Sight/tricky words - do we actually ‘know’ the best way to teach them?

[TheDuchessOfKidderminster]

I stumbled across this blog post recently, where the comments underneath are actually more interesting than the blog itself, so well worth looking at the whole thing. It’s something I have a professional interest in (I’m not a teacher though) as well as personal (my DS is in Y1 and learning to read following the Letters and Sounds guidelines). It strikes me reading this that we really don’t know yet what is the best method, although it is very clear that phonics teaching should predominate, it’s debatable whether that should be to the exclusion of other methods.

I’ve read a few debates about this recently on Mumsnet (there’s one in AIBU that sparked quite a long discussion about it), so I thought some people might find this interesting. Or maybe just me

readoxford.org/guest-blog-are-sight-words-unjustly-slighted

If we (you) recognised words by shape we wouldn’t be able to read words written in CAPITALS

Ok, fair point. Put it this way, I recognise words by remembering the way they are spelled (not phonetically, but reading the letters pretty much in isolation). I remembered the pattern and associate that pattern to a certain pronunciation. So if you like, I remember the succession of letters. After all, not knowing phonics I need a strategy to recognise a word. This is a common way of spelling and reading for people who learn English later in life.

“ I remembered the pattern and associate that pattern to a certain pronunciation. “ so Phonics

Arkadia, I remember you saying you can decode words fine on other thread...Now you say you can't?

'in the not so distant pre-phonics past'

I think you mean 'during the late 20th century', when the now-discredited fad methods were in use. Phonics - the traditional method - has been around for centuries.

Just jumping on to read later.

Not to knock phonics teaching at all, but the question I have is more about the degree of technical language the children have to know now. Is there any real world advantage in knowing the terms "split digraph, grapheme, phoneme" etc at age 4? I never heard of them until my mid 30s despite being old enough to have learned pre-look and say reading, and it doesn't feel like it held me back to know what a "magic E" was instead. Of course the teachers should know this stuff, but why does it come off the lesson plans into the children's vocabulary before they have the basics? It feels like learning grade 5 music theory before the tune of "baa baa black sheep"

“but the question I have is more about the degree of technical language the children have to know now.“
They don’t have to know the technical language.

Irvine, if I said that I lied

Arkadia - You seem to be confusing phonetics with phonics. What you describe (remembering the pattern and associating it with a particular pronunciation) is very much the synthetic phonics approach.

knottybeam - As Norestformrz says, children do not have to know any of the technical language. They just have to learn to read. That involves understanding that "not" and "note" are different words and that the e affects how the o is pronounced but they don't need to know that the o and the e are referred to as a split digraph.

Arkadia, I think you are over thinking. A lot of comment you make sounds like you are misinformed and confused.
I really think you should trust teacher like mrz and follow their advice.
I understand your aim is to help your dd, I don't think your way of thinking is really helping.

It's funny how some people on this thread think they know better than I do about how my own brain works. Well, I have news for you. You're wrong.
You don't know anything about me.

I’m inclined to believe brain research I’m afraid.

Professor Dehaene says, "Whole word reading is a myth…As adults we have forgotten how we were as children. We have forgotten how difficult it was to learn to read and we think we can just lay our eyes on a word and it immediately pops to mind. Indeed, there is this notion of parallel reading, we read all of the letters at the same time. This gives us an illusion of whole-word reading, but in fact, if we look at the brain, the brain still processes every single letter and does not look at the whole shape. So whole word reading is a myth, basically. What we have is letter processing, but letter processing in parallel across all of the letters of the word. The brain does not use the global word shape. And in fact in children it’s even worse. Children require more and more time for more and more letters. ”

I'm inclined to think you need to stop telling me what to think. I know how my brain works better than you do.

I see words in the same way I see images and symbols - like a picture. If I look out of the window and see a blackbird or an oak tree, then I know that's what it is. If I look at a road sign I understand what the symbol means. I don't have to translate it into sounds for it to make sense. For me, words work the same way.

I’m not telling you what to think. I’m telling you what brain science tells us about how everyone’s brain actually works and wasn’t aware you had the benefit of home fMRI

mrz, out of curiousity, people who use non phonetic languages like Chinese, do they process the reading same way as people using phonetic languages?

"山" means mountain, "川" means river, those letters represent words but pretty much rely on visual image to remember.

Until fairly recently it was believed that different networks in the brain were engaged when reading alphabetic and logographic systems but there is now evidence that reading in all languages activates the same area.

I know how my brain works better than you do.

And I presume you think you'll know how your liver works better than a doctor, then? You know your tooth structure better than a dentist?

Generally speaking, researchers will have a better knowledge of their core area than the man on the street. That's not a slight on the man on the street at all. But as lay people, we will have misconceptions and information that isn't scientifically proven or up to date. I might have a preconceived idea of how my eye health is, or how I see - doesn't mean I'm right just because the eyeballs are in my head.

As I understand it, irvine, even Chinese characters have a phonetic element to them.

The facts about learning to read in Chinese (that I have gleaned from googling over the years ) are that children need to memorise about 3,000 characters in order to be reasonably literate and that it takes them a considerable number of years., far longer than it takes children who are learning to read English. For more than ordinary day to day literacy they would need to master many more characters.

But I'm afraid I know nothing about how they actually process them.

Thanks. I read that learning second/third/++ languages uses the different part of brain looooong ago somewhere, it might be a myth as well then.

maizie, that sound like a hard work!

Well, irvine, google's not obliging me this evening but I found this:

According to this national syllabus, students should be able to read and write the following number of characters:
Grade 1-2: Read 1600, write 800;
Grade 3-4: Read 2500, write 1600;
Grade 5-6: Read 3000, write 2500;
Grade 7-9: Read/write 3500

Makes learning to read English look like an absolute doddle....

!

Not everyone's brain works in exactly the same way.

Tell that to the neuroscientists who have studied thousands of brains