a nursery can actually put this right which is why many of these children fail to catch up. I would not say that many of the nursery nurses I came across were expert enough to do this but I do believe we should try.