Learning to read

SueDonim

Lathyrus wrote I just wish people who make decisions in education would pay some attention.

I also wish educators would acknowledge that learning literacy is not achieved with a one size fits all approach. One of my GC has struggled to learn to read despite being articulate and well-rounded in all other areas. Curiously (to me, at any rate!) is that she has had no problem learning writing and writes clearly and tidily, despite being left-handed.

Part of the issue is down to her school, I suspect, as more than half of her class is below the expected standard at their age, which to me suggests it’s the teaching at fault, not the learners. One 40 minute literacy lesson a week surely isn’t enough to embed reading at age five? Her parents reinforce at home but not all parents can do that. I can see now how children can pass through the system and emerge at the other end with very poor literacy skills.

Absolutely.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ and I’m totally frustrated by today’s approach in schools that says if you’re failing to learn with the current emphasis on phonics then the problem is with the learner not the approach.

The remedy seems to be to give the learner extra lessons in phonics 😱

My dh has never been much of a reader and his spelling isn’t that good so if he asks me how to spell a word I sound it out in phonics …. in ter res ting and he just doesn’t get it. Even when I break it into small bites and sound it out slowly. I have to spell each individual letter.
(He didn’t learn to read with phonics.).

I was an early reader and have always read a lot.
I was also very good at spelling but my handwriting has always been poor. I never learnt the spellings for our weekly test at school but always got them right. I believe I am dyspraxic, hence the poor writing.
Lathyrus - your research sounds fascinating and I am curious how spelling and writing are linked when I am good at one and poor at the other?

NotSpaghetti

This is a really interesting subject Lathyrus3 - of course when my own children were small we did what seemed right for them.
That was the lovely thing about home education. We had no one proscribed path.

I went to a small montessori school and though I didn't "need" (for example) sandpaper letters, I loved to see some of my own children exploring them as toddlers.

I think I interpreted
Writing, including spelling, is an encoding skill. It uses a different part of your brain more closely linked to imagination.
to mean that there was a link between writing and creativity..
I think you meant a "brain link", Lathyrus? As in part of the way the brain functions?

I didn’t express myself well.

What I was trying to say was that reading ( in the initial stages when it is just decoding ie working out the word) fires off activity in the left side of the brain, with the left hippocampus interacting with logic and spatial awareness. Which is why logical phonic schemes often work well in reading.

Whilst encoding in the initial stages comes from activity in the right side of the brain with the right hippocampus interacting with with imagination and language.

This is just for the initial stages. Later on reading and writing uses practically all the brain I believe.

I think I learned with Peter and Jane, definitely not Janet and John.

Our own children had Roger Red Hat, Billy Blue Hat and Grandfather Yellow Hat.

They had to memorise words from cards as I recall. Seemed strange to me, they didn’t learn the words as such, just remembered them.

But they ended up good readers, like me, so it must have worked.

I am a retired Early Years teacher so have some insight here.
Over the years I was exhorted to use a number of initiatives, and this has led me to agree with Lathyrus that children ( and adults) respond differently to approaches. If one strategy didn't work, I was happy to try another.
However,the last few years, with it's total promotion of phonics- is- the- only- way hasn't been good for every child.
The Literacy strategy in Reception year was followed by Additional Literacy Strategy in Year 1, for those who were still struggling, then , you've guessed it , Further Literacy Strategy to follow - i.e. The Mixture as Before.. rather than a change .
And yes, spelling is different and muscle memory is involved, but....some of our Reception children are just four and lack the strength in fine motor movements, so can find this hard work.

Sarnia, my GD is also ten and a very fluent and enthusiastic reader but a poor speller.
She also has a diognosis of dyslexia! They are good readers - so let's rejoice in that! Please don't worry , if you daughter is dyslexic there are ways to manage that. Her spelling is poor - she will learn to cope. Good luck and I am sure you are giving your GC all the support and praise she needs. All will be well.

Lathyrus You have (IMO) made some valid points. Anecdotally, I have a son who never learnt to read/write through phonics. He was so bad that he had to have "special" literacy lessons. Fortunately, the teacher was quite traditional and had other tricks to reading/writing in her armoury. Once the penny clicked for my son, he never looked back and I don't think I know anybody who is more bookish than he is.

Some reading theorists claim that some excellent early readers don't need to decode words by syllable, so they don't pay much attention to how words are actually formed. They visualise whole words, but can't always remember the actual letters involved, so are poor spellers.

Yes growstuff. I read in “blocks” not individual letters. It wasn’t till the film came out that I realised Gandlaf actually wasn’t😳

Lathyrus3

Yes growstuff. I read in “blocks” not individual letters. It wasn’t till the film came out that I realised Gandlaf actually wasn’t😳

My background is in foreign language learning and linguistics. I memorise words in "blocks" too eg. I know that the sound "ayshun" is spelt "ation" in English - and I remember the letters as a group. In other languages "ation" is represented by a different sound. "ation" is never pronounced a-t-i-o-n as individual sounds.

I can't remember how I learnt to read/write, but I started realising how I remembered new spellings - and it's not with phonics.

It’s an oldie but goody in reference to phonics - the word

Ghetio

Gh as in enough
E as in pretty
Tio as in station

Lathyrus3

Yes growstuff. I read in “blocks” not individual letters. It wasn’t till the film came out that I realised Gandlaf actually wasn’t😳

Which tells me that you're not decoding when you're reading...

I'd be interested to know which reading research you were involved with, I have read a huge amount of reading research, some good, some bad... I could bore for hours about phonics, too.

If a child is Dyslexic, there is alot more to just reading being a problem.
I have a daughter who is Dyslexic. Besides the good old getting letters wrong, if wording is not of a certain font, colour, my daughter has difficulty reading it. Also Dyslexic people don't see what we see. So if a room is dusty, Dyslexic people don't see mess as we do. Dyslexic problems also come with Dyspraxia problems, which may seem like the Dyslexic person is lazy, which they are not.
I would look into Dyslexicia more, it's not just a school problem, it's a life problem. My daughter went to university and is a designer, to overcome problems she keeps reading, she has overcome many hurdles. I wish I knew, when she was at school, what I know now about Dyslexicia, that was 20 years ago. Dyslexicia is very complex.

But Maizie have you really read the literature describing the limitations of phonics and the alternatives when phonics don't work? Phonics have become something of a "religion" for believers, who seem blinkered about the criticisms.

Maizie You're right about not decoding using phonics with suffixes such as "ation". Readers (and spellers) need to remember the "shape" of the letters in sequence.

Good readers will internalise the element so quickly that their brains don't bother to memorise the details, so they later could have difficulties when spelling.

When learning a foreign language, learners can read much more than they can spell. They look at a whole word or elements of words and can read (and usually pronounce them), but far fewer can actually spell them. It's a similar process when learning to read/speak/spell a native language.

Crusher

If a child is Dyslexic, there is alot more to just reading being a problem.
I have a daughter who is Dyslexic. Besides the good old getting letters wrong, if wording is not of a certain font, colour, my daughter has difficulty reading it. Also Dyslexic people don't see what we see. So if a room is dusty, Dyslexic people don't see mess as we do. Dyslexic problems also come with Dyspraxia problems, which may seem like the Dyslexic person is lazy, which they are not.
I would look into Dyslexicia more, it's not just a school problem, it's a life problem. My daughter went to university and is a designer, to overcome problems she keeps reading, she has overcome many hurdles. I wish I knew, when she was at school, what I know now about Dyslexicia, that was 20 years ago. Dyslexicia is very complex.

Not only that, but poor spelling isn't always caused by dyslexia.

My mother taught me to read Welsh and English before I started school at age 5, she wasn't a teacher either, this was back in the early 1940s.

are phonics the same thing as phonetics?m If so they were used in Scotland when I started school 69 years ago. We carefully spelled out "Ke -ah-te says cat" and so on. At the same time we recited the letters of the alphabet when teacher pointed to them on the wall chart using the names everyone else has always used in English. Confusing? Not to me. but then I was bilingual so was used to sounds being different and meaning different things.

In Primary 3 we stopped using phonetics and had to get used to spelling CAT as See-ay-tea.

What an utter waste of time!

And it utterly confused my adopted sister who was dyslexic, but no-one knew that when she started school four years after me. So, when her eyesight was tested and found normal, her teachers said she was stupid or lazy.

Daddy blew his top, as he knew she was neither, and he could see she was struggling. My maternal grandmother - the Danish one, solved the problem by saying when she tried to help my sister with her reading homework, "The child is word-blind" this being what it is called in Danish, and she as a retired teacher knew what it was and what you did about it.

I don't know what system was used when I was at school, or even if there was a system. All I know is that me and my siblings could read before we started school and so could my 4 children. As long as they have books read to them from when they are tiny most but not all children do learn quite easily. My youngest daughter learnt to read from her favourite book when she was 2. Probably she was just telling the story by rote but she soon learned to recognise the actual words and could apply those words to other story books.

I just find it really sad when people seem proud to say that they haven't read a book since they left school. I would be bereft without books.

My daughter is dyslexic as is her daughter. They both, to this day, cannot read more than about a page at a time. After a rest, they can read a bit more, but it is extremely hard for both of them. It helped my daughter listening to her older children read, as they were growing up. Are you sure they didn't mean in numeracy? Writing, both my girls get b's and d's back to front.

My grandson is dyslexic, and as crusher said it is far more complex than simply having difficulty reading. I can remember when he was a toddler being aware that he had no eye/hand coordination and couldn’t manage a pencil. But it also has its advantages - I haven’t read enough about the differences between the average reader and someone who is dyslexic, but I do know that they have an ability to “see” a project and are very creative, although they approach a problem very differently to the average bod.

I do think that we should not see it as some form of problem, because recognised and treated properly it isn’t a problem. They just have to work in a society which isn’t dyslexic. If that makes sense.

My GS has an engineering degree (computer sciences) and he flies in this subject.

I spend two afternoons a week in a local junior school listening to some Year 3 and Year 4 children read. They have all been coached in phonics, but quite honestly I don’t think phonics are helpful when it comes to sight reading in the reading scheme we are using. I can write words out for them using phonic spelling but the next time they see the word as it’s actually written, they don’t recognise it. I therefore prefer to write the word out, split it up into syllables and take them through the sounds a syllable at a time until they can put it all together. I make a note of any words they have struggled with and the following week we go through them again. I also have lists of words with silent letters, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ letters (c and g for example), words with ‘gh’ in them, ‘tion’ etc. At the end of the day, it comes down to recognition and the only way to recognise words consistently is to read consistently. Unfortunately, there is no culture of reading for pleasure for many children these days and they don’t read at home, like my children and my grandchild did. Before I started doing this, I took the English language, which I love, for granted. In reality, it’s a complete nightmare😁! Try, for example, telling a child who has never seen either the instrument or the word before why cello is pronounced chello. It has opened my eyes to the difficulties that not only poor readers have, but those children for whom English is not their first language.

are phonics the same thing as phonetics?m If so they were used in Scotland when I started school 69 years ago. We carefully spelled out "Ke -ah-te says cat" and so on. At the same time we recited the letters of the alphabet when teacher pointed to them on the wall chart using the names everyone else has always used in English. Confusing? Not to me. but then I was bilingual so was used to sounds being different and meaning different things.

That is a truly dreadful way to teach phonics, AuntieE. No wonder children like your adopted sister was confused by it.

Phonics teaches how the individual sounds in words are represented by a letter or group of letters.

The biggest problem with the English language is that it is a 'bastard' language made up of words from several different languages, words which are spelled as they would have been in the original language. And, as you noted different languages use different letter combinations to spell the sounds in the words. So instead of children just having to learn one way of representing a sound (phoneme), as they do in a language such as German, they have to learn all the different ways that sound can be spelled and where it is appropriate to use that particular representation when they are spelling a word.

Reading is a bit easier than spelling because the learner can see the letter/s and make a choice as to which sound to attach to it/them in order to produce a recognisable word.

Spelling is a matter of memory and particularly, as someone noted earlier, of kinaesthetic memory for the particular 'pattern' of a written word. The old fashioned method of getting a child to write out the correct spelling of a word they had spelled wrong several times was very sound in that it helped to develop kinaesthetic memory.

I am acquainted with the authors of several good phonics programmes, all of them trained teachers rather than theoreticians. Their programmes work extremely well if properly taught. None of them would claim that there is anything 'new' about phonics, it has been in use for centuries. What was 'new' was the 'look and say' method which was originally devised in the 19th C for teaching deaf children to read.

Lathyrus3

It’s an oldie but goody in reference to phonics - the word

Ghetio

Gh as in enough
E as in pretty
Tio as in station

I've always seen that as 'ghoti'. It's utter nonsense, anyway as that combination would never be encountered in English words.

This is such an interesting post . My DH is dyslexic but it wasn’t diagnosed at school . He was told because he could read , the spelling and writing would come . It didn’t.
He has no problem reading but his spelling and writing is still poor . Siri has been a huge bonus for him. However his maths is brilliant. Whereas mine is rubbish .
Our 2 DC are both avid readers as am I . And I did put in a lot of work with them regarding reading , spelling and writing .