Phonics

Me too GG13

So looking forward to the next two days of online phonics & literature with the GC ?

MissAdventure

I don't know the difference in pronunciation of whales and Wales.

I know that one is a country and one lives in the sea. They sound the same to me.

Hwell, I'm inclined to agree.

All I can think is that some people would start one of those words with a 'hw' sound, but that would sound awfully pretentious in all the regions I have ever lived in.
It might be something quite different, of course.

MissAdventure

I don't know the difference in pronunciation of whales and Wales.

Not do I ?

It's a stretched out A. My daughter who moved to London after uni speaks like this now. To us living, in Wales, she sounds really posh. Just spoke to her on the phone and she was just putting her maarsk on to collect GD from school. My son who also moved to London after uni does not speak like this.

MaizieD You are so right about the change back from ITA to conventional text. For many children, it was yet another barrier to reading.
However, I feel I should send a word of congratulation to the Uni’s where our students come from. They arrive all up to date with the latest phonics teaching and talk knowledgeably about the phases appropriate to the classes they are teaching and the progression through the phases. They are also aware of the ‘difficult’ words that just need to be learnt.

trisher

GrannyGravy13 fortunately phonics is just one way of teaching reading, the process of which is an incredibly complicated brain function. It is a way upon which some advisers in education became hooked. Much as when I started teaching some people were hooked on the Initial Teaching Alphabet (fortunes were spent on books and equipment for that). It's something that gives children a start in the first steps of reading and it provides a good base for a teaching programme. It has its limitations, but early years are usually OK. It's the later ones where kids start to try and sound out words like cough and through not to mention thorough and brought that you get problems.

Sorry, trisher, but you're information on phonics is out of date and incorrect. This is why teaching students aren't getting properly taught at Uni. Most of the Uni tutors are ex-teachers trained in Whole Language, Look and Say, Balanced Literacy, none of which are really even compatible with phonics instruction and have no scientific evidence to back them. but they cling very closely to what they were taught. It is they who perpetrate the myths and untruths about phonics instruction.

Phonics has no limitations except in the minds of those who don't understand it, or who don't want to understand it. Phonics is what adult skilled readers do when they encounter words they have never seen in print before. It's a lifelong skill.

There are some 250,000 words in the English lexicon. Most of which, about 95%, can be worked out with phonic knowledge. There are, if I recall rightly, 16 of those 'ough' words in the English language. Not really enough to condemn children to not being properly taught the English alphabetic code and how to use it.

Oddly enough, the ITA was the impetus for a refocus on phonics instruction because it used one to one correspondences for the spellings of phonemes and was incredibly easy to learn to read. Of course, the crunch came with moving back to materials written with the conventional alphabet. Phonics as, taught now, works on the same principles. Teach the children the way that the 44 phonemes of English are represented by a letter, or letters and how to use that knowledge to work out what the words 'say'.

ITA only needed to use 44 symbols; using the conventional alphabet means using 26 to represent the 44 sounds and account for the fact that English may have more than one way to spell a phoneme. But teachers familiar with ITA realised that it was more effective to teach children some 160 'sound spellings' than to try to get them to memorise 20 - 30,000 whole words.

It's more complex, but absolutely doable - children do it all the time.

In some areas e.g. Liverpool, the difference between the short oo in book, look and the long oo in pool or food is unnoticeable. Does it matter? It’s not the same as cudder or could of which is just wrong.

My two older DDs have southern accents, my youngest has a West Midlands accent. GCs are Australian, Hampshire/NZ and the youngest Geordie. That’s what comes of us being gypsyish.

I don't know the difference in pronunciation of whales and Wales.

GGD has developed a Geordie lingo since being in Durham for a number of months. Her siblings laugh as they have a mild Liverpool lilt.

And don't get me going about people who pronounce 'whales' the same as 'Wales', and 'February' as 'Febuary'...

LadyHonoriaDedlock
My DC got very teased when moving from the Home Counties to Wales and were told they were Cockneys.

I always thought they spoke quaite naicely.

I’m very happy the way my Geordie granddaughters speak. I’m a southerner and they quite often tease about the way I speak. I just tell them that people talk differently depending on where they come from and both is fine. I want them to love their heritage just as I do.

As long as they learn to read and write and later spell, I’m a happy bunny. We should be celebrating our wonderful language in all its forms, wherever we come from and of course our diversity for such a small country.

Bathsheba

^Nobody speaks like that really^
Well of course people do, don’t be so daaft. I live in the south and nobody pronounces daft, path, raft, etc with a short ‘a’ as in cat, it is always, always with the long ‘a’ sound, as in park or barn. And yes, I do say Doncaaster, sorry dragonfly .
And I say Glaasgow as well!

Surely, GrandmaKT, you are aware of regional dialects? How can you honestly believe that ‘nobody speaks like that really’?

Bathsheba, as Mr Hardy says you live between Weymouth and Dorchester then you might well say 'Glaasgow' and 'Doncaaster', like a sheep or Robert Newton in the Disney Treasure Island. Although I think Doncaster would come out more like Doncaaaasrrr.

Oh, and we Woollybacks (and thereabouts) have never said "Oop North". We say "Up North". It's the bloody southerners who say "Ap North".

Aaaargh! How awful! That reminds me of when I was 11, having just moved from Wirral to Hertfordshire where it was considered scintillating to get me to say "potato puffs", hit me, and then fall about laughing. That brutal form of elocution lesson only reinforced my determination to keep my Woollyback vowels which are, after all, much closer to those that Chaucer Shakespeare would have recognised.

I did all right in life.

trisher it always amazed/pleased me when the whole reading writing process actually sunk in with our children. It was as if a weight had been lifted from our shoulders, as we knew it would now be onwards and upwards.

GrannyGravy13 fortunately phonics is just one way of teaching reading, the process of which is an incredibly complicated brain function. It is a way upon which some advisers in education became hooked. Much as when I started teaching some people were hooked on the Initial Teaching Alphabet (fortunes were spent on books and equipment for that). It's something that gives children a start in the first steps of reading and it provides a good base for a teaching programme. It has its limitations, but early years are usually OK. It's the later ones where kids start to try and sound out words like cough and through not to mention thorough and brought that you get problems.

MaizieD if the lecturers do not teach phonics correctly what hope is there for our early years children?

GrandmaKT

Witzend

Isn’t it more a case of dahft and rahft etc.? No actual ‘r’ sound in the middle of the word.

Yes Witzend, or I would say a long 'a' sound - Daaft, raaft, but if they go round saying darft and rarft they will sound like members of the royal family circa 1950! Nobody speaks like that really.

Darft and rarft aren't posh, they're just Southern. I can assure you my accent is nowhere near posh! Although it IS a bit clearer now I'm back overseas again. Non British children can't understand me if I chunter on in my Norfolk accent.

GrannyGravy13

MaizieD I have just spoken to friend of DD’s they teach yr1, graduated 6 years ago
from a Southern University and that was how they were taught to teach phonics.

I know. Sad, isn't it, that many Unis still don't have a clue about how to teach phonics because many of the established lecturers don't approve of it? Believe me, I was involved in 'the reading wars' for many years.

I know most of the developers of the leading UK phonics programmes (it's a small world) and have had training from four of them. I really do know what I'm talking about.

Bathsheba

^it's buses and butter not bases and batter^

I have never heard anyone pronounce bus and butter as bas and batter . I have only ever heard bus pronounced with a short 'u' (in the south) or with a long 'u', to rhyme with could (in the north).

But bas? Batter? How odd. Where have you heard this trisher? Genuine question, I am interested.

When I first moved to Sheffield, from Essex, some 50 years ago I was trying to buy half a pound of butter in a grocer's shop. The assistant was utterly baffled and swore that they didn't sell it, that no-one would sell it. It was only when I said that I wanted the stuff made from milk to spread on bread that she said with great relief "Oh, you mean booter ('oo' as in hook). She thought I meant the stuff you make yorkshire pudding with, 'batter'.

This is absolutely true, and I still sometimes get my 'bus' and 'butter' commented on, even after all this time oop North

So, yes 'bas' and 'batter' are a 'thing'.