Sheesh

[conuly]

Random internet comment: Blah blah blah, phonics doesn't always work, please tell me how you'd use phonics to spell the word "color".

Me: Color? That's the word you're going with? Not two, or one, or eye, or cough, but... color?

Sometimes I don't know what's going on in people's minds. A couple of people responded, but he's yet to reply back.

Comments

[dine]

well, personally I spell it "colour" but maybe that's just me (and a whole bunch of non-USians. and I've no idea if that means phonics works or doesn't

[archangelbeth]

Phonics is a good starting point. (Best reading is the Glen Doman method; two generations tested here... I will die on this hill.)

But then we get though, enough, read (reed) and read (red), lead and lead, women (wimmin! -- depends slightly on regional accent), and really, phonics is nothing but a good starting point.

It certainly did nothing for my atrocious spelling. Best thing for my spelling was Underline Misspelled Word!

(I wonder if they were thinking of Color and Colon? Kuh-lur, Koh-lin?)

[conuly]

That's why Orton-Gillingham programs, which are used for dyslexic kids (that's what the article was about anyway) tend to start with spelling and work back to reading.

English has 44-ish phonemes ("sounds") and 26 letters, and those letters are combined to make an ungodly number of phonograms, where "phonogram" means "letter or combination of letters that indicates a certain sound". And as any student of phonics knows, most phonograms have more than one phoneme associated with them. Fun times. But anyway, the point is that both pronunciations of read can be sounded out with context because /ea/ is a phonogram with three different pronunciations. And ideally you can spell as well as read, or at least spell well enough for spellcheck to catch it.

[archangelbeth]

I was always able to read far, far better than I could spell! (A flaw in the reading approach, I admit. The reading is really good, though. O;> )

But yeah, if there's dyslexia involved, I really don't know how that interacts with the "expose babies to it and they learn it as well as they learn any other language" thing. (Would be fascinated, though.)

[redbird]

No, phonics doesn't always work, but nothing does. Even in Spanish, with much close to phonetic spelling, we just had to memorize which words are spelled with an s and which with a z.

What that other person is missing is that phonics works much better for reading than for writing: if "color" and "kolor" were both words, they would be pronounced the same way. Everyone who reads English at all fluently is doing so at least partly phonetically, or we'd be spending as long memorizing words as some Chinese students still do with ideograms. (I am told that pinyin has done wonders for the literacy rate of native Chinese speakers, even if it doesn't prop up the claim that "Chinese" is a single language spoken throughout China.)

[conuly]

Pinyin and also bopomofo.

And you're right, a minority of students learns better with less direct phonics. But phonics works better for most kids, and at least doesn't teach any of them really, really bad habits they have to unlearn if it isn't working for them.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I am frequently at work amazed at just how much what I do is predicated on exposure-That and reading aloud is not a basic/common skill.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Hah, lay this on him:

The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité (http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)

Phonics is just a place to start. Most of the words a beginning reader encounters can be attacked (https://www.google.com/search?q=word+attack+skills) phonetically; by the time a reader is encountering a lot of words that don't follow the rules, presumably they are using other word-attack skills as well.

[conuly]

Oh, I don't know. I find that it's the short, common words that tend to have more unintuitive readings or aren't phonetic at all, whereas the longer ones follow very consistent rules.

I mean, some of the first words you'll learn are numbers. One, two - damn.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

The first spelling anomaly I remember is 'once'. I was about 4, and trying to write a story, beginning with 'Once upon a time' - I knew I was spelling it wrong (and even at that tender age, that was not acceptable to me) but I couldn't sound out any way to spell it that looked right, and I didn't yet have the experience to go look it up.

Funny, the persistence of memory... I can still recall my own preschooler printing, 'WUNSS', and the dire frustration of wording wrong.

[conuly]

In order to look it up, you'd have to have had at least the first letter.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

No, no - I'd only have had to open any storybook that began with 'Once upon a time', and there it would be. However, that solution didn't occur to me till some years later.

[conuly]

Well, you were very small.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Creative solutions often seem to occur to me after it's too late to use them.

[conuly]

Isn't that the way for everybody?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I guess, but some people are quicker on the draw than others.