How do I handle this??, Mckaylee's report card

Oh god, there are so many, Rocky, English is an atrocious language to rely solely on phonetics. "the" is a perfect example. the 'e' at the end doesn't sound anything like an e, it sounds like 'uh'. How would a kid be able to phonetically work that out? 'what' is another one- phonetically, it sounds like wut, not hat with a 'w' in front, as it is spelled. I could go on and on, but I think memorizing certain words that do not follow any logical phonetic patterns is a pretty inescapable part of learning to read standard English.

I totally agree with this statement. The English language is full of exceptions. Alot of it really is pure memorization.

The best example of how English ignores phonetics that I can think of is the 'ough' words:

rough
cough
through
dough

I agree that some can be very tricky....I feel like I am completely confusing her when I explain this to her..when certain words don't make the sounds that she has learned they make.

I see what you mean - I still maintain that memorizing the words rather than sounding them out doesn't really help. I know that when Zach reads, when he comes on a word that doesn't follow the rules, he's able to properly say the word after having read the context. He says what as what and not wat, because he knows the word sound by the spoken language. He'll try to sound it out, and know what the word is. Not by memorization though.

In a sentence with the word Rough - it's also used in context... The table's surface is Rough.. when 2 vowels are walking, the first one does the talking... so it's not oooo, it's uh... so he's say R-uh.. g.. and then he knows it's r-uh-f. Maybe my kid's just wierd...

For the word "the", I can back down and say that ok, the kid has to memorize that it is Th-uh and not Th-eh... but not by recognizing it on a flash card. Having to try to sound it out in a sentence, and reading the word and making the connection to pronounce it like you do when you speak, to me, is still more important. Mainly because when you see the word, that you've memorized on a flash card, your brain will not necessarily pick up that it is not spelled correctly if there is ever a typo, due to your brain recognizing the letter group as a whole, and not in the individual order in which they are placed, like your brain does when you sound them out. That's why 50% of the population does not read phonetically.. and also why 50% of the people make horrendous mistakes when spelling simple words, consistently.

((ETA - think of There, their, they're... your you're... soooo many people make mistakes because they spell it the way it sounds.. but you have to take the word in context.. and it's the context that defines how you use it, and spell it.. you do not learn this through flash cards, because it's just the word.. not the context. You completely miss the context when you memorize a word through sight words. As for the ough words... show me a 4 5 6 year old learning to read who has words like that in the "beginning to read" books, as opposed to the very basic vocabulary in books meant for those readers.))

ps - I want to make sure you all know it's for learning to read that I think like this, not reading in general. Just learning.

This post has been edited by Hillbilly Housewife on Dec 4 2008, 06:30 AM

So what you're talking about is is the whole language method of reading, where kids figure out words by the context in which they're placed, i.e., the rest of the sentence, correspondence to a picture, etc...That method was pretty popular when my now 16 yo was learning to read, and early childhood literacy studies went back and forth about the efficacy of whole language. After awhile, I think they settled on a combination theory, some phonics, some whole language. My daughter has a whole list of "strategies" to use when she comes to an unfamiliar word,some are whole language, some are phonics: different strategies work in different situations, depending on the word itself.
As for your "rough" analogy. If a child used the first vowel does the talking trick, he would be pronouncing the 'o' as in octopus, or 'o' as in oatmeal. The sound is actually a short 'u' sound. And then there's the rest of the word: gh to a beginning reader would be guh, not 'f'. There's no way a kid could sound that word out with any sort of logic.
This stuff fascinates me b/c I'm studying to b/c an English teacher.

Yes. I'm not knocking sight words as a whole... just for first learning to read. Sight words are used in functional reading.. once reading is pretty well established with the phonemic awareness and comprehension of the vocabulary read.

You first need to make the letter-sound correspondence. Flash cards can help with this, as it's really just identifying the phonetic sound of letters at a fast pace.. then phoneme blending, which is putting the sounds of the letters you learned in the correspondence together, to form short words... usually the CVC words... dddd-ooooo-ggggg and followed by phoneme segmentation.. using bigger easy word, such as bbbaaa-nnnaaa-nnnaaa, and switching out phonemes either at the beginning or the end.. baaa-naa-nooo, baaa-naa-taaa etc... which is still a method used in testing children. "Take the word Bat, and replace the B sound with a M sound, what do you get?" That's cognitive, not memorization.

Only after these steps have been sufficiently practiced should sight words be introduced.. sight words do comprise of between 50 and 70% of the words we use on a daily basis... BUT - sight words is only for functional reading. it does not teach the comprehension of what is read... and is most often used to replace phonic decoding.

As for pronounciation, as you know, there are different accents all over the world.. the jokes about canadians saying aboot.. it's not really true, we say it like Ab-ow-t. yes, gh would be guh to a begining reader.. but like I said, show me a beginner reader learning those words without having first mastered basic cvc comprehension.

it also fascinates me, as I was aiming to continue to pursue language studies, as I speak English and French fluently, I am pretty darn good in German and Spanish, can understand a lot of Portuguese, Italian and Abenaki, and I'd like to work internationally some day as a French or English as a second language teacher. I have a few friends in japan right now doing just that, and it's in my plans for the future.