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!!

I have got a feeling that there are some people who are being misdiagnosed with dyslexia, when these people's problem is more to do with not being taught appropriately. I think that for some people the over-emphasis on sound is what is causing the problem. It is not surprising that DaisymooSteiner's DD spelt 'potato' as 'btaito' since the emphasis was on sound.

Dr. Daryl Brown, son of Dr. Neviile E. Brown, talks about phonetic spelling and says

"if that was all there was to reading and writing English dyslexics would be as proficient as the rest. Most are quite capable of spelling phonetically ? ?c? for ?see?, ?hows? for ?house?, ?brort? for ?brought? and ?distruckshun? for ?destruction.?"

Flummox

Dyslexics can read when taught properly with phonics which actually disguises the problem a little as people say "he can read therefore he can't be dyslexic"

There are other problems that dyslexics.

DS reads well, DH eventually read well. DS has never been officially diagnosed with dyslexia but has been on the SN register for Specific Learning Difficulty. Dyslexia is a SLD, his new SENCO says he is almost certainly dyslexia but there is no point in paying out for an official diagnosis as he gets help anyway.

There are problems with memory ie DS always found copying from the board difficult because he would forget what he was copying from looking up to looking down to the paper.

A word can be spelt correctly as a header on the page and he would spell it wrongly further down. Have known him spell the same word 3 different ways on the same page.

Time management- DS never knew what day of the week it was. If he had PE he knew it was wednesday, but didn't know it was wednesday in the first place IYSWIM. Worried about secondary but thankfully he seems to have grown out to some extent , although in holidays he does lose track of days.

Like your son he can read music, can point out the notes but can't process it fast enough to play from, didn't stop him from playing beutifully once he learned to play the piece either from ear or memory ie me showing him which notes to play.

bruffin

I can identify many of your son's trait in my ds. I am hopeful that things will improve with age and maturity and support from my other ds, dh and I.

SENCO has said he is unlikely to get extra help as his problem is not severe.

For those interested, here's a review of the DCSF's synthetic phonics programme, 'Letters and Sounds'

www.nonweiler.demon.co.uk/page14.html

You may also like to look at the following page
Dyslexia : Myths and Facts

www.aowm73.dsl.pipex.com/dyslexics/five_main_2.htm

maverick, the Dyslexia : Myths and Facts page is very interesting, and it makes sense to me. I agree with the vast majority of it and as for the other aspects, I am unsure about some of them.

No, I don't buy it, sorry. Spellcheckers are a cop out, ditto to so-called "phonetic spelling". As is the early use of calculators in maths. I can see many many battles with DS's teachers once he starts school.

Over my dead body will DS be using spellcheckers or calculators before he understands the principles behind the technology

I think it is an excellent idea to have experienced professionals on mn to answer queries and concerns about the teaching of earlky literacy. How nice to hear patient people like debbiehep, maizie and lisa's mum speak with real knowledge of the subject.

Two rather bizarre thigns. The first was reading through claig's interpretation of a child's spelling/phonics/thought processes (don't know what the hell it was) and offering advice, even though claig has no training in this area at all.

The second was noting that there seems to be no distinction made in teh minds of som e posters between experts' knowledge and a punter's home-made system.

gaelicsheep, tend to agree with you about spellcheckers and calculators. That is why I am trying to sort out ds spellings before he gets to secondary school. Few years yet but it will soon come.

Poor boy can definitely hear the sounds, just cant decide which grapheme to use.

Absolutely the right thing to do IMO. Best of luck with it.

"Two rather bizarre thigns. The first was reading through claig's interpretation of a child's spelling/phonics/thought processes (don't know what the hell it was) and offering advice, even though claig has no training in this area at all."

Totally agree, very strange agenda there

I'm glad you agree, bruffin. Very odd.

bruffin, lisata mentioned that there are problems with the way that schools are currently teaching spelling

"My guess is that since we haven't had a synthetic phonics based curriculum for the whole population before we are still developing the appropriate strategies. Early SP is easy. Later on SP is hard to teach well and teachers need to be trained. Equally there must be great strategies for teaching spelling with phonics but they need to be gathered together and shared. Teachers certainly are not using them in schools at present. "

debbiehep also mentioned the same problem

"What I am saying, then, is that we have a long way to go before people can attribute children's reading and spelling to the use of leading-edge methods and materials. I suggest many schools are still at the stage of muddling along - or they may have some stronger synthetic phonics teaching in Reception which may fizzle out higher up the school - particularly where spelling is concerned.

Personally, I thought the 9 year old lad did some pretty sensible spelling all things considered.

Spelling needs to be worked at really hard and consistently and teachers are not provided with adequate resources and training to do this - nor is there adequate time spent at school teaching spelling."

My agenda, based on my experience of learning how to spell in several languages without using phonetics, was to offer some non-phonetic methods which might help improve her son's spelling.

Your agenda, based on your son's problems with spelling, was one of no hope. Your advice involved the use of spell checkers and relaxing

"Thank god for spell checkers, DS does most of his homework on PC. "

"Flummoxed if you want advice from another mother who has been there, try and relax again about the spelling so he can get back to enjoying writing."

and your answer to flummoxednow's hopes that her son would crack his spelling difficulties was

"Flummoxed he will be capable of anything whether he cracks it or not"

I don't think flummoxednow is at the point of giving up yet, she believes something can be done and I agree with her.

My point to flummoxed was that it is not the end of the world if he can't spell. I never said give up and I actually pointed her towards and effective remedial spelling programme and hopefully I have given her some ammunition to take to the senco to get a little extra help.

I have not given up on my son either, but I see a very gifted boy (not just my opinion) who happens not to be able to spell.
His teachers don't see a boy with poor spelling they see a child who is capable of going to the top universities. Spelling is not the be all and end all of literacy.

I have to tread a careful line, I don't want to make him so selfconscious about his spelling that he hates writing which thankfully he does not.

We have computers nowadays, why not use them. I cannot think of any job where anyone is expected to do more than a little handwriting these days.

I saw a programme on dyslexia filmed in New Zealand recently. It included a successful marine engineer who said he actually looks out for people with spelling mistakes on their cv as those people tended to better at seeing the overall picture

You set yourself up as an expert on this subject without any experience of being a teacher, senco or even having experience of these kind of problems yourself. It is all very odd.

I said I have no expertise in phonetics, I am no expert in it. But I know how I learnt to spell and offered some insights that might help flummoxednow's son. I find it odd that you accuse other people of having an agenda or of having a worthless opinion just because they are not a teacher etc. and do not agree with you.

Pointydog said it all really!

Flummosed my apologies that you and your son have been dragged into this.

I'm not sure why claig has suddenly come in for such a fierce two-pronged attack in the middle of what was really a very civilised and informative discussion. Have I missed something?

It's a feature of forums like this that people give advice from all quarters whether their experience is professional or personal. And God forbid that we should ever stop questioning the experts.

The crux of this issue for me is contained in DebbieHep's post above:

"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."

I would think that in practice there is potentially a very fine line between these two things, particularly if, as Debbie suggests, government guidance for teaching reading and writing tends to fizzle out in the later stages.

While I agree it is very much better for a child to spell enormous "enormas" than not to be able to spell it at all, it is obviously not ideal. What strategies can teachers (and parents if necessary) use to ensure that children are not misled into believing that the process of writing is all about building up words using their knowledge of phonics, without having to learn the individual spellings of the words themselves?

ZephirineDrouhin,
totally agree with you. I have learnt a lot and all views are valid. It is up to individuals to make an informed opinion on what they believe is right for their child.

What I observe in younger children is that the teachers are keen for the children to write freely and with enjoyment. (And to do this, a young child should not be hung up on their spelling) This is a good thing, and much better than the approach that I was brought up with, where we copied a line that the teacher wrote. (I'm talking about year 1 children)

However, as children get older they need to be encouraged to spell correctly. I'm not sure that it's really a re-learning, because they weren't taught the incorrect spelling in the first place; just encourage to write.

I think that a four/five year old would be very discouraged if they wrote a wonderful sentence but each word was corrected by the teacher. They probably wouldn't take it in anyway.

Sorry but Pointydog and I came to the same conclusion quite independently. It is not about having different opinions, its about someone trying to give advice when they are coming from a position of ignorance from all aspects ie professional or experience, and making it up as you go along . It just seemed to be a little game to me which doesn't feel right.

THink it's mostly all been said now but my undererstanding is that phonics taught well enables a child to read and write most words where the "rules" can be sucessfully applied. Alongside this they are taught the so called "tricky" words where the phonic rules do not work. I have a 9 year old who reads well but whose spelling is atrocious. Unfortunately our school (Scottish primary so no complusion to use synthetic phonics to teh extent of English schools) does not give a particularly good grounding in phonics so he is missing a lot of building blocks to enable good spelling. They are trying to give him extra help now - but are trying to teach him individual words rather than going back to basics with phonics - so his spelling is not improving.
dd (7) is probably dyslexic. I strongly feel if she had proper teaching in phonics her reading and THEREFORE her spelling would come on dramatically because she understands rules and tries to apply her limited phonic knowledge already when she reads and writes. Her learning support teacher disagrees with me and keeps going on about building up a bank of words that she can read / write - but there are only so many she can remember at a time - so when a new list it is produced to learn the old ones disappear.
It is I am sure far easier for the human brain to learn the 44(I think) phonic sounds and then learn teh words where these rules do not apply than try and memorise long lists of words.

Haggisaggis, my question on that would be whether there are sufficiently straightforward "rules" in English to enable children to successfully encode words using phonics. Clearly there are many words that are decodable, but reversing the process is not so straightforward.

One can read the word "rules" for example using phonics knowledge alone, but could you spell it? How would you know whether it was "rules", "rools" or "roules"? How would you even get to the correct spelling of "word" using phonics alone? Surely building up a bank of words, as your dd's teacher suggests is an essential part of the process?

Zephirine (there I spelt it right)

Haggis is making the point I have been trying to make all along, some children just can't store these word banks. They learn them one day and forget them the next.

So how can they be helped to spell?

If I knew that I wouldn't be on here posting about DS

I was like Lisatc and didn't really learn to spell until I was adult and taught myself some rules. Words like "wednesday" I still say to myself "WED - NES - DAY" or February
"FEB - RU - ARY" whenever I write them.

There are some good rules in Stareway to Spelling. ie questioning words that begin with W are always WH ie where, why, who or what.
I think a lot of just comes with experience of reading and working out what works for you.
DS was taught things like Big Elephants Can't Always Use Big Exits for Because which was fine but he thought "always" began with an "O"