Phonics Reading Systems — Everything you never wanted to know about teaching your child to read
Everything I have figured out so far about English phonics, consequential conclusions about the adequacy or otherwise of the “Read Write Inc” Phonics system and resouces, and general conclusions about an ideal Phonics System
[Or… why learning to read English (note the “E” making a short “i” sound like it does in “shopping”) is so hard.]
Why god ever let me become a parent is an obscure mystery. However, here I am. Perhaps it was not God. Perhaps it was my Jenny.
Anyway here I am. And there the small one is, being fed a diet of “Read Write Inc” Phonics at school (a.k.a. Ruth Miskin).
By the way, I’m not an expert and I’m not claiming to be one. I just got interested, and this is what I have found out so far. First here’s a summary of the issues:
(1) Accent
Part of the problem is that people don’t pronounce their “worms properly” … as Ronnie Barker, would have it — so you have to deal with “pisspromunciations”.
For example in the simple sentence — “He ate his lunch.” — the word “ate” is pronounced like the number “8” by a good number of U.K. people, but another whole swathe of the population say he “et” his lunch … “et” like when an Englishman tries to the say the french word for “and”, but has never been taught how to “parlez franglais” (“e” like in elephant, “t” like in blue tit).
Now if you are one of those who says “ate” like “8”, and you have learnt the phonics rule “a-consonant-e” (that the “e” after the consonant turns the “a” [for apple] into an “a” [for apron] then the whole thing makes sense.
But if you are someone who uses the bad-french-for-and pronunciation (“et”), then “ate” no longer follows any of the rules you have been taught, and so gets consigned to a category that variously gets called “Red Words” or “Tricky Words” or “Sight Words”.
(I have become less certain since I wrote these paragraphs just above that I really understand what a Red Word is. Sometimes it seems to be used to distinguish words that don’t conform to the commoner phonics patterns, and sometimes simply to refer to the words that are most common. And sometimes to some combination thereof. See the linked DfES document at the bottom of this article for more about this, and my more recent article about Common Exception Words.)
Take the words “one” and “none”. Variously they are pronounced either: “wun” and “nun” (perhaps that’s how you pronounced them?)… or with the middle sound of “o” like it is at the beginning of orange… so “w-on” and “n-on”. My mate Neil at school used to tease me cos I said “w-on” instead of “w-un” when speaking the word “one”.
“o” on the page can either make the “o” for orange you may expect it to, or an “u” for umbrella. And neither of these are then consistent with the “o-consonant-e” phonics rule that commonly applies as it does in words like “phone” and “home”. And by the way, lets not forget “come home” — “come” being a member of a whole group of “o_e” words where the “o” [orange] gets pronounced as “u” [umbrella] — “some” “cover” and “glove” being three others — and “others” being a fourth other (treating “th” as a single consonant sound).
People from up north, tend to take baths with a short “a” [like in apple], but down south maybe you take a bath with a bit of an “ar” in it.
And if you go still further north, you might even look at a book with a long “oo” sound [like the “oo” in “zoo”], whereas the rest of country [notice “ou” making an “u” for umbrella sound] looks at their books with short little “oo” sound like the sound in “push”, “pull” and “put”. By further way, I am reliably informed that north of a certain line across the country, people say “put” the same way they say (golf) “putt” and “but” — really?
(2) Lots of sounds — 44 of them perhaps — and more sounds than there are letters
Apparently English words are made with blends of 44 sounds — which clever people call “phonemes”. For example, each of the vowels in English can make at least one short sound and a long sound— apple/apron, west/east, insect/ice.
And the o and u are even cleverer. Start with the three or more sounds “o”can make: orange/soda/whole. That third kind of “o” sound, as it is in “whole” and “foal” and “fold”, sounds when I say it, somewhere between the long “o” of soda, and the short “o” of orange. There is also the beautiful long “o” sound that is sometimes made with the double “oo” (like in “too” and “zoo”) but doesn’t need to be (like in “do” and “to”).
This last “oo” sound is also available via the letter “u”. Compare the “u” sound in duty (which as I say it has a “y” [as in yak] at the beginning of it, like when you say the vowel’s name, or the word “you” like in “you and me”) with the “u” sound in truth (which has no “y” — and makes a sound the same as the double “oo”, like “zoo”). So “u” provides two different long sounds (duty/truth), as well as two different short sounds (pull/bus).
Then as well as the regular vowel sounds, long and short versions, there are things like “oi” (eg. “join”), sometimes spelt “oy”, and “ou” (eg. “out”), sometimes spelt “ow”. Clever people call these “dipthongs” — pairs of vowels that combine to make a sound that is distinct from either of the vowel components.
And then futher there is a group of sounds that are made by combining vowels with the growl of the letter “r”: Ar, or, er, our, ear, air, ure and ire. Personally I’m not entirely convinced that “ure” and “ire” are distinct from “u” and “i” but Read Write Inc (RWI) seems to think so.
In addition to vowels having short and long versions, consonants have hard and soft versions for example: cat/ice, big/gentle.
(3) Lots of ways of spelling any given sound
Several phonemes have 10 or more ways of making those sounds using letters. Consequently there are over a 100 such letter combinations.
Phonemes, at least in English, can be represented by multiple alternative groups of one or more letters (called “graphemes” — and sometimes colloquially called “sound families”), the result of some of which combinations getting determined by other letters that happen to be around in the word where the grapheme is being used.
For example, most of the long vowel sounds in English can be represented by about 10 different alternative letter combinations. Take the long “a” sound you get in “apron”. Here are 10 ways I could find to make a long “a”:
Or the long “e” sound. Here are 12 ways I could find to make a long “e”:
And so it goes on:
So anyway, I made a table of everything I have figured out so far. I have tried to produce a complete list of phonemes and their corresponding graphemes. At least I have tried to do that for all the most interesting phonemes. If there are some particularly important ones I’ve left out, do leave a comment !
Read Write Inc
One of the things that you may notice about the Read Write Inc system created by Ruth Miskin is that (as far as I can tell and at the current time of writing this article) the “Sets 1, 2 and 3 speed sounds” stop short of including all the grapheme (letter combinations) that I have included in the table.
Some of the additional graphemes are not common — obscure even — perhaps you can think of another word apart from “shoe” where an “oe” makes an “oo” sound? (Please write a comment below with any interesting additions to any of these sets of words!) But the ones I have high-lighted in yellow seem to me to be useful and not uncommon additions.
Perhaps these missing grapheme groups are available somewhere in the Read-Write Inc system, I don’t know. We bought all the different sets of Read-Write Inc phonics flash cards that we could find available online, and these grapheme sets were not included in them. Perhaps resources available to teachers are more extensive and include my additional word-sets?
Or perhaps the philosophy of Read-Write Inc is just that any graphemes outside of the most thoroughly common ones should not be taught as groups of words at all, but as “Red Words” … that’s to say words that don’t follow the rules.
If this is the case, I’m inclined to disagree. I tend to think that even with less common graphemes like one-sylable words ending in “y”, it is still going to help with learning to read these words if I can have them presented to me as a category, rather than as individual anomalies.
(1) Moving words out of the Red
Take for example the word “your”. In the Read-Write Inc (RWI) system, as far as I can tell, “your” is a “Red Word”. This is because the spelling of “your” and the pronunciation of it as “y-or” does not match with any of the standard rules that Read-Write Inc wants to include.
But should this mean adding it to our list of Red words, or have we just not noticed one of the rules?
The words four, pour, court, (of) course, source (and depending on your accent, probably mourn and tour as well) also have the “our” 3-letter combination and also (at least in my accent) are pronounced with the same “or” sound… I pronounce “four” in the same way I pronounce “for”.
[And while we’re on the subject of “o,u,r” I might quite often pronounce this set of words: colour, colouring, odour, labour, favourite, tumour, with an “er” sound, or at most an “or” sound, but pretty much never an “our” sound like I would say when “our car is parked in the drive”.] (Incidentally, when I’m in a hurry, I might even say “our car” as “ar car”… but lets not get bogged down.)
The point is that it turns out there are quite a lot of words where “our” makes an “or” sound or an “er” sound. And if we are going to treat these words as anomalies, let’s at least treat each of these as whole sets of anomalies that can be grouped together and learnt about together.
Same goes for the “red words” all and call. Here the “al” makes an “or” sound, when you might expect something else. But “al” does the same, or something very similar, in small, tall, wall, ball, hall, stall, talk, walk, alright, always, also and maybe falter (depending of if you pronounce it forlter or fulter), and probably some others I haven’t thought of yet. (But not shall !)
Another set of the Read-Write Inc red words are those with a single “e” that is pronounced as a long “ee”: we, me, she, he, be. RWI seem themselves to acknowledge this kind of “e” as a set by having a flash-card in their flash-card sets for this exact set of words. And yet these words also get included in the RWI list of red words — presumably because they are a less common form. But as “red words” they still appear to be treated as individual anomalies, rather than as a group with a common pattern.
Another RWI red word is “some”. RWI have a phonics flash-card for o_e with examples like “phone” and “home”. In the case of phone and home the “e” after the consonant makes the “o” before the consonant into a long “oh” sound. I’ll admit this may be a much more common form, but the o_e as it appears in “some” and providing a short “u” sound like in “sum” is not a single case anomaly: money, honey, love, loved, lover, above, shove, dove, cover, glove, some (and all its related words like sometimes and somebody), come, done, none, govern, government, other, another, mother, brother, none, one (and probably some others) all follow this same form; an “o” before a consonant sound and an “e” after a consonant sound produces a short “u” for umbrella sound. [Discussion of different ways of pronouncing one and none is back up at the top of this article.]
RWI acknowledges in its system the existence of both the long “oo” (like you get in “zoo”, “igloo”) and the short “oo” (like you get in “good”, “wood”, “book” “look” “took” “hook” and “cook” — depending on your accent — see the top of the article again). However this short “oo” sound also exists in another set of English words: sugar, put, push, pull, full, bush, bull (not to mention, as an aside: would, could, should, wolf, and woman —which have the same phoneme, and another couple of alternative graphemes for that phoneme). This word group with a “u” in them can hardly be said to be uncommon words in English, and yet I have not yet found any mention of them either as a set or as Red words in RWI.
Other curiosities about RWI red word lists is that they include words like “over” or at least “her”; words which seem to be completely consistent with RWI’s own regular word blending rules: “h” as in horse, “er” as in “better letter”… they have a flash card with “er” in big letters occupying the entire card. There seems to be no particular reason why “her” has been included as a red word. (Although see the quote from the DfES document linked down below, which may provide an explanation.)
See the following article for more about the “Common Exception Words” lists for Year 1 and Year 2:
(2) Other notable omissions to the phoneme/grapheme patterns identified by RWI
An “ea” making a short “e” sound: bread, head, dead, death, lead (the metal), heavy, read (he had read the book), ready, already, dealt, meant, dreamt, heaven, thread, health, spread, cleanse, feather. It is especially curious that RWI don’t have a flash card for this grapheme-phoneme connection, because they even list it on their chart of “Complex Speed Sounds”.
An “ey” making a long “a” sound (as does the “ay” in “play”): grey, prey, hey, obey, they. (“They” is a red word in RWI.)
An “ear” making an “air” sound instead of an “ear” sound: tear, bear, pear, wear.
An “ear” making an “er” sound instead of an “ear” sound: early, earn, year, heard, learn, pearl, search.
An “or” making an “er” sound instead of an “or” sound: work, worse, worst, worm, word, world, worth, author.
A “ui” making an “oo” sound: fruit, suit, juicy, juice.
Anyway, you can look at my whole table — either the picture at the top, or the linked Google Sheets document (which tends to be more complete and recently edited) and decide for yourself.
(3) Interim conclusions about RWI
Maybe I have misunderstood what a “Red Word” is. Maybe I have just not come across all the resources that RWI has to offer. Maybe these other groups of words, which can be simultaneously grouped by both phonemes and graphemes (however that they may be less common, but not single-instanced, graphemes for those phonemes), are included in RWI resources I just haven’t seen or found yet. Or maybe the program is still under development and some of this is coming.
However, my interim conclusion is that when you think about the phonemes and how these phonemes are written as graphemes, both in the lists of Red Words and in several groups of words that appear to have not even been included, a large portion of the so-called Red Words and missing words and word groups can be put into sets where both phoneme and grapheme is consistent across that set.
So why would you make children learn these words as a series of single and individual anomalies? There appears to be a whole number of phoneme/grapheme word sets that RWI simply misses out, or fails to mention.
This said, the RWI resources that I have seen, in as far as they go, are useful, helpful and well made.
Phonemes →Graphemes :: Graphemes →Phonemes
An ideal phonics system both maps phonemes(44?) to graphemes(100+?) and graphemes(100+?) to phonemes(44?). Ideally we need a system that competently encompasses both of these mappings.
Ideally what is needed is familiarity with an understanding that maps each of the 44 phonemes (spoken/read sounds) onto the all of the possible graphemes that get used to represent that phoneme (I have counted as many as 12 graphemes for some phonemes) [a.k.a. spelling] …
and
a system that maps each of the 100 or so (a guess) graphemes (single letters and letter combinations) on to all the phonemes that that grapheme can be used to represent [a.k.a. reading].
This is a “many-to-many” mapping relationship in both directions. There are several graphemes that map onto multiple phonemes just as there are many phonemes that map onto multiple graphemes.
The grapheme single letter “a” for example can make an (1) “a” like in apple (2) “a” like in apron , (3) “o” like in what (4) “ar” like in father (5) “or” like in water (6) “i” like in orange (7) “e” like in any (8) and for some people even an “er” in pizza.
Mapping phonemes → graphemes is a key part of the skill of early writing or at least of spelling words correctly.
Mapping graphemes → phonemes we could say (roughly speaking) is reading or a key part of the skill of reading. Below is a bit of a Thortspace showing graphemes that map onto more than one phoneme. For each grapheme that does this it gives word examples for each of the phonemes it maps on to.
Below is an earlier version of the above Thortspace clip — possibly seeing the progression may be interesting or useful?
Syllable splitting
The small one looks at a word like “going” and, clever little thing that she is, spots an “o” and “i” together and applies the rule to make an “oi” (oy) sound.
Hmmm.
So back to the drawing board. In order to make sense of not doing this and correctly reading the word as “go-ing”, we presumably have to learn to split words up into syllables before applying other phonics rules?
Fortunately, in practice, examples like this don’t seem to crop up too much. I am still figuring out what, if anything, to do about it. But in the meantime I found this:
I found this DfES document that may be helpful
Letters and sounds — DfES document: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/190599/Letters_and_Sounds_-_DFES-00281-2007.pdf
It includes the following paragraph on page 64:
“There are 100 common words that recur frequently in much of the written material young children read and that they need when they write. Most of these are decodable, by sounding and blending, assuming the grapheme–phoneme correspondences are known, but only 26 of the high-frequency words are decodable by the end of Phase Two. Reading a group of these words each day, by applying grapheme–phoneme knowledge as it is acquired, will help children recognise them quickly. However, in order to read simple captions it is necessary also to know some words that have unusual or untaught GPCs (‘tricky’ words) and these need to be learned (see Notes of Guidance for Practitioners and Teachers, page 15).”
That maybe explains why some words which get classed as Red Words in RWI are in fact completely decodable, even by RWI’s own rule set.
More information
I have written three more recent articles related to this one: The first is on the subject of Common Exception Words see:
… and the second is about which graphemes are ambiguous, and the significance of that for learning to read:
… and most recently this!
I made a pinterest board with some of the Phonics resources I found:
and a Thortspace:
and I’m planning to make a Thortspace sphere of my summary table, which I think will be interesting to see how well that works compared to the table version. I expect there will be some advantages and some disadvantages.
Related links:
I recently discovered the following book, which is amazing fantastic … best book on this subject I have ever seen or come across… Dictionary of the British English Spelling System by Greg Brooks
Why English is so hard to learn by Marlene Davis
You think English is easy? Check out the following:
- “The bandage was wound around his wound.
- “The farm was cultivated to produce produce.
- “The dump was so full that the workers had to refuse more refuse.
- “We must polish the Polish furniture shown at the store.
- “He could lead if he could get the lead out.
- “The soldier decided to desert his tasty desert in the desert.
- “Since there is no time like the present, he though it was time to present the present to his girlfriend.
- “A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
- “When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
- “I did not object to the object which he showed me.
- “The insurance was invalid for the invalid in his hospital bed.
- “There was a row among the orasmen about who would row.
- They were too close to the door to close it.
- “The buck does many things when the does (females) are present.
- “A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
- “To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
- “The wind was too strong to wind the sail around the mast.
- “Upon seeing the tear in her painting, she shed a tear.
- “I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
- “How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?”
Heteronyms
“These are brilliant. Homonyms or homographs are words of like spelling, but with more than meaning and sound. When pronounced differently, they are knowns as heteronyms.”
Got that? Your lesson for dotay, lol. Thanks to the facebook note from English Professor June Gillam (JuneGillam.com), it is shared.
Sincerly, A. K. Buckroth
