An Introduction to Synthetic Phonics
by David Morgan
The current trend in literacy education is to move towards Synthetic Phonics. This is a quick overview of what that means.
Within each word are individual sounds called phonemes. For instance, the word plough has 6 letters, 3 phonemes and 1 syllable.
In the English Language there are 43 phonemes in all, to make up every word. And there are 1420 possible letter patterns to generate them.
Literacy education is split between two main approaches; Real Books and Phonics.
The Real Books philosophy is to expose children to interesting books with pictures. The child then steadily picks up an ability to decode the text, first by becoming familiar with a basic vocabulary and then by intelligent guessing using the context and pictures as clues.
In the other camp, the teachers work with the phonemes, the phonic structure of words and the relationship between different letter patterns and each phoneme.
Within Phonics there are two principal approaches. Analytical Phonics looks at the main letter patterns within words and teaches those to the learner. So fat, hat, mat and splat would all be grouped together. In that way, the learner just has to become familiar with each letter group, and to differentiate within the group. So it tends to focus on syllables.
Synthetic Phonics takes the opposite approach. It teaches the individual building blocks of each phoneme. And then shows how to decode a word using these individual building blocks. The learner is taught to recognise the letter patterns for each phoneme and then how to blend them together to form the word.
What should we be using?
Well, the peak results of Synthetic Phonics seem to win, with 95%+ of learners successfully learning to read.
But rolling it out across the school system is harder because it is a highly technical approach, which many teachers find hard to deliver.
As a result, it has never had such good results in general use as in the test environment.
We have been working on a new approach that takes elements of both systems. The technical aspects of synthetic phonics are delivered over the Internet. And we then switch to a more Real Books approach using Easyread TrainerText to build experience and confidence
For advice on phonics and online literacy support and details on Easyread, click EasyRead Coaching System You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.
|
