Is Phonics The End All And Be To Learning To Read? No!

I started my teacher training at Roehampton University at the start of the great PHONICS era which we are now living in. Fortunately, when I started working in schools, guided reading was still being taught and being prioritised as a means to learning to read. I studied, researched and explored many reading strategies during my 3 years of training to become a teacher. I enjoyed teaching reading in small groups. The children were taught strategies such as looking at the pictures for context cues, omitting words and reading ahead to decipher the word missed from the context, based on understanding, working out words using the onset and rhyme. Onset and rhyme is where words might have a different letter sound at the beginning but the end rhymes, such as a string of words like cat, bat, rat, mat, fat, chat, hat and so on. Or bed, red, ted, fed … How many of us adults can remember challenging our friends to orally read those words as we spelt them out. “Sarah what is r-a-t? What is c-a-t?” And the one who could say what these words spelt were deemed to be clever. As a professional now, I have seen where children can more easily blend to read c-at, much better than they can c-a-t, proving that onset and rhyme is a strategy that works. Phonics reading strategy insists that the rhymes -at, -ed , -ot -an etc should be taught as 2 separate sounds rather than blended and read together. It does not take into consideration that not all humans learn in the same way. Do not misunderstand my stance. I believe in phonics as a good resource to helping with spelling, but I think too much time is being spent on phonics and as a result other strategies are squeezed out, and so, very young children are unable to read for meaning and understanding. Phonics produces robotic readers who do not get the main gist of what is being read and so comprehension is not gained. We don’t speak and communicate like robots, which is what we get with those average pupils who are not natural readers and so rely heavily on strategies and tools. I am going to finish by quoting 2 teachers from the NEU magazine: ‘In my experience, pupils with autism, for example, learn to read whole words with little attention to phonics. To make them decode nonsense words does not compute. Schools used different approaches alongside the belief that books were fun: non-reading scheme picture books, as well as various schemes, including look and say, flash cards, sentence makers, repetition within a story line, poetry and rhyme.’ (Amanda Warren, Ipswich) ‘I would like to see studies into the effects of phonics on reading for pleasure, as Government advice about reception children reading only phonetic books is enough to put them off reading for life. Reading is just a mechanical exercise unless there is enjoyable content with meaning.’ (Helen Toyne, Stockport)I would like to see reading being taught again. Drilling phonics for the first 4 years of a child’s life is not teaching children to read for pleasure and it is not an effective reading strategy to develop readers. It helps a lot with spelling, but not reading. And sure adds NO pleasure. It makes children into reading robots! AI readers - no true humans with understanding!