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!!

sorry think it should start on page 3 of that thread. I will repost just the links here
www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/student/honorstheses/pdfs/R44_1963ReesIla.pdf
www.nrrf.org/article_anderson6-18-00.htm
www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/readytoread.pdf

Why doesn't 'phonetic' start with an F?

phortyplus, good point

May have to change my name

Thanks very much, Claig. The 1963 thesis is particularly fascinating.

yes excellent review of the historical shifts, quite hard to find detailed info on this

There may be a little confusion on this thread about the implications of phonics teaching for spelling.

It's true that synthetic phonics teaching quickly empowers young children to be able to have a go at writing independently, but the approach is not about encouraging invented spelling at the expense of teaching real spelling.

Good teaching should involve providing opportunities for children to experiment with writing tools at their current level of achievement - but it should also involve lots of step by step direct teaching in our English Alphabetic Code leading to the best possible spelling ability for all the children.

Without very rigorous and specific phonics teaching, the only children who will end up spelling well are those children with a seemingly natural propensity for spelling.

Parents don't need to fear synthetic phonics teaching for reading or spelling - but they do need to worry as to whether their children's schools are teaching phonics well enough for both reading and spelling (and handwriting).

PS - I've joined mumsnet because I've been asked to help mums with misconceptions and worries about basic skills literacy teaching. I hope people don't mind if I chip in to help.

Thanks, debbiehep. Yes, absolutely, it's the implementation that is the issue.

Welcome to Mumsnet. Very interested that you were asked to come on - didn't know that people did this. Are you from the DfES?

Sorry I mean DCSF

I asked Debbie to come on to Mumsnet because she is one of the UK's top experts on synthetic phonics, nothing to do with the DCSF. She's a hugely experienced teacher and past head teacher. She's been working tirelessly for many, many years to get the evidence-based teaching of reading established in our primary schools. More recently she wrote her own reading programme
www.phonicsinternational.com to fill in the huge gaps in the government's programme Letters and Sounds.

I'm sure that Debbie will be able to give excellent, commonsense advice grounded in long experience AND empirical research to those asking for advice and information on reading, writing and spelling on Mumsnet

Ah I see, thanks maverick.

Debbie, how would you respond to someone like flummoxednow whose child seems to have learnt to spell out words phonetically, but now finds it difficult to override this process in order to use the correct spelling?

If flummoxed ds is anything like my ds it's not that he has learned to spell words phonetcially ,he has trouble retaining the correct spelling so resorting to phonetic spelling. I suspect if he didn't have phonics to fall back on he would be even worse.
My DS has had a lot of intervention with spelling with over a year of one to one using "wordwall" and "stareway to spelling" which is really intensive and he still not even average for his age despite being far in advance for everything else and reading well.

Thanks ZephirineDrouhin for asking the question. I would really like to know how to help my ds.

The spelling is a real stumbling block to him. He is articulate and full of ideas but is not keen on writing because of his spelling.

All useful advice will me most welcomed.

This is an interesting thread.

Thanks for the tips on spelling Maizie - they have helped me think about strategies

Zeph
I went and had a discussion with my mum about the article you posted (also posted this on the other thread). This is her (Wendy's) response:
"One barely needs to teach the children who have good visual memory and can teach themselves the phonic code. I had one of those as a daughter (me - Lisa).

There are jails full of young people who are non readers, because they were not given the skills to break words up into syllables and sounds. Children who can read analytically benefit from having the code explained to them (i.e. synthetic phonics), especially for spelling. The others make steady progress with phonics, and slowly gain automaticity with reading.

Children who are taught analytically, but do not have good visual memory resort to guessing. That is fine with lovely books full of explicit illustrations, but what happens when they are faced with a page full of text with minimal illustration? Guessing does not help, and they give up.

I am a SpLD teacher, and have helped countless children through phonics.

Some children with good visual memory make good progress with reading until they are 7. Then you get the year three dip. Why? Because those children have not worked out the phonic code, and their visual memory can only remember so many words. Their self esteem becomes very poor, and they stop trying. If they had had the phonic code explained to them from the beginning, they would be reading.

The research with onset and rime (analytic phonics) is academic research, not classroom research. If you want some good classroom phonics research, look up

the following website www.sounds-write.co.uk. You can also read teachers comments."

She also told me that the sound write research explicitly found that synthetic phonics resulted in better spellers. I need to read up on that.

Her other point is that most of the reluctant readers she had taught who had lost all their confidence were guessers. Her starting point with them is to build up their confidence by talking to them about the problems they have had and going through a worksheet focusing on their skills. Once they feel confident and happy they can start to learn. Kids that have low esteem cannot learn anything.

Lisa

Sorry hadn't explained in this thread - My mum is Wendy Tweedie - one of the founders of phonic books and ex head of the bloomfield learning centre in southwark.

Phonic books writes decodable books for beginner and reluctant readers (www.phonicbooks.co.uk). They also have a blog which discusses phonics and decodable resources www.phonicbooks.wordpress.com

I think the spelling comments from Maizie were on another thread sorry for the confusion!

Thanks for the clarification DebbieHep (-:

Thanks for posting that lisata, and thanks to your mum, it's very interesting.

"Look and say" certainly does not seem like a successful way to teach reading. I don't think this is what Kathy Hall was advocating in that article though. I understood her to be saying that it is not an either/or issue, and that children benefit from being introduced to a range of strategies, including both synthetic phonics and pattern recognition.

I just conducted a very crude experiment on ds an hour ago. He read to me using his knowledge of phonics to decode unfamiliar words. His fluency can be improved but that is another story. Got him to spell for me and here are the results.

secret - 'seacret'
weather - 'weather'
stream - 'stream'
enormous - 'enormas'
bowl -'bowl'
shouted -'shouted'
telephone - 'telephon'
creature - 'creatcher'
reataurant - 'restroant'
triangle - 'triangle'
triple - 'trippel'
although - 'althow'
incredible - 'incredabl'
desperate -' desproat'

I do not dispute the fact that phonics has been helpful in decoding words. What about the other side of the equation, writing?

Any comments will be most welcomed and received with thanks. He is 9yo in 4 months.

Zepherine Drouhin,

If you want to look at it another way, learning to read and spell with SP is really a way of learning pattern recognition par excellence! The 'patterns' Kathy Hall refers to are just the different ways in which the 'code' is used to represent sounds in words. The difference between the methods she advocates and SP is that SP teaches in a very structured and systematic way, whereas teaching a 'range of strategies' is usually rather haphazard and unsystematic.

Children get very confused as to just which 'strategy' they are meant to be using and many just end up using the 'guess and hope for the best' strategy. By the time they get to secondary it lets them down very badly. To be quite honest, I have used SP for remediating secondary children for a number of years now and I've never needed any other strategy! Teach them the letter/sound correspondences they don't know, then 'say the sounds, say the word' is all they need. I would freely admit that spelling is more difficult, but 'Hear the sounds, spell the sounds' is still the basic strategy.

You said earlier:

"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."

All spelling is a matter of building words 'phonetically'; with an unfamiliar word you work out what the sounds are in the word, then spell each one, in order. I suspect that what is worrying you could be the fact that poorly taught children may believe that there is only one way of spelling each sound and they can't cope with the variety of spellings that a sound may have (like, at least 14 ways to spell the /or/ sound...fun, isn't it?)

Someone earlier asked (jokingly, I suspect) why 'phonetic' wasn't spelled with an 'f'. Why should it be? There's nothing about the letter 'f' that makes it superior to 'ph' for spelling that sound; we borrowed the word from the Greeks, they spell the /f/ sound 'ph', we kept their sound spelling. I can imagine the Greeks saying 'Those English, why don't they spell the /ph/ sound with a 'ph' like normal people do...?

yes it looks to me like these rules that he has learnt for sounds are screwing him up. He is trying to apply the rules blindly rather than seeing the picture of the word in his mind. I am sure he has seen the word restaurant many times, but when he tries to spell it he tries to do it via sounding and I don't think he will ever be able to make the jump to the "au" in retaurant via sounding.

For secret he is using the word "sea" which he knows and it sounds the same as "se" in secret, so he thinks that is the way to go.
For creature he is probably thinking of the "tcher" in "catcher" and forming the word using that sound.

If he didn't focus on the sound, he probably see the word in his mind's eye and would remember the word from having read it many times before.

claig it has been explained time and time again to on this and other threads, that some children don't see the picture of the word in their mind, it is not the fault of phonics, they just can't do it!

also this sounding depends on how you pronounce the words, people have different accents in different parts of the country.
If you clearly enunciate "desperate" you may be able to sound it out and get to the correct spelling, but he is probably pronouncing it quickly and that is why he gets "desproat". Similarly "incredible", in London we would pronounce it "incredable", which is why he gets "incredabl".
For "triple" he thinks of "apple" and gets "tripple" but the "ple" doesn't sound like the "pel" sound in apple, so he gets "trippel".
To me it looks like there are so many sounding rules (many of which don't match the complexity of the English language) and so many different ways of pronouncing words, depending on where you live in the country, that it is no wonder that he hasn't got a clue what is going on.

My guess is that the children who are spelling correctly have abandoned the intermediate step of sounding and have instead remembered what the word looks like. He is being a good pupil and trying to follow the rules as taught and ending up a poor speller.

bruffin, I accept that some children can't see the words in their mind, but clearly this particular child can't sound them. Do you accept that? or do you think that every child can sound words if given long enough? It looks to me that not all children think and see things in the same way, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and the methods should be adapted to fit the child's needs.

MaizieD - "I suspect that what is worrying you could be the fact that poorly taught children may believe that there is only one way of spelling each sound and they can't cope with the variety of spellings that a sound may have (like, at least 14 ways to spell the /or/ sound...fun, isn't it?)"

No, I realise that children are taught several alternative spellings for each phoneme. But that is not enough to allow them to do anything more than guess when it comes to spelling. To teach children that they have it within their power to spell anything just by knowing the phonic "code" seems at face value, very confidence boosting, but it is surely very misleading.

In addition to flummoxed's reports of the difficulty her ds is having, I have seen several posts on here lately from people reporting the strange phenomenon by which their children will spell a word perfectly if asked to spell it out of context, but will revert to a phonetic guess within a piece of writing. I wonder whether this is an unintended consequence of this particular aspect of phonetic phonics programmes.

(btw you seem to have spelled my name phonetically. It's a hazard of unfamiliar words )

flummoxednow, is your son good at maths? It looks to me like he has got a logical mind and is applying the rules logically.