Phonics raises reading results

Bruv · Post by **Bruv** » Fri Dec 08, 2017 9:34 am

Results are 'a vindication of the government’s boldness' says minister, as 10-year-olds' scores rise in international rankings

Schools that are failing to hit reading standards need to further increase their focus on phonics, after international rankings “vindicated the approach, according to schools standards minister Nick Gibb.

Why shouldn't the rising standard be ALL those foreigners and their different attitude to education ?

Wandrin · Post by **Wandrin** » Fri Dec 08, 2017 3:04 pm

The only problem I have with the phonics method is that spelling seems to lag significantly.

magentaflame · Post by **magentaflame** » Sat Dec 09, 2017 5:44 pm

I disagree.. phonics helps with spelling if taught properly.

Post by **spot** » Sun Dec 10, 2017 5:32 am

magentaflame;1515617 wrote: I disagree.. phonics helps with spelling if taught properly.

Hau?

The tew hav nuthing in comun at aul. Speling iz arbitrari, foniks iz ekzakt.

(and if I had my way we'd all use those spellings everywhere).

Post by **LarsMac** » Sun Dec 10, 2017 10:02 am

spot;1515642 wrote: Hau?

The tew hav nuthing in comun at aul. Speling iz arbitrari, foniks iz ekzakt.

(and if I had my way we'd all use those spellings everywhere).

you misspelled 'egzakt'

magentaflame · Post by **magentaflame** » Sun Dec 10, 2017 4:33 pm

A phonic is a building block for words. From the word cat to zebra.

Post by **spot** » Sun Dec 10, 2017 5:24 pm

Phonics isn't phonetics?

I can see I'm going to have to look the word up. I thought they were single syllable sounds, with a regular say-what-you-see spelling for each.

magentaflame · Post by **magentaflame** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 4:08 am

Phonetics id the study of human sounds and language.

magentaflame · Post by **magentaflame** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 4:16 am

A phonic is a sound in the human language which corresponds to a letter/ mark/smudge if you will.

It works better in greek and latin... but it is essential in basic english.

Hypothi...whatcha-a-callic..... newspapers are the best way to learn english. If you know the spoken word but struggle with the written the newspaper historically would be the place to learn based on phonic education because all newdpapers were written in a common voice. Its solely why i was reading the nrwspaper at the age of four. Mother taught us phonics and we practiced with the newspaper.

magentaflame · Post by **magentaflame** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 4:20 am

LarsMac;1515647 wrote: you misspelled 'egzakt'

Still trying to figure out what the "g" sound is doing there....it would be a 'c'.

You guys dont speak good proper english. Youre using the back of your throat for the 'g' sound...tut tut tut.

Post by **spot** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 5:03 am

magentaflame;1515662 wrote: Still trying to figure out what the "g" sound is doing there....it would be a 'c'.

You guys dont speak good proper english. Youre using the back of your throat for the 'g' sound...tut tut tut.

All any phonic system requires is a consistent sound for a given symbol. That's the one thing no newspaper can possibly provide.

You cannot use a "c" because the "c" sound in English is either "s" or "k" depending on its setting. The way to treat "c" in a phonics system is to eliminate it as a symbol entirely and stick to "s" and "k" as in "surkul".

The hard "g" as in "got" has to have a symbol, and nothing stands for that sound except "g" - what else would you use? If you want a soft "g" it's easily written as "j", as in the unambiguous "jentul".

No symbol should ever represent more than one specific sound.

You wrote phonics helps with spelling if taught properly - could you explain what you mean by that? It appears to me that sounding out the letters of English words is a lousy way of trying to discover what the word sounds like. Correctly spelt English is notorious for the inability of current English pronunciation to sound like what's written in it letter by letter.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 6:48 am

Chuckle.

I'm told Spanish always pronounces a letter the same way and spelling reflects sound perfectly. English does not.

I believe the reason for this is that English, in origin, is a multiple train smash of a language. We start with the basic Anglo-Saxon and some Celtic place names. Then you smash the Norse language into it in the C9th (basically the same vocabulary, different grammatical endings). People found that they could communicate across the two languages if the grammar was simplified and it's my guess that's the point where our verbs lost many of their endings: Amo, amas, amat: I love, you love, he or she loves. We use pronouns, not word endings to indicate the differences.

Then this already hybridising language was hit by Norman French in the C11th - the third big train in the smash. This played merry hell with pronunciation and gave us many more words. By the C14th we had a language that is recognisably English, but with pronunciation that is different to today's and actually closer to the way some modern words look as though they SHOULD be pronounced: Modern "though" was spelt "thogh" and pronounced more like "thoch" with a (soft) Scottish "och". You can add dozens if not hundreds of local accents and dialects to complicate the matter.

Then Dr Johnson codified the whole shambles with his dictionary in 1755 and we've been stuck with what he said more or less ever since.

Post by **LarsMac** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 9:03 am

Clodhopper;1515665 wrote: Chuckle.

I'm told Spanish always pronounces a letter the same way and spelling reflects sound perfectly. English does not.

I believe the reason for this is that English, in origin, is a multiple train smash of a language. We start with the basic Anglo-Saxon and some Celtic place names. Then you smash the Norse language into it in the C9th (basically the same vocabulary, different grammatical endings). People found that they could communicate across the two languages if the grammar was simplified and it's my guess that's the point where our verbs lost many of their endings: Amo, amas, amat: I love, you love, he or she loves. We use pronouns, not word endings to indicate the differences.

Then this already hybridising language was hit by Norman French in the C11th - the third big train in the smash. This played merry hell with pronunciation and gave us many more words. By the C14th we had a language that is recognisably English, but with pronunciation that is different to today's and actually closer to the way some modern words look as though they SHOULD be pronounced: Modern "though" was spelt "thogh" and pronounced more like "thoch" with a (soft) Scottish "och". You can add dozens if not hundreds of local accents and dialects to complicate the matter.

Then Dr Johnson codified the whole shambles with his dictionary in 1755 and we've been stuck with what he said more or less ever since.

You are spot on, I think.

What we know as English is the Mongrel of languages.

Here in the Americas, it has even evolved much further, with words borrowed from pretty much every possible language and dialect mankind has ever invented.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 10:44 am

LarsMac;1515670 wrote: You are spot on, I think.

What we know as English is the Mongrel of languages.

Here in the Americas, it has even evolved much further, with words borrowed from pretty much every possible language and dialect mankind has ever invented.

Yes, the same thing happened here with the development of trading links and then an empire. Something that might interest you - and this is a personal theory, I haven't seen it backed up anywhere else - is that some of the basic differences in English English and American English come down to the fact that when the first settlers arrived and stayed, their language for a time froze and didn't change much at all - apart from talking in some Native American words, mostly place names. I saw the same thing with the returned descendants of English settlers who had gone out to South Africa in the very late C19th and up to the 1940s: they spoke an English which was like 1930s' English in many ways, more than 1980s English. Then as numbers increased and you had more immigration from other countries (though still mostly English speaking) the language began to evolve again in very much its own way, though still based on Anglo Saxon grammar. This would explain why "gotten" is still in the American dialect, but has (I think) died out completely in English English.

I think without tv and now the internet, in 300 years we'd be talking genuinely different languages rather than now where differences occasionally cause amusement or at worst embarrassment and misunderstanding can be reasonably easily worked through. Though even with that...there was a case in Korea apparently, when the Chinese came in big time and the UN forces, US and UK among them, were under serious pressure. The US General commanding got in touch with the Brits holding part of the line and asked how things were. "A little sticky," came back the reply. "Oh, ok, they're coping," thought the General...

...a British superior officer of the time would have known that "A little sticky," in that situation meant "HEEEEEELP!" Something in my head is saying Battle of the Imjin River but it's not entirely reliable. Anyway, terrible and avoidable casualties were the result and the loss of the position (which didn't actually matter that much because the whole line was going back at a rate of knots by that time).

It's language use more than language that has diverged at that point, but that's the first stage as languages split, I think. Radio, tv and now the internet have slowed and perhaps even reversed that process.

Post by **spot** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 10:51 am

Having been there I can confirm long-term residents of Cornwall speak 1970s English. Nothing which happened in British society since then has penetrated that far west.

Post by **LarsMac** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 11:42 am

magentaflame;1515662 wrote: Still trying to figure out what the "g" sound is doing there....it would be a 'c'.

You guys dont speak good proper english. Youre using the back of your throat for the 'g' sound...tut tut tut.

I probably would have been more correct spelling it eggsakt, perhaps?

But then I've heard you Aussies speaking, and Kiwis, and various other English speaking regions, and it strikes me that this whole Phonics thing could go haywire in a hurry when a lot of people from various regions all gather in the same locale to discuss the matter.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Mon Dec 11, 2017 12:19 pm

LarsMac;1515675 wrote: I probably would have been more correct spelling it eggsakt, perhaps?

But then I've heard you Aussies speaking, and Kiwis, and various other English speaking regions, and it strikes me that this whole Phonics thing could go haywire in a hurry when a lot of people from various regions all gather in the same locale to discuss the matter.

Six, sex, sucks, sacks. It's vital to know which accent each one is said in.

Socks, too.

FourPart · Post by **FourPart** » Tue Dec 12, 2017 3:33 pm

I'd be interested to see how they would teach a language such as Welsh using Phonics. For any non UKs among us who don't understand the significance of Welsh, Welsh is a very guttral language, which uses double letters as letters in their own right, thus the Welsh alphabet has 28 letters:

a, b, c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ff, g, ng, h, i, l, ll, m, n, o, p, ph, r, rh, s, t, th, u, w, y

(j, k, v, x, z are letters not included in the Welsh alphabet).

Post by **LarsMac** » Tue Dec 12, 2017 5:39 pm

FourPart;1515699 wrote: I'd be interested to see how they would teach a language such as Welsh using Phonics. For any non UKs among us who don't understand the significance of Welsh, Welsh is a very guttral language, which uses double letters as letters in their own right, thus the Welsh alphabet has 28 letters:

a, b, c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ff, g, ng, h, i, l, ll, m, n, o, p, ph, r, rh, s, t, th, u, w, y

(j, k, v, x, z are letters not included in the Welsh alphabet).

Many years back, I worked for a Chef who was from Wales. He taught me a little bit about how to make sense out of Welsh writing, but it was a long time ago, and without usage, language skills quickly fade.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 5:15 am

It's a very beautiful language, I know that. It nearly got wiped out by British policy which saw the gaelic languages as the languages of rebellion in the C18th and then later of ignorance and poverty in the C19th...we now might see connections there that they didn't then...

It took the work of writers from Scott to Heaney to give the lie to the charge of ignorance and poverty and make gaelic glamorous, even edgy and fortunately the languages still survive. Even Cornish is being resurrected I believe.

edit: The really tantalising one in these islands for my money is Pictish. We know it was spoken for hundreds of years in a large part of what is now Northern and Eastern Scotland. We know it was a living language at the time Irish and Anglo-Saxon chroniclers were writing in their native tongues. We have Ogham (runic writing on stones) which is reckoned beyond doubt to BE Pictish and there are some guesses (I believe) as to what some of them might mean. But of Pictish itself - no sounds at all. Not a word, and yet they were there, so close.

There's hope yet modern techniques might find more. And treasure troves of all sorts still pop up here every year. But at present the Picts remain a tantalising mystery.

On phonics or not, my feeling is that the phonic method is a tool, and a good one. It works for many so use it. But it isn't the only way and some kids may respond to a different approach and better methods may evolve - hopefully will evolve - in the future. I think it's a mistake to think any single system is THE way, final, definitive. In my ideal world, teachers would have access to various systems and use what worked best for them with any particular class.

magentaflame · Post by **magentaflame** » Wed Dec 20, 2017 2:41 pm

and without usage, language skills quickly fade.

On phonics or not, my feeling is that the phonic method is a tool, and a good one.

It certainly helped me because I had hearing difficulties when a young child. I needed those sounds to learn to pronounce words properly. And I speak extremely well in adulthood. But I'll admit I've never pronounced "H" as "a"che" ...always... "ha"che" ...even when reciting the alphabet. Because I've always needed reminding of the sound.