Teaching Synthetic Phonics

Rhona Johnston, Joyce Watson, Author

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446298619, 9781473919235
• eBook ISBN: 9781473908888
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The synthetic phonics approach is used in all primary schools in England.  If you are a trainee or beginning primary school teacher, you need to demonstrate a confidence in the teaching of phonics to meet the Teachers? Standards and gain QTS.  This is a practical, up-to-date guide to teaching children to read using synthetic phonics.  It helps you to understand the theory behind phonics and how children?s learning of reading can develop.  It gives you practical teaching strategies and outlines how you can assess and diagnose reading problems.

This second edition has been updated to include new chapters on the new Phonics Check in year 1 and overviews of popular phonics schemes used in England and Scotland.

1 What is Phonics and which Type is the Most Effective?

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn that:

• whole language approaches to teaching reading were common in the latter part of the twentieth century;
• in the 1990s there was concern in England that reading standards were falling because of this approach;
• unlike the whole language approach, phonic approaches draw children's attention to the fact letter sounds provide a good guide to the pronunciation of written words;
• with analytic phonics children initially learn some words by sight. This is followed by learning letter sounds in the initial, end and finally middle of words, and then learning to sound and blend;
• with synthetic phonics, children learn a few letter sounds and then learn to sound and blend right away;
• research shows that children learn to read and spell much better with synthetic phonics.

Teachers' Standards

• 3. Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge

Phonic approaches to teaching reading capitalise on the fact that our spelling system is alphabetic; that is, the letter sounds in words are a helpful, if sometimes imperfect, guide to pronunciation (see the Glossary for technical terms).

The earliest writing systems were not alphabetic, and indeed an alphabetic system is not well suited to all spoken languages. Very early writing systems used pictures, but obviously such systems are not good at coping with complex ideas as they are limited to picturable objects. Chinese uses a logographic writing system where one character represents a word, and where a sequence of characters forms a sentence. Alphabetic writing systems do the same thing, but here the individual sounds (or phonemes) of the spoken word are represented by letters, and a group of letters forms a word. Early sound-based writing systems, however, used representations at the syllable level, and in Phoenician script syllables were represented by their first consonants. The Greek alphabet was a major development as it introduced letters for each consonant and vowel, which stood for the phonemes in the spoken language. This is what we have in English. Once you have mastered an alphabet like ours, you can read unfamiliar words without having seen them before.

Phonics versus Whole Language Approaches

There has long been a debate about whether children need to be taught that the English spelling system is alphabetic. Early approaches to teaching reading traditionally involved learning letter names or letter sounds (the latter being a major element of the phonics approach). However, a view developed that the phonics approach undermines children's ability to understand what they are reading (Adams, 1990, Chapter 2). The whole language approach to reading developed because of these concerns and also because of a change towards a child-centred educational philosophy. This development was very much influenced by the work of Piaget, who proposed that children were active learners, who constructed knowledge for themselves. These ideas were then applied to reading, although Piaget did not specifically address learning to read in his research, which was largely about the development of logical thinking. According to the whole language view that developed, reading should be meaning based. An unfamiliar word was to be identified as a whole unit by inferring its meaning from context, or even through picture cues, rather than the ‘bottom up’ approach of applying phonic knowledge to letters and letter sequences to decode the words.

Reflective Task

Task 1

Here are a few short sentences. See if you can work out what the missing words are from the context:

The mouse ran into the ——, and hid under a ——. The cat —— around and —- put — paws under the ——. — popped the mouse and ran into the ——.

See the end of the chapter for answers.

Whole language methods were in vogue in England for much of the latter part of the twentieth century. The approach moved from being a method whereby children used their language skills to predict what a known word would be from the sentence context, which might aid reading fluency, to an approach whereby this was a major element in developing their ability to read an unfamiliar word. Where the guessed word is incorrect, however, children get misleading information that will undermine their ability to learn to recognise printed words; for low ability children it may be hard to over-ride the incorrect associations. This approach is particularly problematical for children with poor language skills, who will have greater difficulty in predicting the missing words, and whose reading problems will therefore be further compounded. See Chapter 3 for more about the distinction between reading comprehension and decoding printed words.

What was the perceived problem with phonics? One problem for some educationalists was that it involved direct instruction in the study of sub-parts of words, rather than operating at the getting meaning-from-text level. In addition, the type of phonics used in the UK, which was largely of the analytic type (see below), was many years ago implemented by drilling children in reading lists of similarly spelt words, i.e. word families. These programmes also tended to use phonic readers, some of which used very stilted language. It was argued that the phonic method was therefore unlikely to enthuse children about reading. Another objection to the method was that as some words in the English language are irregularly spelt, the phonic approach cannot be effective and leads to inaccurate pronunciation. The word ‘yacht’ is an extreme example of an irregular word that is not straightforward to read by a phonic approach (irregular words are called common exception words in England's National Curriculum, DfE, 2013). However, by the 1980s it was found that the standard of children's reading in England was dropping alarmingly (Turner, 1990), and the lack of phonics tuition was widely considered to be an element in the poor attainment figures. It seemed very likely that some children were not able to work out the alphabetic nature of the English spelling system without explicit tuition, and so made poor progress in learning to read.

Most Scottish primary schools retained phonics teaching, however, although the pace slowed down and the meaning-based aspect of the reading curriculum received greater emphasis. In the early 1990s it seemed to us that there was a general lack of knowledge about how phonics was taught, and we decided to examine how it was done in Scottish schools. We began a study in 1992 where we observed the phonics programme from the first to the third year of school in 12 classes (Watson, 1998). The approach used was of the analytic phonics type.

What is Analytic Phonics?

In analytic phonics, which until recently was the predominant phonic method in the UK, letter sounds are taught after reading has already begun, children initially learning to read some words by sight. We found in Scottish schools (Watson, 1998) that there was generally a long period devoted to learning the sounds of the letters of the alphabet. This generally started soon after school entry and took until Easter of the first year at school. In this phase, typically children would be shown whole words sharing a common initial letter sound, e.g. ‘milk’, ‘man’, ‘mother’ (Harris and Smith, 1976), attention being drawn to the /m/ sound heard at the beginning of the words. The children therefore would have some idea of the usefulness of letters sounds, but only at the beginning of words. They would probably recognise the rest of the word on a holistic basis, as the words presented were often suggested by the children and could be of quite complex structure. For example, a teacher would say ‘This is the letter /m/’, giving the sound and writing the letter on the blackboard. She would then ask the children for words beginning with the sound /m/, and write these on the board. In one lesson we observed a little boy said ‘mallard’ (there was a stream nearby), and the word went up on the board. After a minute or two there was a whole list of words starting with the letter ‘m’, listed one under each other on the blackboard. The point of the exercise was to show a family of words all starting with the letter ‘m’, and there was no attempt to pick words that were easy to read phonically.

We found that when all of the letter sounds had been taught in this way, attention would then be drawn to letter sounds at the ends of words. Finally, children learnt about the vowels in the middle of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words. Although it is often thought that in analytic phonics the sounding and blending of letters to read unfamiliar words is not done, our observations in classes showed that this was a feature of such programmes. Indeed, in the region in which we were doing the study the teachers had an outline of the progression that their phonics teaching should take, and this was the third step. So towards the end of the first year at school, children in the study were taught to focus on letter sounds all through the word, and in some classes they were actively taught to sound and blend CVC words, e.g. /c/ /a/ /t/ -> cat.

We were very interested in the fact that our tests showed that once children were alerted to the importance of letter sounds in all positions in words, independent reading skill really took off. However, we did find that some schools were not teaching children to sound and blend. We were told that this was because researchers were saying at the time that it was impossible to blend the sounds in a way that made them sound like a word. We do tend to give consonant letter-sounds a following vowel sound, however hard we try not to, so the sounds in a word like ‘cat’ can come out as /cuh/ /ah/ / tuh/. However, children do manage to make the leap from these sounds to the whole word, perhaps partly because, as they start to sound and blend, a set of known words which look and sound like the unfamiliar word are activated in their memories (Johnston, 1998). The effectiveness of the approach may lie in the fact that the blending procedure teaches children to track through the letters in the word systematically from left to right. As each letter is fixated in turn, the sounds are produced, and this leads to the sequence of letters and sounds for the printed word being closely tied together in memory. This close attention to the letters and their sounds in an ordered sequence in words would inhibit children from looking only at distinctive features, such as end letters or letters sticking above or below the line, which would lead to a primitive form of sight word recognition. The importance of forming a more mature form of sight word recognition well underpinned by sound (or phonological) information will be described in more detail in Chapter 3.

We found that after reading CVC words through sounding and blending, children in analytic phonics programmes spent the next two years learning about consonant digraphs, consonant blends and vowel digraphs. (The term digraph refers to the spelling of one sound with two letters.) The children would typically be shown word families of similarly spelt word...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 What is Phonics and which Type is the Most Effective?
• 2 Phoneme Awareness: What is It and what is its Role in Learning to Read?
• 3 How does Reading Develop?
• 4 Teaching Synthetic Phonics: The National Curriculum and an Overview of Letters and Sounds
• 5 How do I Start to Teach Synthetic Phonics?
• 6 Teaching a Synthetic Phonics Lesson in Phase 2 of Letters and Sounds
• 7 Teaching Phases 3 to 6 of Letters and Sounds
• 8 The Phonics Check and how to Assess and Diagnose Reading Problems
• 9 Letters and Sounds, Phonics Bug and Read Write Inc: Selecting a Programme to Prepare Children for the Phonics Check
• Glossary
• Appendix 1: Graphophonemic Awareness Training for Adults
• Appendix 2: Phoneme Awareness Training Programme for Children
• Appendix 3: Score Sheet to Assess Children's Knowledge of the Letters s a t p
• Appendix 4: Score Sheet to Assess Children's Ability to Sound and Blend the Letters s a t p
• Appendix 5: Rules for where to Split Words into Syllables
• Appendix 6: Hull Diagnostic Phonics Checks 1 and 2
• Appendix 7: Nonwords for Testing and Assessing
• Appendix 8: Catch-up Sheets to be Used with the Hull Diagnostic Phonics Checks (Appendix 6) and the Nonword Reading Tests (Appendix 7)
• Appendix 9: Word Lists from Letters and Sounds, Phases 2 to 5
• Index