My eight year old son seems to have a poor grasp of phonics. He has a hard time guessing the spelling of a word he doesn’t know as well as pronouncing a word he hasn’t seen before. This came very naturally to me, so I am at a loss as to how to explain it to him (especially in a way that doesn’t frustrate him). He has had to undergo speech therapy, but is able to pronounce words correctly when he thinks about it. Any insights?
Thanks,
Rob
Do they teach phonics in his school? I know that, for a time, it fell out of favor.
Altho u cud use fonix four spelen, it is a week aisle in the see of English.
Most schools, while they have returned some phonics to the curriculum, now focus much more on “sight words”. “Sounding it out” (aka phonics) is believed to slow students down, and many of the most common words they use violate the “rules” of phonics anyhow.
In our school, by first grade, the kids are responsible for knowing the correct spelling of their kindergarten sight words, the first grade sight words as they come up, and the spelling words they learn each week. Everything else, they’re simply encouraged to get something on the paper that might possibly be what they mean.
How do you increase phonetic awareness? With reading out loud while you use your finger or a stick to trace a line under the word as you read it. Only when he consistently sees “b” while he hears “b” will he grok that “b” makes the sound “b”.
Flashcards can help, too. Just take some index cards and write the same letter on each side. Make sure you include both capital and lower case letters. Flash him the cards until he can make the most common sound for each letter correctly on the first flip through.
…and then after you’ve done all this work and he understands the most common phonetic patterns…be prepared to answer why through is spelled with a thoroughly unnecessary “ugh”! 
Too many schools/teachers go all one way or the other. Either they teach nothing but phonics or they teach nothing but sight words when the reality is that most kids do best when both are presented in parallel.
It’s as important for a child to be able to recognize the high frequency words (to, at, the, with, in, etc) than it is to know that “b” makes a “buh” sound, “a” makes an “ay” or ‘ah" sound, "t’ makes a “tuh” sound and buh-ah-tuh is bat (with the final step being the recognition of the word based on previous exposure to it).
A speech therapist might help with the motor skills needed to pronounce sounds (how to place lips, tongue, etc), but it isn’t their job to really teach how to read. I think you should be sitting down with your son’s teacher and seeing about developing an individualized education plan (IEP) to help address this issue before he begins to encounter reading material that is truly overwhelming for him. You don’t want your son to tune out or get frustrated with school because he can’t quite read. Some time with an IEP and targeting teaching could resolve the issue - if it makes you feel better, you can see if your son can be evaluated for a learning difficulty, but the way to work with that will still be with an IEP anyways.
I wish I had better advice - my mother is a consultant for primary schools and does a lot of work on reading programs and teaching methods for exactly this type of situation. I consider her to be as much an expert as anyone can be in the field. I’ve talked to her about all kinds of stuff related to this (I find her work fascinating, but would never want to do it!), but I’m afraid I don’t remember it well enough to share it with you.
Good luck! The key is to be proactive and patient… with time and good learning resources, your son will get past this!
He reads o.k., but when he encounters a new word, I can tell that he is scanning his memory for it. It’s more his writing that suffers. He was trying to write the word “Privet” and came up with “piivit”. He is familiar with what letters make what sounds, but I couldn’t get him to recognize that there needed to be an “r” in that word. He was tired and frustrated too, which didn’t help matters, but trying to get him to see this stuff is a sure way to make him tired and frustrated. His school does teach sight words, but he doesn’t seem that great at memorizing them, at least as far as writing is concerned.
Rob
What does he like to do? Is he good at physical things? Drawing? Listening to music?
He may simply have an idiosyncratic learning style, and not yet have found the “key” to rote memorization with that style.
I’m an auditory and physical learner, for example. If I was memorizing a new script, it was far easier to learn if I recorded it and played it back over and over. If I could move around in an approximation of my blocking while I listened to the recording, even better - I could learn a major role in a full length play in two or three run throughs.
Some kids learn spelling words best by writing each one 10 times, or 20 times, or 50 times. Some learn them best by making each word out of modelling clay. Some can learn them by drawing the word - not just writing it, but illustrating it. Some kids create a dance for the word. My son-the-engineering-type found that letter blocks (you know those things toddlers chew on and stack?) helped him learn words as things you put together out of smaller things. We held on to those letter blocks until he was 10, I think! As words got more complex, we pasted common prefixes and suffixes onto some of the blocks, and that helped him learn things like “ing” is a unit that can be added on to a base word, so he didn’t have to remember three units of information - “i”, “n” and “g” - just one.
Encourage him to find his own best learning style, and think outside the box a bit. Don’t keep trying what doesn’t work, but keep trying new ways of getting the information into his head.
But I still can’t stress this enough - the best way to build spelling, grammar and vocabulary skills is to read, read, read.
Well it might be more of a problem if English were a phonetic language.
Of course if it were that word would be spelled fonetic. Either that or the word fee would be spelled phee, or or maybe the city in Arizona would be Feenix.
From a phonetic point of view English sucks compared to other languages such as Spanish.
He is very good at drawing and he likes to read, but he is not good at reading aloud and hates to trace what he is reading with his finger. He also doesn’t seem to understand what he has read very well. At least, he can’t tell me what happened in his own words.
Rob
That’s not entirely true. English more or less makes sense, it’s just that the spelling is a thousand years of borrowings and sound change.
Zompist’s How to pronounce English spells out most of the rules. (As it uses IPA and is written by a linguist, I’m not sure how helpful it would be to a kid)
Ok, this is half-remembered from a conversation last week with my mom, but this might help a little. This sort of approach is, I think, done over the space of a few days.
Have your soon choose a book, magazine article or other reading material that he likes. Perhaps a couple of books on the same topic, say baseball. Start with one book by reading it to him - let him just appreciate the story. Then ask him to tell it back to you in his own words - find out what he remembers and felt was important about the story. Don’t correct him if he gets things out of order, you just want to understand his level of understanding.
Next time, have him read the story to you. He knows what’s in there, so a lot of the words will be in his head, even if he doesn’t remember it exactly. If it’s a book about baseball, he’ll know the word “pitcher” and “catcher” and “field” will be in there somewhere, so he’ll anticipate them when he sees a word that starts with p or c or f. While he reads, write down the words he struggles with and turn that into a list of study words - see if you can identify any trends (stuggles with ph or ough or other forms). You can then focus on sorting those words out, and turning those into “power words” for your “study” of baseball books and stories.
After he’s read it to you, ask him questions about it - does he remember more than after you read it to him? Can he tell you the story better? Can you quiz him on who did what/what happened first in a series of events and does he get it right?
Repeat a similar process with another book on the same topic - read to him, have him read it to you, focus on and improve his recognition and sounding of special words.
Have him write a paragraph or two about baseball - he’s now seen the words several times, he knows the topics, he can write a short story and you can have him refer to the "power words’ to help him. He can do one draft for the story, then one draft for correcting mistakes - don’t focus on getting it right the first time, but help him learn to express the story first and then make sure it’s readable/correct.
This is part of how a teacher teaches reading in grades 1 and 2 - it’s repetition, it’s focusing on specific elements of language, and adding words to the high frequency ones as he goes along. The repetition will make it easier for him - if he knows what words to expect when reading about a particular topic, he’ll be able to associate the words on the page with words that he knows or he heard you say when you read him a book the night before.
It’s not easy - it takes time, and will likely take going through several topics/books before you see much improvement. That’s why reading is taught continuously for a few years in school, and why very similar language homework is given month after month in school as kids progress through themes about apples, halloween, autumn, Christmas, winter, bears, dinosaurs…whatever.
Also, books can sometimes be intimidating. My mom gave me some book proofs for things that will be published shortly (to give to my husband’s little cousins as reading material) and a lot of these things are pamphlets, posters and magazines rather than books. Reading a detailed poster on the history of the NHL and the Stanley Cup involves just as much skill at the primary school level than reading about the Three Little Pigs. It doesn’t matter what he’s reading, as long as he’s reading.
Do poor spellers and/or those who had difficulties learning to read run on either side of the family?
Does he have some difficulty telling his right from his left?
The poor phonemic awareness, the difficulty in decoding words, that you describe is the neurobiological deficit that the experts believe is the crux of developmental dyslexia (specific reading disability).
If so then it is important to have it recognized as soon as possible, even though he currently “reads o.k.”. Many dyslexics read okay at a third grade level, if they are otherwise smart. They memorize enough words that between the words they have memorized and context and other cues on the page, they can deduce what the words between must be. But they are using that brain power on those activities rather than on comprehension and those tactics will soon be overwhelmed even for the very bright dyslexics as the volume of words exponentially increases and the other cues decrease. By fifth grade they are struggling with reading and that struggle prevents them from using reading to learn.
These kids need to be explicitly taught the rules of phonics and need to be taught it soon. They will not just pick it up by reading more.
Now I am not saying that your child has dyslexia, but he is doing what the brighter kids who are later labelled with dyslexia in fifth or sixth grade did when they were in second and third grade. Take that for what it is worth.
Inspired by Cecil’s topic today, are there any video games that are worth a shit (that is, they are both compelling and effective) that teach reading and/or comprehension?
Rob
If there is an issue with graphic recognition (for example, linked to laterality issues), not just the rules of phonics, but the rules of how to tell letters apart. “n has one hump; m has two humps; count the humps in this letter, how many humps does it have?” “b has the stick up and on the left; p has the stick down and on the left; q has the stick down and on the right; d has the stick up and on the right; tell me, where is the stick in each of these letters I’ve drawn?”
But that seems to not usually be what is going on in most dyslexics anyway. See the link provided. Also see here, here, and here. The typical deficit is not telling “p” from “b” but at the grapheme to phoneme (written sound representations to sounds made) level as is, in those studies, evidenced by the difficulty with rhyming both functionally and in fMRI studies.
As an aside, the speech therapy that the op’s kid has had was likely very useful and may have helped the current presentation be less severe (assuming, for the sake of discussion, that he does share that dyslexic neurobiology) as much of speech therapy is done by breaking words into their phonemes and having a child focus one phoneme at a time. A very basic part of remediation.
Meanwhile, I have no idea about any of the edutainment games, but you’d want ones that practice rhyming and that explicitly teach the phonics skills in as multimodal a manner as possible. This one looks promising anyway. The read to me feature on many e-books is useful also to give a kid the option to have the machine help out some, sort of reading training wheels, that allows a child to read some materials that are hard for his/her reading level but appropriate for his/her intellectual level, maturity, and interests.
My post started with an IF.
IF the kid has problems telling individual letters apart (which may only show up with certain types of letters; for example Middlebro has problems with bdpq typed but not handwritten), then that needs to be adressed.
IF he does not, then it does not.
Okay. IF he has a difficulty that is not generally associated with such a description then it should be addressed. Of course it is not relevant to point out that the research clearly shows that such is not usually the case despite the pervasive myth that visual discrimination and or letter/word reversals are a common cause of dyslexia.
Again, I am not saying this kid has dyslexia … merely pointing out that kids who do act like this at this age and answering the op as to why some children, children of otherwise normal or above intelligence with normal exposure to prereading and reading instruction, have difficulty with phonics: because of a not too uncommon inheritable brain wiring difference.
You are correct, the research does indicate that phonemic awareness difficulties are most commonly associated with reading disabilities, aka, dyslexia.
There is also a subtype that does involve problems with visual processing. An interesting test to help distinguish one from the other is found in the spellings of these children: Those with orthographic difficulty (visual system) may often spell words phonetically correct, but with little recognition of the writing conventions of English, while those with phonemic awareness deficits produce spellings that may look somewhat like the word, but make no sense phonetically.
Orthographic issues: “klene” for “clean”
Phonological issues: “bak” for “bank”
Growing up, I can remember being in elementary school when phonics was being taught.
Short e and long e, etc.
I can remember not paying attention and ‘paying the price’ by not being able to distinguish between words that had a short e or a long e, etc.
Also, I can remember in elementary school being responsible for learning my multiplication tables.
It just so happened that we had a set of 45 rpm records at home that helped youngsters learn their multiplication tables.
They were very catchy songs, songs that rhymed and I played those records over and over again.
To this day, I can still remember the words to those songs!
So, if your child is having trouble with phonics, be patient and try to find some music (i.e., learning aids) that makes it oh-so-easy to learn phonics.
So easy that the songs teach you to correctly identify the phonics of words without even thinking about it.
I would also like to mention that one helpful hint in learning a foreign language is to sing (singing to a song) in that foreign language.
Sing out loud and sing your heart out!
From high school French class, I can easily recall the words to songs like Frères Jacques, La Vie en Rose, Á la Ferme de Zéphirin, and La Marseillaise.
Singing those songs out loud, you realize that you do not even have to think about the correct pronunciation of the words … the song and the music do it for you.
I certainly agree that not all with dyslexia are the same, and that while phonemic awareness difficulties are the most common cause (especially of the inheritable sort) of dyslexia, and in fact can predict it, that there are other difficulties that also result in reading difficulties. And your test does indeed discriminate between those with phonological vs. orthographic difficulties, and illustrates the difference well … but I am not as convinced that orthographic difficulties equals “visual system” difficulties. The distinction is perhaps better expressed as “words” vs. “rules” (as coined by Pinker). Pinker (that book, p.246) would place the common form of dyslexia, the phonological one, as having a problem in the rule pathway, and those who have no difficulty with applying the rules, can sound out nonsense words fine, but who would mispronounce irregular words like “yacht” and “aisle” (or spell “clean” and “klene”) as having a problem in the “whole-word” pathway and as having “surface dyslexia.” The book is a great read btw, more about using linguistics as a model for brain function in general. That process of learning the individual words, deducing the rules, and then learning when the rule does not apply, is at a higher level than visual processing … which does not disprove that visual processing is ever a factor, of course. (I wonder if the kids who do the “klene” are also prone to more often say “catched” instead of “caught” and otherwise fail to identify and apply irregular language exceptions … but that gets even farther off-topic.)
I suspect that you understand why I am so eager to make clear the likely very small role that visual processing plays in reading difficulties. There is an industry out there exploiting that myth: the developmental optometrists who sell parents on special glasses and visual training exercises for their dyslexic children despite the evidence that it does nothing for these kids at all. A general public convinced that dyslexics literally see letters or words reversed, see letters jumbled, can’t visually track, is more easily sold on such snake oil.
Not sure why you aren’t telling us what he’s being taught in school. That seems the most logical place to start. If they aren’t teaching phonics, then it’s no wonder he doesn’t understand it.
Have you met with his teacher to discuss this?