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I was a sight reader/excellent speller, too. It's not that I wasn't aware of phonics, it's just that I never bothered to apply them until much later in life.

My DD was taught phonics early, and it was pretty clearly making her angry when she'd try to phonic her way through some reading material and she kept getting it wrong. If I could hear her thoughts, they'd say, "Why did we bother with phonics, then?"

I was completely irritated by phonics when I was taught them in first grade as a fully competent reader. I don't remember much of first grade, but that is seared into my brain.

DS is constantly reading difficult words aloud using flawless phonetics (he's very fond of high-level science nonfiction). Except, of course, that's usually not how you say them. He's surprisingly cheerful about this.

Yes! I agree that it must be more complicated. I'm pretty sure I started as a sight reader (as this crude split goes) because my mother taught me (to some extent, not sure how much) using flash cards, and she herself is dyslexic. I was assuming DS would be similar (although I decided against teaching him). In the event, he was fascinated by phonics from very early. An obvious strong interest in spelling came before an obvious strong interest in reading, and he used to (as many children do) put magnetic letters together in apparently random orders and require us to "Read that!" from very young. Yet, he and I started to read at very similar ages and his intellectual course and interests so far are very like mine. You do hear of children who over-rely on sight words hitting a wall in their reading, but it seems to me that many children can infer phonics even if they start with sight words, and that them doing this probably accounts for some of the complication (parents assuming their children don't know phonics because they haven't been taught them yet, but maybe often they do).

I suspect that a lot more of the complication comes from the fact that adult reading is a lot more complicated than often assumed. As fluent readers, we don't rely on either whole-word recognition or phonics - it can be shown with eye tracking and some lovely experiments based on it that we don't even see most of most words! - we do something much more interesting, involving a lot of use of semantics, i.e. we know what we expect to see. Prosaically, this is presumably why proof-reading requires a special state of mind, especially when proof-reading things you wrote yourself!

lol I do that and my kid does too. If i read something that is not what i expected to read i have to go back and read the part before it again. And sometimes when my son's reading he gets lost in following the story, I guess, because after a point he keeps going but he says what he thinks is going to happen next in the same voice he's been using to read with. I have to say, "Wait! Go read the words that's actually on the page."

Yes, I've seen those "tests" where words are repeated but most don't see it. It's fun to watch my ds6 getting more sophisticated with reading : I see him scanning ahead to understand the context and inferring common phrases (he'll read it intuitively and then go back to correct himself. I also agree that sight-readers often understand a lot about phonics without being taught - where I see ds missing a good phonics lesson (which he will get in school) are the differing vowel combinations and some consonant blends). Where I see him reasoning different than a phonics learner - if he comes to a word he doesn't know, he'll guess a similar "looking" and contextually "fitting" word instead of going the sounding-it-out route.

I'm really smiling at some of the anecdotes others have shared. Oh my goodness, DD was annoyed by the phonemic awareness drills in K-2. She regarded that as a COMPLETE waste of her time-- time that she could have been investing in, you know-- actually reading.

LOL.

Looking back, while we say that DD learned to read when she was four...

that's probably not entirely accurate. She had a significant number of sight words before then. She also had complete phonemic awareness from the time she was... well, I'm not even sure. 18-20 months, certainly.

She certainly understood symbolism from that time as well-- that is, that symbols could be representational and have other meanings.

Anyway. We mentally note her "reading" milestone from the time that she was:

a) choosing to read by herself
b) decoding accurately (I mean at least 95% accuracy)
c) reading novel material accurately
d) grasping plot, sequence, etc. in read material-- to the point that she could accurately answer inferrence questions about that material or summarize it for an observer.

She never liked reading aloud, and I think we just handed her the 'key' by showing her phonemic 'stringing' as it were (which she had been asking for for over a year-- and us refusing on the advice of my mother, a primary teacher with bias against early reading), and within a few weeks, she had jumped from CVC controlled readers to second or third grade material and beyond.

It's that quantum jump that we refer to as "learned to read." I think that most parents-- maybe even most parents here?-- would have said that our DD was 'reading' by the time she was three. She certainly recognized signage and words in newspaper headlines and such before that. We just weren't sure how much of that was memorization-and-matching versus decoding in that novel sense. She seemed to understand CONTEXT during all of this, however. So the word "cat" might mean a generic housecat, OUR cat, the illustration in a book, or a big cat at the zoo in the newspaper... was that 'reading'? I really can't say, I guess. She could certainly converse in great detail about reading selections right from the beginning, and asked perceptive questions which required some understanding of print prior to that 'reading' milestone (at four).

Our benchmark was rejection of the null hypothesis, if you will.

This is the big difference I see between DD and DS. DD would do what you describe. DS methodically sounds out every unknown word.

FWIW, DD is a natural proofreader, catching errors in published books (especially in the Warriors series, to cross-reference threads!) quite often. I am, too.