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!!

Yes I do that with Feb-ru-ary and Wed-nes-day too. Of course I don't actually say Feb-ru-ary and Wed-nes-day. If I hadn't learnt that the words are just spelled this way I would probably hazard the guesses "Febury" and "Wensday".

What I would really love is if someone with expertise in synthetic phonics would go into a little detail about how children are taught to spell within a synthetic phonics programme. I keep reading again and again that phonics is essential for spelling, but there is a logical stage missing for me.

Clearly, while children need to learn that particular letters and combinations of letters make a particular range of sounds, they also, crucially, need to be taught that the spelling of words cannot be deduced simply from their sounds, but need to be learnt by other means.

I still feel concerned that if too much emphasis is given to encouraging children to do their own encoding using phonics rules, and too little to familiarising children with the way words are actually spelled, then you end up with exactly the situation described by the OP.

The following web pages contain synthetic phonics-based advice on spelling:

Scroll down this page to find the 'Main points for helping with spelling':
www.aowm73.dsl.pipex.com/dyslexics/spelling.htm

And here's Debbie Hepplewhite's article on spelling for 'Learning and Teaching' magazine:
www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/teaching-spelling-how-5079

I think that you are worrying unduely, Zephhirine. Children aren't taught the letter/sound correspondences and then left to discover for themselves which ones apply in which word. As they cover each correspondence they will be working with words which use that particular correspondence. In your example of 'rules' they would be encountering that word (i.e practising reading and spelling it), and many similar ones, when they are learning that 'u-e' can represent the /oo/ sound.

I appreciate your point about the pronunciation of words appearing to differ from their spelling, though this is less common than people make out (they just tend to target the more tricky words for their objections and forget about the thousands of perfectly straightforward ones). Nobody says that phonics teaching will make the learning of spelling completely effortless, just much easier. There is still some learning effort required from the pupils!

It is true, to a certain extent, that familiarity with words through reading them will help to improve spelling; a child who has read 'library' and has either observed for themselves, or had it made explicit by their teacher, that although we 'say' something like 'liburry' there is an extra 'r''sound' in there which we slop over verbally, is more likely to learn and retain the correct spelling than one who can only dimly remember the string of letters which comprise the word (out of hundreds of other 'letter strings' which they have been expected to memorise).

The use of the 'say it the way it looks' technique which you describe for remembering 'Wednesday' is a perfectly valid strategy, which does actually work best if you have sufficient phonic knowledge to render the sounds you are saying into letters on the page...

Phonics taught children are going to be much better at this word specific stuff because they are trained to attend closely to every letter in a word and they understand what function each letter (or group of letters) performs. I think you come to understand this better when, as a skilled reader, you listen to poor readers reading such things as 'nose' for 'nurse'; you are sitting there thinking "Can't they see that there isn't an 'oe' sound in that word, and that there is an 'r' sound etc?" Well the sad fact is that they can't see that because they haven't been taught to 'see' it. At best they can see an 'n' and a 'se'and make a guess that it might be a word that they 'know'. If they can't see this for reading, they've no chance with spelling!

As MaizieD says
"Nobody says that phonics teaching will make the learning of spelling completely effortless, just much easier."

The English language contains phonetically irregular words (e.g. "colonel") and these words cannot be spelt phonetically. These phonetically irregular words are often termed "sight words" and have to be memorised. It seems that 35% of the most common 1000 words in the English language are phonetically irregular. I don't know what the percentage is for a larger vocabulary such as the most common 20,000 words. It seems that phonics-based systems use a number of methods to memorise these words, and one popular approach is to use a multi-sensory approach such as VATK (visual auditory tactile kinaesthetic). This helps to memorise the letters by using feel by tracing the letters out and movement by moving in the shape of the letters, as well as using visualisation and hearing. The key to being able to spell these phonetically irregular words is memory recall.

An interesting article which explains a modern approach to teaching spelling is
www.greatschools.org/students/academic-skills/invented-spelling.gs?content=384&page=all

An interesting part of the article is near the bottom in the section "Why is my child a bad speller?". It says

"There are also kids who are avid and competent readers but have trouble with spelling. These students probably have weak visual memories. They cannot visualize what a word should look like despite repeated exposure to it. Heath notes that requiring these students to memorize words they have trouble with is not likely to help, because they will not retain them for long beyond the test. Manning recommends that these students develop strategies to compensate for their poor spelling. For example, she suggests that students keep a personal dictionary of problem words and learn to use spell checker or some type of spelling device to help."

I think this shows the primacy of the visual aspect in memory. My guess is that people with poor visual memories may be able to improve their visual memory by carrying out mental exercises, similar to the way in which the physical body can be strengthened by physical exercise.

I think that visual memory and understanding comes naturally to most of us, and is often effortless to many of us. This is even reflected in our language, where we say
"I see what you mean"
"I see where you're coming from"
"I see what you are saying"

A fascinating video, showing a young Tony Buzan, the world famous memory expert, explaining the propensity of children to think visually and describing how they "see" words in their minds, is at the following link
thespellingblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/visualising-words-by-young-tony-buzan.html

"The English language contains phonetically irregular words (e.g. "colonel") and these words cannot be spelt phonetically. These phonetically irregular words are often termed "sight words" and have to be memorised. It seems that 35% of the most common 1000 words in the English language are phonetically irregular."

I'm sorry, but I don't think you are right here. The point about these few words (more like 5% than 35%) is that they contain very unusual letter/sound correspondences, mostly because the pronunciation of e or more of the sounds in the word has diverged very widely from the sound originally 'encoded'.

To say that a word 'cannot be spelled phonetically' is a nonsense; all words are built from sounds and all their sounds are represented by a letter, or letters. I can spell 'colonel' so called 'phonetically' with the greatest of ease- 'kernel'- there! It just so happens that, spelled correctly, the /er/ sound is represented by 'olo'. It really doesn't matter that this correspondence doesn't appear in any other word in English; it is still a letter/sound correspondence and that is what phonics works with all the time.

There has been huge confusion in schools and among teacher trainers about 'high frequency words'(HFWs). When children stopped being taught 'phonics' in the 1960s onward (yes, I know that there have always been a few people teaching phonics, but it mostly went right out of the window)they were taught to memorise whole words, word by word. It occured to some bright person that it would be most useful to start by teaching children the words which appear most frequently in text, starting with the most frequent and working through the list. When phonics started to creep back in the teaching of high frequency words was so well embedded in practice that it never seemed to occur to anyone to look closely at them to see if they actually needed to be taught the way that teachers were accustomed to, as 'wholes'. So, when the NLS in tha late 1990s, stuck a bit of 'phonics' into the mix for the initial teaching of reading, there somehow arose a belief among KS1 (and beyond) teachers that there was something 'not phonetic' about the HFWs and that they couldn't be taught in any way other than as whole words (I have seen/heard this belief expressed so often by Early Years teachers...). Which is ridiculous, because most of the HFWs are very straightforward and (if we 'have' to talk about 'regularity' and 'irregularity') are completely phonically regular.

I am pretty sure that this 35% figure is a product of a complete misunderstanding of 'high frequency words'.

I apologise I am wrong about the phonetically irregular issue. I think I must have been looking at websites of older forms of phonic instruction rather than the synthetic phonics approach. I must have been looking at something more akin to the 2003 NLS approach of Professor Greg Brooks, which recommended learning phonetically irregular words as "sight words" or "whole words". Looking it up in wikipedia it seems that in a sytematic synthetic phonics approach "students are taught the rules and the exceptions, they are not instructed to memorize words", so presumably there are no longer any "sight words".

The figure about 35% of the most common 1000 words being phonetically irregular, I found on a number of websites, one of them being
www.home-school.com/Articles/phs60-michaelmaloney.html
but as you say that could be a misunderstanding and be including "high frequency words".

wow! 2 weeks away from mumsnet, and a whole book has arrived!
what brilliant posts!had a chat with my DD teacher, and it is Phonics, diagraphs and the like, that is being taught.To be honest, it is ME struggling with reading my daughters writing cos of my obsession with spelling.Now I know how to read it , its actually great, and my dd is writing nonstop.
But I agree that at some stage, all kids have different ways of learning, and its really important that the parents and teachers find out how to BRING out the BEST in our kids.Spelling, in the great scheme of things, is but ONE talent of many, afterall.

When we talk about teaching and learning with reference to reading and spelling, we make so many presumptions about what is being taught, or has been taught, but invariably explanations of children/adults who are weak at reading and spelling amount to looking at the individuality of the learner.

We really need to look not only at research and leading-edge classroom practice in terms of methodology - but the individuality of the teachers' teaching and learning skills, the individuality of time spent on the time-table teaching the basics, the individuality of the school and whether a really rigorous programme and whole school approach is being well-utilised and so on.

With reference to the need for multi-sensory teaching and learning, for example, what does this mean? Do we know, for example, whether using wooden alphabet letters or tracing sandpaper letter shapes is really any more effective than teaching handwriting the letter shapes and letter groups whilst saying the sounds. There are so many issues even with this one example. Traditionally, these wooden letter shapes and sandpaper shapes are focused on the alphabet letters - not chunks of alphabetic code. And although the use of tactile letter shapes may help memory for shape - does it help muscle memory for handwriting?

The point being that when we really, really start getting down to the teaching and the learning opportunities for children, there is probably room for much criticism and much improvement.

Whenever we discuss these issues, we need to be so fussy over looking at the detail - at the reality. For example, even now many schools which say they 'do' synthetic phonics teaching may well do a very weak version of it - and not know how to progress the teaching to a rigorous spelling programme.

Schools saying that they 'do' the government's 'Letters and Sounds', for example, would need very close scrutiny to see what they are actually 'doing'. The claim is not enough. In any event, the government's programme is really not a full programme and there is not a single resource provided because (I am told) the intention was for schools to evaluate phonics programmes and to choose a good one. Even having chosen a 'good' programme, however, how much time is allocated to the teaching, how extensive is the cumulative word bank, how well are parents informed, how systematic and visual are the teaching and learning aids?

All I am trying to say is that no teacher and no parent should be complacent. The English alphabetic code is a complex one but much of it is relatively straightforward and there are many spelling variations with surprisingly small banks of words which are learnable - such as words with 'mb' as code for /m/.

I suggest that we are still in pioneering days for good teaching despite the fact that when I look around me, I feel as if we have moved into times which are close to 'science fiction'!

Just to add, I really agree that ability to spell is just one of many potential talents. Sadly, however, we still have a scenario where spelling can be a 'life chance' situation.

Apart from issues like self-esteem where students perceive (as do the teachers very often) that if they cannot spell they must be less intelligent than others, you have to ask what would happen to two job applications for people with apparently equal calibre but with different levels of spelling.

Which would be the first application to go in the bin?

For a teaching and learning scenario starting from our Reception classes which can have such short and long term effects, we all need to be determined to improve the current situation where quality of teaching and learning is still so completely and randomly hit or miss.

Hi guys
Been a bit busy last couple of days! So I've missed out on a whole raft of discussions.

I know exactly what you mean DebbieHep about self esteem and teachers perception. In a way it links to some of my thoughts about dyslexia that maverick brought up earlier.

I have a DD who really strugles with writing and spelling. I thought she had dyspraxia (and maybe she does) but it turns out that she and I have a genetic condition called Ehlers Danlos Syndrom (EDS). This means our collagen is faulty and so our tendons are too stretchy so we are very hypermobile. Apparently hypermobility and the autism spectrum are very related (Dr A Kirby at the Dyscovery Centre, Newport has done loads of reasearch on this).

When she was in Year 1 I was really frustrated by her teacher who seemed to imply that she was lazy. So I went to the paediatrician and asked for her to be assessed. The paediatrician asked me why i wanted her labelled as it was not helpful and she was functioning fine in school. My reply was that she is labelled anyway and that label is "lazy".

I ended up paying for a private assesment at the Dyscovery Centre which was actually fairly inconclusive (I had never heard of EDS or hypermobility at that point) but gave us some great strategies which we have been using ever since (visual timetables, teach her to type etc.)

We are finally going for a diagnosis this year (she is now in year 5).

My point is that I think the dyslexia label has proved useful in the past - it certainly got my husband a scholarship to a private school where he had small classes and specialist help. He came from a very humble background. Without the label I don't believe he would have suceeded the way he has (He has a PhD from Imperial). So I myself am wary of losing the labels. They play an important role in forcing people in a hurry to look again!

What I am saying is I find your "myth of Dyslexia" a bit too hard-line. I think there are people with significant problems who need that label ... we just need to make sure that we are not using it as a catch all for those who have been taught badly!

Or maybe we just need different labels? Poor visual memory might be the solution.

Claig

I think Letters and Sounds does have "tricky words" at each level which are sight words.

Am I wrong teachers?

Maverick - I can't make out from those pages you sent criticizing Letters and Sounds whether they have any problems with the progression. I am using the Letters and Sounds "progression" for the Storyboard project (to differentiate it from my mums books which use the Sounds Write progression). Does anyone have any strong opinions on what order the sounds should be taught in?

thanks lisata, that makes sense as it would seem that some words are so irregular that trying to remember them with the aid of rules seems more difficult than just remembering them by sight.

Fascinated by the words

colonel
hologram
polo

all so close and yet so different. Would be interested to know how these are taught.

claig
If you are interested Wendy once wrote a list of all the word families there are (and therefore how to teach them). I'm sure she has it somewhere! It was huge.

lisata, sounds very interesting, is it available on the web by any chance?

lisata, don't ask your mum about that list. It sounds like a lot of valuable work she has done there, and that sounds commercially valuable and that sort of info should really be paid for.

You did mention about your DH being dyslexic and sometimes having problems distinguishing between "who" and "how". Reading up about dyslexia, it seems that a lot of researchers think that dyslexics have good visual memories and think visually. One very interesting article said that dyslexics can often spell "elephant" correctly because they are able to attach the image of an elephant to the word, but they have more problems with words like "who", "how", "there" etc. because they cannot attach a picture to these words. Interesting to know if that article holds any truth and if that rings true for your DH.
A word like "rhinoceros" is difficult for everybody to spell, but if it turns out that dyslexics don't have a problem with it, then it might corroborate that article.

Claig you have obviously read nothing on this thread. Dyslexics do not have good visual memory for words that is why they have problems.

lisata:

"I think Letters and Sounds does have "tricky words" at each level which are sight words."

No, they are not 'sight words', they are words which can mostly be sounded out easily but have a 'tricky bit', usually a bit of the 'code' which the children haven't yet learned.

This is where teacher's misconceptions come in. Because so many are used to teaching HFWs as 'sight words' and believe (quite wrongly) that they are somehow 'irregular' they ignore the guidance given in L & S, that these words should be decoded and special attention drawn to the 'tricky bit'as a piece of unfamiliar code. This is how 'tricky words' were originally conceived and intended to be taught by Sue Lloyd of Jolly Phonics fame!

I think that L & S shouldn't have included these words (and have argued the point with one of the L & S authors!) as it has, in many cases, just perpetuated the old misconceptions and the old whole word method of teaching!

Having said that, the majority of children will cope with them just fine; I just fear for my poor 'strugglers'...

"Dyslexics do not have good visual memory for words that is why they have problems. "

Which is precisely why dyslexics do far better with learning the letter/sound correspondences to automaticity (i.e, see the letter/s, immediately say the sounds) because with that knowledge firmly established they can sound out and blend most words which they will encounter. Learning by heart some 180ish letter/sound correspondences is far easier than trying to remember the individual 'look' of 200,000+ words! Which is basically what the daft 'look and say' method was trying to achieve.

Thanks for clearing that up maizieD I hadn't really thought about "tricky" words in that way.

On Dyslexia I think that the visual and auditory memory thing is key here. But this is based on very personal experience - haven't read any of the latest research!

I have appalling auditory memory but practically photographic visual memory. I found University Lectures almost impossible. Couldn't concentrate for more than about 5 minutes. My notes had nothing in them (today I would take a tape recorder with me). I have poor spelling, handwriting and am very disorganized. I am hypermobile as i said above but have also always been clumsy. I am a speed reader. I had a hard time at school as i was always day dreaming.

DH has no visual memory but absolutely excellent auditory memory. He learns everything from listening to the radio! He has appalling spelling, poor organizational skills (although he manages this by being very tidy!). He is an extremely slow reader. DH was a school refuser to start with (hid under the desk).

We are both very different but many of our "dys" organizational issues seem similar. We are both fairly creative and both have PhD's.

We both come from families with similar problems. I have been waiting to see what happens with our 3 kids with bated breath!

The kids teachers think I am quite relaxed because I believe they will be fine in the end. With the right strategies (based on each individual child) we seem to be doing ok so far.

I taught my DS to type very young (a recommendation from the Dyscovery centre). She had an alphasmart (keyboard) in class from year 3. I have now a actually taught most of the school to type now using dance mat typing on Cbeebies (I run a weekly typing club).

Typing gave DD lots of confidence to express herself. She can type much faster than she can write. Now in year 5 she no longer needs the keyboard and writes as fast as the others. I went into school today to talk to DS (aged 7) teacher about getting him a keyboard because he is getting very frustrated that he never finishes his work.

Contrary to others here - i think the spell checker has helped my kids because it reinforces good spelling at the point of typing (if they have the sort that highlights poor spelling as you are typing out). My DD's problem are all to do with errors whilst in the flow of writing rather than when she is thinking about a particular word. So it has really helped.

I have come across a lot of articles on the net saying that dyslexics have very good visual-spatial skills, think in pictures and often exhibit more right-brain type thinking rather than left-brain. Obviously dyslexia covers a broad spectrum, so you can't generalise.
Some of these articles are
www.dyslexia-parent.com/mag28.html
www.incrediblehorizons.com/reading.htm

The right-brained picture type thinking is at the bottom of the following article in the "What is Dyslexia?" section
dyslexiavictoria.wordpress.com/
and the founder of this organisation explains how she helped her daughter by discovering the right-brain aspect
www.dyslexiavictoria.ca/

There are also quite a few researchers who think that dyslexia is a phonological deficit, one example is
media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/56/18615648/1861564856.pdf

I can't find the original article about the elephant etc., but this article says a similar thing and makes reference to the Davis method for helping dyslexics to read
www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/arts/story.html?id=08aa7e2a-813a-4866-b025-c3c53344ac22
and it says

"Later, after founding the Reading Research Council, Davis put together the rest of the puzzle learning, for example, that visual thinkers attach pictures to words like "cat" or "elephant," but not to connecting words like "the," "your" or "when."

Davis says
"The dyslexic's dominant way of thinking is visual and non-verbal" and
"He believes the dyslexic's brain becomes confused and "disoriented" by certain triggers -- commonly letters of the alphabet, punctuation, and words that don't have picture associations, since dyslexics are highly visual"
"http://www.dyslexia.com/articles/living_with_dyslexia.html"

The Dr. Who actress Louise Jameson has used the Davis Method for her sons and it worked for them
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgwXqkYDU7E
If anyone is interested in his methods I think they are at
www.blueberry-centre.co.uk/

I don't know if any of this is true, but I thought it was an interesting perspective.

sorry messed up one of the links
www.dyslexia.com/articles/living_with_dyslexia.html

Lisata,

I think that a spell checker is OK, up to a point. It falls down when children are given a choice of similar homophones and don't know which one is right. So you get 'baited' instead of 'bated', 'rein' instead of 'reign', 'here' instead of 'hear', and vice versa...

But at least the 'wrong' word is correctly spelled

Lisata
I agree with you about using the pc. DS writes so much better on the pc, he doesn't need to concentrate so much therefore his creative juices flow
Nowadays nobody would expect a handwritten CV, although did have to fill in an application form by hand.
Although have to agree with Maizie as DS once tried to spell "whole" and got "howl" instead.

maizieD and bruffin

At least when the spell checker allows a homophone and you spot the mistake you can have a great in context conversation about that homophone. The point is that pc's are great if used in tandem with adult support (whether it is a teacher, a parent or a TA).

My poor husband has this problem every day in his work because he simply does not have the word recognition skills or visual memory to work out which is the right homophone. So someone always checks his work. It really has never stopped him (he has written government policies with these poor spelling skills!!).

The reason the pc is so good for my daughter is that physical handwriting actually hurts her hand. She types really fast (touch typing). So she can type as fast as she thinks. She has recently been sent on a gifted and talented writers course because she has such fab ideas (despite her compeltely illegible handwriting and poor spelling). I think this show incredible insight by her teachers. I also wonder if without the alphasmart and the ability to touch type that would have happened (because she would not have been nearly so confident). Self esteem and confidence are critical and tools like alphasmart keyboards can really build confidence.

flummoxed my ds has a similar problem, he is in a mixed y2/3 class and his spelling is atrocious (phonics taught from reception)
to compound the problem his class has always been a mixed year group and I believe his year also missed out a phase of phonics teaching
his teacher says she has never seen spelling so bad as in his year, they are currently discussing going back to revise the earlier phonics phases
he attempts to write from time to time but the results are so hard to decipher he loses enthusiasm