If schools teach phonics correctly?

Question

My 5 yr old daughter is learning to read using phonics at school, where I did not learn that way. Her school enforces the use of phonics not just in English lessons, but in all subjects (like Environmental Studies/EVS.)

While it looks like a better way to learn to pronounce words, I have noticed that English is not a perfect language in terms of phonics rules. So I'm concerned there might be some confusion when my daughter needs to learn words like elbow where w is silent. They have not talked about silent characters yet as they are at an early stage. Also I've noticed that many words appear to be inconsistent (like cow) which has a different pronunciation at the end.

I am thinking child may learn / memorize words, but they will not completely grasp the pronunciation of words (like cow and elbow above). Am I overthinking this or are these differences shortcomings of the teaching method?

Answer 1

Written English is not a Phonetic language; you need to understand that before you go any further. As a result, while phonics are a useful aid to beginners in reading/comprehension, they will always be imperfect just like any shortcut.

If you look at the etymological breakdown of English, it contains words which we can mostly trace back about equally to either a Latin, Greek or Germanic root (there are a few others as well, but those three account for over 75% of English words.) Because Written English is not an alphabetised phonetic language each imported word retains many of the spelling rules from it's parent language.

Take the two words you've compared.

• Elbow is an Old-English word and is rooted in the 'alinobogan' language which underpins Dutch and German but is neither.
• Cow is German rooted, but only came to Britain after a great deal of change in the German language and has different spelling rules as a result.

Differences like this which occur all over the language make it impossible for any rule to be universal unless we threw out all our spelling rules and used phonetic English. That isn't going to happen because Spoken English is wildly divergent; consider Glaswegian or Cockney. If they were to write the way they speak communication would become very difficult.

Essentially 'synthetic phonics' is thought to be the best method currently available for teaching English and claims give a correct or 'good enough' pronunciation of around 85% of English words, plus it is relatively quick. There is also another phonics system called Analytic Phonics which is considered slower and tends to place more emphasis on phonemes at the beginning of each word.

In the 1960's an alternative system was trialled in British schools called Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) and it was used to teach children up to age-7. The idea was that as children became fluent that they could read clearly and could learn the correct spellings later when they had more confidence. While this worked for some children, for the most part they didn't and there are many adults now who find spelling incredibly difficult.

Your child will pick up words that do not fit the phonics patterns as they go, and the teaching materials at the school are correct. If you would like to work with your child and understand more about what they're doing then why not ask the teacher to explain what phonics system they use and how you can help?

Answer 2

English, unlike many alphabetic languages, is not written in a perfectly transparent fashion. You cannot necessarily pronounce a word correctly just by looking at it. This makes learning to read through phonics trickier than it might be in a language with stricter pronunciation rules. However, phonics are still the most effective technique for teaching English reading skills. While there are many exceptions and irregularities in pronunciation, phonics can still be a highly accurate guide in many instances.

As children are first being taught phonics, the focus will be on generally short words, for which there are not so many pronunciation oddities. One of the expectations is that, as part of this process, children will come to memorize most common words anyway. (The instruction process may or may not have explicit lists of "sight words" that students should know without sounding them out.) As children get older, they will be exposed to longer words and less common words, for which the pronunciation may not be as easily decoded using phonics. However, by that point, they should already have basic reading ability, and at that point, other methods of learning difficult words will become more useful.