whats with this phonetic spelling????

[miku]

while i understand that it helps my daughter to express herself without being hung up on spelling, why arent easy words actually taught as they are spelt???
it seems a little daft to me, as then kids have to 're-learn' words, as they are actually spelt.
I had a little conflab with the teacher, as my daughter is also bi-lingual........as are 90% of kids in the school......waste of brain space or confidence building???

apologies as im sure this topic has come up loadsa times before........thoughts please!!

They are - each phase of Letters and Sounds has a 'tricky words' section to be learned alongside.

really?when my daughters homeworks comes back it just seems that the teacher then writes how the word is spelt underneath......now forgive me, but isnt that a little UNDERMINING of learning words phonetically in the first place?

I dont get it either-in fact I dont get the whole phonics thing to be honest. My DS definately sight reads as has good visual memory so only uses phonics when asked to (and not that successfully). He is much more fluent reader when sight reading tbh.
Apparently children eventually find it easier to spell using phonics and in early stages an informed choice (ie C or K) doesnt really matter as long as its an educated choice.
I am sure some teachers on here will be far better at explaining than me but does seem a bit daft to me...I am personally good at spelling but just read a lot as a child and never did a phonic in my life....

Lots of studies have shown that synthetic phonics is the best way to teach children to read. It gives children the tools which allow them to "decode" words they haven't seen before. Equally, if you don't know how to spell a word, phonics will allow you to take a shot at it with a decent chance that the reader will understand what you meant.

Phonics work for spelling a lot of common words but, English being what it is, it doesn't work universally. In some cases the spelling reflects the way the word used to be pronounced or the word's roots in other languages, in others the spelling is just odd. Why, for example, is it "pigeon"? It is derived from an old French word, "pijon", which is a more logical spelling than the one we use.

So yes, children do have to learn the correct way to spell words. Once they are reading well, this usually follows. The schools my children go to used weekly spelling tests to help with this.

Both the evidence and experience with my 4 children have convinced me that phonics is a good approach.

Phonics is how a letter (or group of letters) SOUNDS so O and U would be ou. They learn how to "sound out" the letters which, in turn, helps them to spell the words.

They shouldn't be re-learning anything at all. have a look here

The thing that most schools now use if called phonics - which means learning about how the letters sounds, and how to join them together to make words.

Phonetic spelling is something completely different, where people have sometimes suggested that the whole of English spelling ought to be changed to match the sounds better, so there aren;t any words which sounds different to what you'd expect if you had never seen them before.

I've not heard of any schools in the UK using phonetic spelling.

But I think sometimes teachers encourage children to "express themselves" by writing without worrying about the spelling of words they haven't learned to spell yet, which is maybe what your DCs teacher is doing. But they would then give them the proper spelling so they will maybe know it next time.

I'm also a little dubious about phonics and spelling. I understand that there has been a lot of research to show that synthetic phonics really is the most successful system for teaching children to read and spell, but imagine that a lot depends on how it is implemented by individual teachers.

There does seem to be a great emphasis on giving children the tools to spell using phonics, which is great in theory, but I just wonder whether in English the exceptions are simply too numerous for this not to actually cause problems with spelling unless handled very skillfully indeed by the teacher.

Every morning and afternoon my heart sinks on walking into dd's school and seeing examples of the children's writing displayed proudly in the hall, all spelled very logically, but very very wrongly. "I wak to skool" is one that particularly sticks in my craw mind.

My ds is now in Year 4 and I am trying to undo the harm that using phonics in spelling has done. I remember going to look at his work at the end of Year 3 and nearly burst out in tears when I saw his writing.

He gets his spellings in a twist when he tries to spell phonetically. I have talked to his teacher and they say it is 'normal' My experience is based on having 2 ds, both quite bright. One is able to make the transition from spelling phonetically to spelling correctly easily and Y4 ds cannot. I am despairing. By the way ' he is not bad enough to require extra help'

I sympathise with previous post. I know where you are coming from. Do we just wait until the children learn to spell properly.

I'm very sorry to hear that flummoxednow. What sort of things are you doing with him to help him now?

I try to get him to read more, anything to help him recognise words. The frustrating thing is he will always try to use letter sounds to spell. As many have posted, English is a very difficult language to spell. I am not a native English speaker which makes it more difficult. I mispronounce words and do not emphasis the right sound. I try to get my 11 year old to help.

Lots of spelling repetition and getting him interested in words. Sorry I am really frustrated. Are our children guinea pigs in this whole education experiment.

My ds lost one year in literacy. He did not make any improvement in a year. I found out at the end of Year3 that he has a real problem.

Sorry for the rant folks. Watch your children as they transition from reading to writing. That's when my ds problem became apparent. It was funny at first but I am really worried now.

I'm sure you are doing the right thing, flummoxed, and I'm sure it will come.

Did your ds1 learn to read and write with the same method?

flummoxednow,
I posted these links in another thread. They may not be able to help you much because it looks like you need to live in Nottingham to access these methods, but they show you that your son is not alone. It seems that certain children are not able to get the synthetic phonics methods, and that they think differently and can be taught to read in other ways.
www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6002967
www.birminghampost.net/life-leisure-birmingham-guide/postfeatures/2009/01/21/understanding-dyslexia- 65233-22746472/
www.iconmethod.com/nias.htm#Icon.

I agree with claig-apparently some children are more right brained (or left-cant remember which way round) and simply learn better visually whilst others are better at decoding. I had to at the idea of phonetic spelling leading to a change in the english language-surely thats a bit like saying " well we know the earth is round but lots of children dont get that and think its flat...lets just change it and call it flat so its easier to teach them...."

I will get flamed for this.....

Whilst I understand peoples anxiety about their childrens spelling, I DO think it is more important to be able to READ. Phonics DOES help with this.

If you can read, you can achieve things, if you cannot, you are basically stuffed.

If you can spell, all good, if you cannot, there are spell checkers etc to help you out.

For example, my Dsis is incredibly incredibly bright. She hold a golden key to a major university. She writes and spells like a primary schooler. Her writing is shocking. But this didn't stop her from being incredibly successful.

My point is, yes, try and hep out where you can Some people 'get' spelling, others don't.
If you don't like phonics and don't think your child 'gets' it, do some research and find another method of assisting your child at home. The schools are TOLD to teach phonics. What they are meant to do is ensure each child comes away with an understanding of that level. If you can prove to the teacher that a certain method s better for your child and acheives those same aims (and your child will not get confused at school time) then use that one and the teacher should surely be in agreeance?

I dont disagree with you threetimemummy-I know logically that in the world today spelling & grammar are likely to take on less significance as stuff can be corrected by a computer-I guess its just hard to adapt to this when at school these things used to be of primary importance.
In a sense its much fairer now on people like your Dsis and my DS-they can now be judged on their ideas/thoughts/abstract concepts rather than the things like spelling which just slow them down!!
Really interesting discussion though...

I'm not sure. I doubt very much that private/selective schools will be similarly relaxed about spelling. I think it is less likely that the world will decide that spelling doesn't matter and more likely that those pupils who have never learned to spell correctly will be further disadvantaged compared to their more expensively educated peers.

I disagree that spelling is unimportant, especially at primary level. My ds has lost his confidence in the year that he lagged behind in spelling. I am trying to pick him up, reminding him that he is not 'stupid'.

ZephirineDrouhin, he learnt to read by something called ERR. In the 3 years between my two ds, the school had changed the method of teaching reading. Not sure if this contibuted to number 2 ds difficulty.

Fascinated to hear why people think that phonics affects kids spelling negatively???

The whole point of phonics is that you explicitly teach kids the code to allow them to spell. This quickly enables them to learn how to spell literally thousands of words.

Yes they then have to learn other "tricky" words by sight and I guess they have to learn which ones are irregular. But the whole word way of learning to spell requires that you learn every single word by sight. To me logically this latter method has to be a bigger and harder task?? Therefore phonics should prove to be the better method.

Anyone point me towards any articles discussing this?

Lisata, I posted this article on the other thread, but it is relevant here too. I find her arguments quite compelling.

I think the reason people feel that phonics are affecting spelling negatively is because they see it happening in their children. See flummoxed's posts above for example.

It's not an either/or choice between whole word recognition and synthetic phonics. Clearly for irregular or "tricky" words something like whole word recognition is being used even within a strict synthetic phonics programme.

But what I have read of parents' concerns on here, it seems that there can be unintended negative consequences of teaching children that there is a clear relationship between the sound of words and their spelling, subject a few "tricky" exceptions. This approach might work perfectly in Spanish or Italian, but English is so irregular that it is easy to see how this would lead to some children becoming very confused on discovering just how often the rules (in which they have invested huge amounts of time and effort) don't apply.

I'm sure in that an expertly implemented programme of synthetic phonics where due attention is given to the fact that many words are not spelled as they sound, these problems are less likely to occur. As you say there is plenty of evidence that synthetic phonics is a very effective way of getting children to read well. But it seems that things can go wrong in the implementation, and if parents are seeing these things going wrong it is worth discussing rather than just saying "the research has been done: this is the way to teach reading and spelling, case closed".

ZephirineDrouhin, thanks for posting a very interesting article. From a purely philosophical perspective, synthetic phonics appears to be a 'bottom-up' method, and the weakness of 'bottom-up' methods is that they have trouble seeing the wood for the trees.

Yes Claig. My feeling is that the relationship between spelling and sounding in English is defined by patterns rather than by rules, so you would think it would make sense to emphasise pattern recognition over rule building in teaching that relationship. If children are taught that there are clear rules for sounding/spelling, I can see that this is an extremely effective way to get them spelling words like cat, dog, cup, man, day etc. But it surely leaves them without any useful strategy (other than guessing) for a lot of very common words like bread, word, walk, school, night, mother etc.

I attended a conference where Kathy Hall was speaking about synthetic phonics at around the same time that the article ZepherineDrouhin posted was written. It was very clear that she had very little understanding of the English alphabetic code, or SP teaching, 'works'. Which is not surprising as she has spent a long academic career promoting 'whole word'/'look and say' methods of teaching reading.

It is an indisputable fact that the written word evolved by the 'encoding' of the sounds in the word by means of alphabet letters. The problem with the English language is that it is made up of words from a huge number of other languages which remain encoded as in the originating language. As no two languages use the alphabet in exactly the same way to encode sounds we have ended up with a code which is complex and needs to be taught in a very structured, systematic way.

As far as spelling is concerned, in the initial stages of learning to read and spell children do not have all the code available to them, but, once the 44ish 'sounds', plus one way to encode them, have been taught, children have the tools with which to make a plausible (i.e phonetic) spelling of any word they want to write. Once the more complex code (i.e the different ways of spelling sounds) is introduced a good SP teacher will do lots of word level spelling work in which children will be sorting words according to the way the target 'sound' is spelled, looking for spelling choice probabilities (there aren't any reliable 'spelling rules')and learning word specific spellings.

The very fact that children have to look closely at words in order to work out what they 'say' encourages a habit of paying close attention to the detail of the letter use in the word and makes them more likely to remember the specific way that sounds are spelled in words. Most children who have been taught the whole 'code', with equal emphasis placed on spelling and reading, will have no problem with spelling. Early phonetic spelling will be replaced by 'correct' spelling as they are taught it. A few will never really master it, but their phonetic attempts are at least readable, which is more than can be said for the children who have never been properly taught the connection between letters and sounds and who think that spelling is a matter of hurling a dimly remembered 'letter string' onto the page and hoping that they've got the right letters in the right order! I work in KS3, remediating reading and spelling, and I see a great many of these...

It is really helpful to be very clear that every sound in every word is represented by a piece of 'code', however bizarre that code may seem to those who believe that some words are 'not decodable'. What they really mean is that they don't quite understand how the code works. I think that 'one' and 'two' are probably the oddest words that children will encounter early on (forget about 'Cholmondley' pronounced 'Chummly', that's for adults) Not really a hugely difficult pair to come to terms with...

Yes I can see that it is better for all children to be able to at least write something intelligible than to have some good spellers and some not able to write at all.

My concern would be that it seems that children are being asked to learn one thing, ie to spell by building up words phonetically, and then being asked to unlearn this for a great many words, which clearly some children find confusing.

So glad to have discovered this thread. DS is just 3 and was desperate to continue with phonics for reading (his previous nursery introduced him to it very early) so I have been gently teaching him to read using phonics. Knowing English and several phonetic languages (i.e. languages where you pronounce words as they are spelled), I think phonics is a great idea for teaching reading in English as it's so complex pronunciation-wise.

I also happen to know phonetics, having been an English teacher in another life. I cannot imagine why anyone would use phonetics to teach spelling, I think it would only confuse the children horribly.

I have always been a good speller; I put this down to my lifelong voracious appetite for books. So I would imagine that a combination of learning to read using phonics (not phonetics) would be the key - the more children read, the better their memory for the spelling of all words, both phonetic and not. Then this can be backed up with spelling exercises/ games/ tests, etc.

Does this make sense?

ZephirineDrouhin, if you are interested in this topic you might be interested in the links in this thread which deal with the historical fashion shifts between whole word and phonics and also looks at the way that politics drives these changes
www.mumsnet.com/Talk?topicid=primary&threadid=897391-Bright-child-getting-bored-at-reception&pg=7