TO not get Phonics

[BIgBagofJelly]

I'm mainly curious as opposed to concerned, my DD is summer born reception and brings home ORT level 2 books so I'm assuming she's within the normal range and I'm not really worried. What I don't get though is the school make a huge dealt of phonics (and I understand there's a lot of evidence to back this up) but the Oxford Reading Tree books she brings home seem to have so many words that she can't "decode" either because they're irregular or because she hasn't learned that particular rule yet. (E.g. the E on the end of a word in "Like" "Snake" etc). Am I meant to be explaining that to her or should she just read the entire word and learn it?

I can understand building up a catalogue of "High frequency words" but it doesn't even seem like the same word is consolidated so isn't she bound to forget them anyway?

AS I said I'm not really worried she seems neither particularly advanced nor particularly behind but I was curious about what I should be doing with these words and the reading books in general. Should I read each one once? Read it a few times?

"Children should be encouraged to read naturalistic texts with non-decodable words" I'd love examples of non decodeable words because I don't know any.

Btw, there are other recent studies that show exclusive use of synthetic phonics is not the best way to teach reading. This study found that supplementing synthetic phonics with sight-reading of high-frequency words (as opposed to continuing purely with the synthetic phonics approach) improved reading attainment. This one found that teaching English word structure and morphology improved reading and spelling performance compared to synthetic phonics. There are others.

Overall, a lot of recent research suggests that while synthetic phonics is a good way to start reading, children benefit from other methods being introduced as well. Perhaps some of these benefits are because many schools don't teach synthetic phonics in its strictest form. However, even if some ideal, purist form of synthetic phonics was theoretically the best way to learn to read in English, it won't matter if that's not how it's delivered in classrooms. As it's currently taught, synthetic phonics by itself is not as effective as synthetic phonics + other methods.

Horses for courses.

Comparing a few thousand pupils with the half million plus seven year olds in primary schools isn't any more accurate than comparing individual school results.

"Overall, a lot of recent research suggests that while synthetic phonics is a good way to start reading, children benefit from other methods being introduced as well"

I'm sure you have a link?

Dyslexia is a problem with sequencing sounds eg hearing separate sounds in the correct order. So you may be able to say cat but not tell someone it is formed from 3 sounds /c/ /a/ /t/. It becomes harder the more sounds involved and if there are lots of consonants clustered together. Specific is a good example because to first 3 sounds are hard to get in the right order /s/ /p/ /e/ - you may miss out the /s/ especially as the next syllable also starts with /s/ sound (written with a c).

Therefore learning to say words correctly, learning how to put the sounds in order, is the most important part of teaching reading. No point trying to sound out a word if you have never heard it or said it before. So if you're reading with a young child it's fine to model sounding out or for them to sight read snake if they are able to before knowing that a_e makes the /ai/ sound. They will need to know the words snake, make, take, late etc first before they can start to learn that spelling pattern.

If your dd is ok reading sounds in the main then just sit with her and read with her building up her vocab knowledge. If she was showing signs of dyslexia already then you'd do the same thing but with decodable books that taught her how to put sounds in order. But if she is enjoying reading and doing both sight recog and a bit of phonics (with some good guesses at what the word might be) then you're doing fine.

I'd love examples of non decodeable words because I don't know any.

They mean non-decodable for the stage of phonics instruction the children had reached, according to the structured sequence of phonic sounds as set out in the national curriculum. The phonetically-decodable texts were restricted to vocabulary that matched the sounds covered by that point in Reception year. The non-phonetically-decodable texts had no such restriction, and contained more complex words that went beyond what try children had learned about phonics by that point (but presumably could be decoded by older children).

It sounds like the difference between the Letters & Sounds and Oxford Reading Tree books, although I don't think that's what they actually used in the study.

Even with phonics you have to know how to pronounce the sound in any word decoding only gets you so far. For instance the ai sound in paid is different to the ai sound in said, so if you met the new word waid would you pronounce it to rhyme with paid (which is spelt wade) or would you pronounce it to rhyme with said ( which is spelt wed) or could it be some other way. See example used earlier about parochial the ch sound is not the standard ch sound in church but a different sound. you need to hear words to know exact pronounciation a lot of the time.

Toptoe,not all dyslexics are like that. The likes of my ds and dh need the logic of phonics and needed to be taught rules because showing them "pictures" of words ie flashcards never worked.

"Overall, a lot of recent research suggests that while synthetic phonics is a good way to start reading, children benefit from other methods being introduced as well"

I'm sure you have a link?

The 3 different studies I've linked to all make this point.

It's a common theme at academic conferences on reading that synthetic phonics is not the end of the story; people are not going to just give up researching the topic to say "well, it doesn't get better than this". If there's evidence that something can improve the system, then great. There is always room for improvement.

"They mean non-decodable for the stage of phonics instruction the children had reached," do they? ...the words are still decodable whether the reader has the skills or knowledge to decode and all it requires is someone to supply the missing knowledge to enable them to succeed rather than give the message "this is too difficult"

For instance the ai sound in paid is different to the ai sound in said

The child us taught the alternatives and to start with the most common sound for the spelling then try others to work out the correct alternative.

Phonics isn't about correct pronunciation

My able reader ds still uses phonic knowledge/ breaking down, segmenting to work out how to read new word.
I do exactly the same, even I don't know any proper phonics, still break down words to work out unknown words. (I am not native English speaker.)

I'm a bit curious, how normal adults who hasn't learned phonics do to work out unknown words. Don't they use their own way of figuring out how to read the word by looking at part/segment of the word, like phonics?

the words are still decodable whether the reader has the skills or knowledge to decode and all it requires is someone to supply the missing knowledge to enable them to succeed rather than give the message "this is too difficult"

I'm not sure what you're saying here. There's no suggestion that they told the children that the texts they were getting were non-decodable: that's just a name for one of the experimental conditions.

From the paper (PD = phonetically decodable):
Two parallel reading schemes were used (Text PD and Text non-PD). Text PD contained only words which should be phonically decodable by children in Reception classes who are following the structured sequence of phonic sounds as set out in the National Curriculum (DfE 2014a, b). Text non-PD was designed to replicate the kind of language used in ‘real’ books, with no restrictions in the choice of vocabulary other than being age appropriate and congruent with Text PD. Both texts used repetition and introduced the same number of words per book, having the same length of sentences, and the same number of pages as well as having identical illustrations.

But if you know that there are a minority of schools that have consistently closed the gender gap yet the national picture still shows there is one, then surely the direction research should be going in is to look at what those schools are doing that is different. Then you can accurately pinpoint further areas of research for RCTs.

Good phonics teaching also includes morphology and word structure. Even letters and sounds includes elements of morphology and as far as I know documents produced by the UK govt in recent years have always included it. I don't have access to the whole of that last paper but I suspect it doesn't tell us much we don't already know about phonics other than highlighting the need for a common understanding of terminology.

"Reception classes who are following the structured sequence of phonic sounds as set out in the National Curriculum (DfE 2014a, b"
Interesting since reception children don't follow the National Curriculum and there isn't any such structure set out suggests researchers hadn't don't their homework or ill informed

Both texts used repetition

This caught my attention this morning. Decodable texts usually don't use repetition. At least not in the same way look and say texts do. There's no need for them to.

Given they were allowing the phonics schools to carry on what they were doing before, I don't see how they could have had one set of decodable texts for those schools.

I'm tempted to suggest the authors of that paper have very little understanding of what they were trying to achieve. It's really not very good.

I was trying to be polite but it sounds as if they are absolutely clueless about schools not just phonics

Since you've mentioned the NC

I gave up on being polite . I don't think it's just schools.

I'm not sure that study design could have been more biased towards the intervention if they had tried.

Interestingly, one conclusion that you might be able to draw from it is that teaching oral vocabulary aids reading comprehension. The groups that were given oral vocabulary activities do score higher in the passage comprehension. I don't think this is anything we didn't know before though.

Which is all part of what Rose called phonics within a language rich environment .... Receptive vocabulary essential for comprehension

Exactly. So it's strange that the two intervention groups were given it, but there seems to have been no attempt to ensure that the control SP classes were.

Obviously the researchers conducted a study without knowing how to teach phonics well ...sad!

My DS finished the set one RWI sounds but needs set 2 and 3 sounds to read his books. Anything with set 1 sounds is easy but I have ended up having to teach some of 2 and 3 just so he can do the books.

Don't worry about the books. We send home books that don't match the phonics we teach either, because it's all we have and reading schemes cost many thousands of pounds that we don't have. If there is a word that a child can't decode yet, there is no harm in telling them the phoneme if you know it, or providing other strategies to work out the word (or even telling them what it is!). It's the frequent reading that counts, and discussing the book. The phonics practice will be done at school.