Two complaints about people who rant against phonics instruction

[conuly]

1. If you're going to ask people to sound out a word, pick a word that's difficult to sound out, that is, one that has at least one "rulebreaker" letter, a letter or phonogram that does not do what's expected. If the word you picked is not difficult to sound out then you really ought to accept that you need to learn more about this subject before you can venture an opinion on it.

Words I've seen that are not difficult to sound out: Me, we, red, eat, same, and most recently, schools. Every one of those words is very predictable. (And there are words that cannot easily be sounded out, most of which are quite common! But people never point to "two" or "eye" or "one". Why.)

2. There is no situation in which the phonograms "gh" "o" and "ti" can be combined in that order to make the word "fish". Those phonograms do not represent those sounds in those positions. If you think this is an okay comeback then you really don't know what you're talking about.

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Comments

[redbird]

(1) If I was looking for an argument against sounding things out, it would be the variety of ways "ough" is pronounced, something like "You ought to go through, even though you have a cough."

[conuly]

Right? Like, this isn't actually difficult. (Though, as always, English orthography is never as bad as these anti-phonics people like to claim. It could be better, sure... but it's not impossible to learn.)

[altamira16]

I think "eat" may be difficult to sound out. If you are looking at the -at words, knowing how to pronounce eat comes from having heard the word.

[conuly]

I think "eat" may be difficult to sound out. If you are looking at the -at words, knowing how to pronounce eat comes from having heard the word.

No, it doesn't, not if you were taught to subdivide words by phonograms rather than onset + rime.

Ea at the start of a word is generally a single phonogram. The most common sound of that phonogram is /i/ - and, indeed, that's the first vowel sound in the word eat. So you sound out the most common sound for the two letter phonogram ea, then you move to the third letter and that only has one sound. Is /it/ a word? Yes, it is. Does it make sense in the context of whatever it is you're reading? I mean, I hope so, otherwise I'm very confused.

But if it didn't make a proper word that makes sense in context you'd go back and try again, this time with the second sound of that phonogram, and so on, and eventually subdividing the word as e-at. But that last is just not a very likely reading of that combination of letters, especially at the age when children are first learning to read. When people get to words where -eat might possibly represent two syllables they generally have seen the word "eat" written down many times and now memory can help them out.

[conuly]

And on that note, teaching children to read by onset + rime is totally backwards, for the simple reason that it encourages them to read from the end of the word, figuring out the rime and then adding on the onset. It is literally backwards. I know it's popular, but it makes no sense to teach them -at words are cat, rat, sat, etc instead of teaching them to combine letters start to end.

[gingicat]

My favorite alphabet book is the Dr. Seuss one, not just because Dr. Seuss is awesome, but because he uses "extra fox" for the letter X.

Thank you for that last one. I have been hoping that IDF soldiers would refuse service.

[minoanmiss]

I don't understand the push against phonics. Isn't the whole point of an alphabet that we can use phonics to use a syllabary of a couple dozen symbols rather than a couple thousand?

[conuly]

Oh god do not get me started.