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CHAPTER 1
Phonics, Why and How
This chapter will:
Explain why phonics are important in teaching reading and writing
Outline complex phonic patterns, and the roots of irregularity
Explain the principles of teaching phonics
Introduce and define key terms, including synthetic and analytic phonics
Consider some alternative theories of reading
Phonics is the systematic teaching of the sounds conveyed by letters and groups of letters, and includes teaching children to combine and blend these to read or write words. It is of crucial importance, for the following reasons:
The majority of the information conveyed by letters concerns sounds.
Letters tell us more than any other source of information, even when we have to interpret the information they provide.
We cannot read fluently until we read accurately, and this depends on accurate use of the information conveyed by letters. Skilled, fluent readers very rarely guess.
Once we have learned what the letters are telling us in a word, we can store it in our memory and retrieve it more quickly than if we had to work it out.
As English is not completely regular, most children are unlikely to be able to perceive and use patterns in language for themselves (Rose 2006: 18).
Direct observation (Rose 2006: 66–9) in schools has shown a consistent link between phonics and successful reading.
Almost all weak readers have difficulty in blending sounds from letters to make words. Almost all good readers do this well.
Regular and irregular languages
Alphabetic writing represents the sounds we hear in words by means of letters. For reading, learners reconstruct the word by blending the sounds represented by the letters. For spelling, they translate the sounds in words into letters. Although letters often give us more than sounds, their links with sounds are their most consistent and important feature, and there is some link with sound in every word. Children and adults who can use this connection fluently and accurately build up a store of words that they can read very quickly. Familiar words are scanned swiftly, as they contain information that has already been learned and stored in the memory, while learners have a valuable technique for working out new words, even when the sound connection does not tell the whole story.
In some languages, notably Spanish, Finnish and Italian, the links between sounds and letters are very consistent – what you see is what you say. In English, the connections between sounds and letters have been affected by historical events and long-term changes in speech and pronunciation. As a result, phonics work most, but not all of the time, and we have to adapt our brain to interpret what letters tell us rather than simply translate letters into sounds and vice versa. This means that we need to take care in presenting phonics, so that children do not become confused when they come across words in which the letters do not behave as expected. The main causes of irregularity in English are:
In the 150 years after the Norman conquest of 1066, English was flooded with French. The spelling of roughly one-third of English words reflects this –
table, for example, makes perfect phonic sense in French, where
l is pronounced before
e. Try it.
Over the centuries since English began to be written down, several letters which used to be pronounced, such as
k in
knight, no longer are. They are still retained in spelling. Modern, everyday speech takes further shortcuts, particularly at the ends of words and in pronouncing vowel (voice) sounds.
In the late Middle Ages, there was a shift in the way vowels were pronounced. Some words are spelled as they were before the
shift, and so vowel sounds are not always written as we now speak them. The most common example is probably
was.
What is a Vowel?
Most of us have been taught that vowels are the five letters, a, e, i, o and u. But a vowel is first and foremost a sound made with the voice, and the letters we know as vowels have the difficult task of catching and representing these voice sounds. The system of voice sounds in English is complicated. It includes composite vowels, known as diphthongs, which begin in one part of the mouth and move to another – say boy, and feel how your tongue moves upwards as you pronounce the oy.
Knowing when and when not to pronounce a letter, how to pronounce it, and what emphasis to give different parts of similar words (photograph, photographic, photography) requires us to interpret what the letters tell us in the context of what we know about the word’s meaning. The Learning Brain, by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Uta Frith, FRS (2005), summarises key evidence from brain scans that show readers in English using a distinct section of the brain, between the processing areas and long-term memory storage, that is concerned with interpreting information from letters after it has been processed. This area was not active in Italian readers, whose language is regular, but was very active in English readers. This shows that the brain adapts itself in different ways to the demands of different languages.
Letter combinations
Early in the disputes over phonics in the National Curriculum, the Conservative minister Kenneth Clarke, asked what he meant by phonics, replied ‘c-a-t says cat’. So it does, provided we take care not to add stray bits of vowel to the c and t, producing an effect like ke a te. But three-letter words such as cat make up a small minority of English, as scanning a few lines of almost any text will show. Many words use letters in combinations, and these do not always reflect what we might expect the letters to produce on their own. Some writers on phonics refer to a two-letter combination as a digraph, and a three-letter combination as a trigraph. In my experience, children are happy with the term group, and so am I.
A group in which letters do as we might expect is sh. Words like ship or finish show fairly clearly elements of both letters in the group, and this one is easy to learn. Words such as patient, station, though, use the group ti to produce the same sound as sh, and this is far removed from the normal sound produced by ti, as in tip. This type of group requires a greater adjustment of thinking in order to learn and use it. Similarly, the softening effect of e, i and y af...
