Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments VS learners and phonetics

I think it can help to really slow down the auditory input. Such as cat= K.....AAAAA.....T. Many kids don't seem to "hear" the vowels.

In American English, those vowels are often muddy.

I had a roommate from Japan who couldn't hear the difference between r and l. That made it hard to look words up in her English/Japanese dictionary...

Thanks again for the answers. For what I have been reading and what I know of DD I think her case is rather a 'I cannot do it and therefore I will not even try it' thing. She speaks three languages without any accent and after a few days in France she was able to imitate French language - including the french r. She knows the name and sound of almost all the letters in Spanish and Dutch.

It does not make any sense - she should be able to discern the sounds of the words. Maybe it is like when she was convinced that she could not count more than 20 because it was too difficult for her.

I will keep practicing with her in Spanish...

I have been think further: DD learnt her letter by association with words she knew - that is she went from word to letter and I think with the sounds is the same. She just hear the whole word and it does not make any sense for her to break the word into individual sounds or even worse, make a whole word out of individual sounds.

Does this make any sense?

Yes, it does! That's the same problem my DD has with spelling. Even though we used phonics instruction when she was learning to read, I think she just learned to read the whole words. Now, whatever it is that makes a word recognizable to her is what she throws in when she tries to spell it. The result is writing that look like letter soup. I really have to break the words down into smaller chunks for her to learn to spell them.

I'm reading this thread because my DH is a bad speller. He's a VS superstar, though. He said he has to use pneumonic I mean mnemonic (had to look that up) devices for spelling. When we were in China he commented that he'd probably learn Chinese characters much more easily because they are conceptual.

If DD has trouble spelling, DH will have to coach her on phonics because what you guys are saying about phonics seems like Greek to me. I cannot understand it at all, in fact if I had to use the "rules" I'd be illiterate!

DH is very athletic - has a world ranking - and has tested above his elite athlete peers in hand-eye coordination at the Olympic Training Center. (They do things like measure how often you can catch a ball thrown to you in the dark with only a strobe light.)

He's right handed but goofy foot. I did some reading on being right handed and goofy foot and there was actually some correlation found with poor spelling ability. Recently, while reading up on language acquisition, I read that most brains have language centers on the left, but a small percentage of people draw from the right (I hope I got that right - will have to relook the research). I wondered if that could account for DH's spelling challenges - his reading and comprehension are excellent - as well as he VS gifts.

Well, I'm sorry this is slightly O/T. Hats off to you all for understanding phonics.

I'd look around for some sort of workbook or curriculum for phonics in those languages (or work on the sounds and letters as best you can).

I have been told that some VSLs never really learn phonics (for English), they just learn to read by sight words. My DS5, a VSL has a lot of trouble with phonics and he also has a speech delay. He gets special help with this as part of his IEP. Interestingly, I think he is actually developing his own "system" for learning phonics, a little bit at a time. The other day he asked me to spell "book" and "books" and I think he's figuring out about the s at the end. Prior to this, he'd see a word he knew in singular but didn't know it in plural. Now it seems he's starting to get it. It's a slow road.

My DD7 never really understood phonics until more than halfway through first grade. I think it had something to do with auditory memory - she just couldn't blend the sounds. I used to get so frustrated trying to teach her, and when we had her tested at the Gifted Development Center, they explained that as a VSL she simply could not do it.

This is a little off topic but here are a couple articles about spelling and VSLs
http://www.visualspatial.org/Articles/app2spell.pdf
http://www.visualspatial.org/Articles/spelling.htm