Phonics explained

  • The approach to the teaching of reading has been influenced by at least three philosophies:

    The Whole Language approach: teaching based entirely on learning to read through reading ‘real books’, no phonics whatsoever; often termed ‘reading by osmosis’. No direct teaching strategy.

     A Mixed Methods approach: multi-cueing (guessing using a mixture of clues: the first letter/s of a word, the word shape, finding a word within  a word, context clues and pictures…), ‘high frequency’ words to be memorised as whole units (e.g was, school, father, mother etc.) plus ‘first sound’ phonics ( e.g the ‘c’ in cat, the ‘b’ in black) to be learned in the context of reading books + reading book schemes with repetitive/predictable text and pictures. The MM approach is a complicated series of teaching strategies, lacking rigour and difficult to train teachers systematically.

    A Phonic approach: the teaching of ‘phonics’ (the letters that represent the sounds of a spoken language) has always been an element of the teaching of reading in the English speaking world. It means teaching the alphabet letters and their sounds: the ‘a’ in apple, the ‘b’ in bat as well as some of the sounds that are not covered by the alphabet e.g the ‘ee’ in tree or the ‘sh’ in ship. Sometimes the ‘rules’ that govern vowel spellings in English (e.g ‘when two vowels go walking the first one does the talking’: ‘pie’ sound /i-e/, but these do not always stand up: ‘chief’’ –sound /ee/) are also included. It is important to note that English spelling ‘rules’ only work about 60% of the time!

    The phonic approach has two strands:

    An ‘analytic’ phonic approach is based on teaching children to notice the written spellings and to analyse the word. This strand is burdened with rules.

    A more recent development is the ‘synthetic’ phonic approach which means that a child is taught to synthesise (blend together) each sound in a word and say the whole word: an ‘all- through- the -word’ approach:

    c-a-t,     th-e-n,     t-ea-m,     c-augh-t.

    The English Alphabet code needs to be fully understood to teach effectively. Most synthetic phonic programmes manage to teach a percentage of the code but due to the lack of transparency of the code often lose their way, causing problems for both the teacher and the learner. So unless the teaching structure is well understood at the outset, this approach also has pitfalls.