{"id":222,"date":"2013-06-30T03:46:59","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T03:46:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/?p=222"},"modified":"2018-04-18T11:04:07","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T22:04:07","slug":"concerning-phonics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/2013\/06\/30\/concerning-phonics\/","title":{"rendered":"Concerning phonics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I didn’t write this, Professor John Wells did.<\/em><\/p>\n

I just cut it from\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and pasted it below.<\/em><\/p>\n

My point is that phonics may be very useful
\n<\/em>for teaching children who already know the sounds of English how to write,
\nbut\u00a0not for teaching those who do not know the sounds how to say them.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Learning the sounds?<\/h3>\n

Synthetic phonics, according to a Sunday Times \u201cbriefing\u201don dyslexia (18 Jan., main section, p. 20) is a system in which children are taught the 43 sounds of English and how to blend them.<\/p>\n

Oh no it isn\u2019t. It is a reading scheme. English-speaking children who are ready to learn to read and write already\u00a0know<\/b>\u00a0the\u00a0sounds<\/b>\u00a0of English. What they need to learn are the\u00a0letters<\/b>\u00a0and the letter combinations that correspond to them in writing.<\/p>\n

True dyslexia (if it exists) involves the inability to identify letter shapes. If a\u00a0b<\/i>\u00a0looks to you like a\u00a0d<\/i>, or you can\u2019t reliably tell apart a\u00a0p<\/i>\u00a0and a\u00a0q<\/i>, then you do indeed have a special problem in visual perception.<\/p>\n

Synthetic phonics very sensibly concentrates first on the regular spelling-to-sound correspondences. Rather than the rival whole word schemes (\u201clook and say\u201d), children first learn to spell out C-A-T =\u00a0cat\u00a0<\/i>(which they can already name as a \/k\u00e6t\/). The cat sat on the mat.<\/p>\n

As explained in Wikipedia,<\/p>\n

Synthetic phonics emphasizes the one-to-one correspondences between phonemes and graphemes. In synthetic phonics programs students say the sounds for the graphemes they see and orally blend them together to produce a spoken word. In the context of phonics, the wordblend<\/i>\u00a0takes on a different meaning from its use in linguistics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(In phonics, a blend is a letter combination, such as\u00a0sh<\/i>\u00a0=\u00a0\u0283.)<\/p>\n

But English-speaking children learning to read experience a special difficulty: the irregularity and inconsistency of our spelling-to-sound correspondences. Learning to read and write imposes an extra burden on the memory not required of, say, Swedish- or Polish-speaking children. It seems reasonable to conclude that some cases of supposed dyslexia may be due to difficulty in surmounting this extra hurdle.<\/p>\n

After all, there are very few adults who are entirely confident in their ability to spell every word they need. Most adults make occasional spelling mistakes, and many make lots.<\/p>\n

Many years ago I was engaged to teach some elementary phonetics to teachers of reading. I was astonished how difficult they, of all people, found it to distinguish between speech (something you can hear) and writing (something you can see).<\/p>\n

I encountered one teacher who honestly believed that\u00a0\u03b8\u00a0as in\u00a0thing<\/i>\u00a0consists of a\u00a0t-sound followed by an\u00a0h-sound.<\/p>\n

It looks as if the anonymous Sunday Times reporter may be guilty of the same confusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn’t write this, Professor John Wells did. I just cut it from\u00a0here\u00a0and pasted it below. My point is that phonics may be very useful for teaching children who already… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":377,"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions\/377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phonetics.livecodehosting.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}