Every so often we are beleaguered with the idea that phonics is a good idea. So it’s good to see it being challenged.
But Dr Davis, a former primary school teacher, says in his pamphlet a small minority begin school able to read and understand sentences, while a larger group are able to recognise some words.
I was one of those. I was reading books by the time I started school. Indeed, one of my earliest memories of school is reading through the Janet and John books then sitting idly by while the rest of the class were still working through the first few pages. My parents were insistent that literacy was instilled into me by this stage. Unfortunately, my numeracy lagged. Still, can’t have it all, I guess.
The point Davis makes though, is sound – if children can read words and sentences, then let them.
He argues those well on their way to reading could be put off by reading books featuring only words for which they have been taught the phonetic rules in class.
Again, going back to my experience, yes. I became bored very rapidly reading the matter we were using as I had already moved on to more complex material. We are not all the same. And surely that is the crucial point and Davis is making it.
I started with ‘Janet and John’ too but got stuck on Book One when everyone else was on Book Three.
Then one day I finally managed to convince the teacher that I could read it and I was given Book Two. Within five minutes I was back for Book Three, and so on, until I was on the last book in the series, (a fat book with lots of stories as I recall).
We are definitely different when it comes to picking up new things. I’m convinced now that my reading ‘problem’ was all because letters like ‘a’ and ‘g’ in the books didn’t look like those that we were taught.
A good teacher tries different approaches when the standard one fails.
I remember we had a couple of the “Janet and John” books in the house, but I preferred the numbered Ladybird books with “Peter and Jane” instead. The illustrations in the Ladybird books were bloody excellent even by today’s standards, so that may have influenced me. (Being raised bilingual probably helped too.)
The only downside was my mother teaching me “joined-up” writing from the outset as that’s how Italian kids are taught to write – there’s no “write each letter out separately” stage – and having to unlearn that when starting primary school. My handwriting has been an illegible scrawl ever since.
Dare I admit it? Alongside Janet and John was ‘Little Black Sambo’.
It may have been those books that got me interested in the realities regarding other races/cultures and countries or was I being groomed to be a racist?!!!
I loved Little Black Sambo my nanna brought me all the books and I had them for many years.
Wonderful stories.
XX Again, going back to me experience, yes. I became bored very rapidly reading the matter we were using as I had already moved on to more complex material. XX
Yup! Been there, done it.
I.T.A I presume is meant by “phonics?”
CRAP! UTTER CRAP!
I started school with a reading age of 11 at five years old. At the end of the first year, it was down to a 7 year old!
My Grandparents made damn sure it went back up though.
Night after night reading bits out of newspapers, and whole chapters of Grimms fairy tales (NOT the sanitised versions either!)
We had similar problems with maths.
These bloody couloured brick things made of wood. “Qiesonaires” or some such crap.
Trouble is, my Grandparents, although not intelectualy thick AT ALL(!), were, like me, no mathematicians, and could not really help. Although they could do a MEAN long division when it came to profit for fish catches and per head of reindeer over the amount of fuel and food per head.
Thanks to my mother (a schoolteacher of the ‘old school’) and her wonderful collection of books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries I too started school in the 1950’s having read the Brothers Grimm ‘fairytales’ (horror stories – I loved ’em!), Treasure Island, most of the Arthur Conan-Doyle Sherlock Holmes stuff, much of Agatha Christie’s work, etc., etc.
It did me no harm and what’s more I don’t recall any effort being made to ‘unteach’ me by the primary teachers of those days. I was given free access to the school library and was encouraged to borrow and read any book which took my fancy (unfortunately, there weren’t many of them, my mother’s collection was better).
My proudest moment was when I was seven and my mother managed to convince the local Public Library to grant me tickets to the adult section. They were dubious until i passed an ad hoc reading, comprehension and spelling test. After that, there was no stopping me.
I had huge issues with phonic learning both as a parent and as a teaching assistant.
My children had all started reading and writing using the old fashioned methods I was taught, before attending primary school.
After a while they started to struggle, and seemed to be going backwards, I spoke to the teachers who told me I had been teaching them all wrong and they were having to reteach them!!!!!
I was not impressed and had to insist they ceased undoing what the children had been taught and effectively making my children dumber.
It was at this time I then took my Classroom assistants qualifications and first started working in school, teaching the children the way I was taught even those who struggled started to improve dramatically.
It did not make me very popular but did I care? NO.
The Phonic system of learning is undermining annunciation, pronunciation, general grammar and reading skills.
Water not woter House not ouse butter not buuuer etc.
it drives me mad no wonder spelling is so bad these days everything is spelt as it sounds to the children.
I started school at age five in 1959 able to read, I raced through the Janet and John books. My teacher, lazily, assumed that I was lying, so sent me home with a note to my Mum to that effect. Next day, I was sent to school with my Biggles books.
As for arithmetic; why did we ever consider converting all of our weights and measures to the Napoleonic base ten? Previously, we had so many different ways of measuring that alacrity with numbers was almost a given. Shifting decimal points around is just too simple. No wonder youngsters can’t do numbers and stuff in their heads.
Back in the 40s I cold read but writing was trick- until my mother noticed I was writing mirror writing. And put this strsaight.
Luckily nobody tried to ‘correct’ my being left handed.
My youngest also did this when he wanted to write at speed. It was greeted with a ludicrous overreaction by his reception class teacher, who claimed never to have seen it before and demanded that he start learning to write all over again from scratch with a chubby crayon rather than the normal pencil he used at home – although she was grudgingly prepared to let him use his left hand.
I finally lost all patience with her when she insisted that, “all human beings write from left to right”, which might come as something of a surprise to readers of Arabic, Hebrew or oriental languages. The fact that someone so ignorant could become not only a classroom teacher but the school’s head of Learning Support says much about what is wrong with education.
Watcha all on abowt? Oi larned to reed wiv foniques an it nevver dun me no arm. Oim a polleetishun now! 😆
If by “Phonics” you mean learning to read by sounding out the letters of the word, I’m all in favour of it.
That’s the way I learned to read, and it’s so much easier than the reading by the shape of the word bollox.
My son is somewhat remedial academically, and at 14 had a reading age of about 7.
We were out walking by the river, and was getting him to read the signs. Anything over about 2 syllables he couldn’t read as the words were too big. So I said “But long words are just a lot of smaller words joined together”. I broke the word down into syllables and got him to read them, then got him to join them all together and read the long word.
We spent the whole summer doing this, and his reading improved by leaps and bounds, and he also became much more confident. Upon his return to school, his reading deteriorated to the level it was before and when questioned why, as he could do it before, he said he was getting into trouble for reading that way, as that wasn’t the way it was done.
In the end, I told him to fuck what they said, and do it your way, and if they have a problem with that to ring me.
My nephews were at school in the 80s, and they “learned” to read the shape of the word way. They could read you the book from cover to cover, only they couldn’t actually read, they just knew what words went with what picture of the book.
One of the tests they do with phonics is making up non words. Also, not all techniques work with all learners. We all learn differently – as a trainer, I am well aware of this and adjust my techniques where necessary. The state, unfortunately, operates a one-size-fits-all mentality. That’s the problem here.
I think your are confusing teaching using the phonetic alphabet with Initial Teaching Alphabet.
The former involves using the phonetic sound of letters in the normal alphabet, so c – a – t to sound out words using component letters, rather than recognising the whole sound of a word; the latter involves a special alphabet representing sounds of letter combinations.
I learned the former, phonetic method, which was used with Janet and John books. We did not ‘make up non words’, we wrote out and spelled real words. I, and most others in my class, learned to read very quickly, and soon rather than sounding out the letters to get the sound of words, this happened increasingly spontaneously with the sound of the whole word just being in my mind.
I have also learned French and Italian, and certainly need the phonetic sounds of letters which differ from their English sounds, in order to pronounce words.
It seems the natural thing to do. I cannot understand why anyone would think teaching children the individual sounds of words, then using those sounds to construct the sound of whole words is wrong.
It is not just an aid to reading, but an aid to speech. Recognising words so you can read them is fine, but if you sound like a cave man when you speak, it is not a bonus.
Ere’ – Wot ar the “Janet & John” buuks?
Said he, who was reading the Sayers’ translation of “the Divine Comedy” @ age 9 …
I first came across phonetics during the 1980s when adding new kids to the attendance register at the karate club. I would ask the kid to spell their name and they would respond with a series of bizarre grunts, “ju oc huh nuh suh muh ic tuh huh”. At the time I wondered what on earth they were teaching in school nowadays. I also encountered youngsters who could only tell the time using a digital clock or watch, an analogue clock with two hands and a face left them baffled.