My kids are now 13 � and 11 � and sounding out words are still not an area of strength. If they don�t recognize it, they can botch it up pretty well! My husband is the only one in our family with phonetic proficiency!
It's not the luck of phonetic proficiency. DS5 is quite good in reading in his other language which is almost completely phonetic. When he encounters a new word in English he will read it using the correct rules (not that it would work all the time) but he won't even try to sound it out. He will say the whole word or may be break it in two parts if needed.
