Alice´s thoughts... (and rants!)

My thoughts on Phonics


What have I learnt?

I think that it is safe to say that the rights and wrongs of how to teach children to read and write is an opinionated minefield! Essentially, there is no right or wrong, all teaching is subjective and it is the individual child who should be the centre of consideration when deciding which method to follow. Unfortunately, with classes of thirty individual learners, whichever choice their teacher makes, it will never provide the optimum for the specific needs or each pupil. Therefore, the best that a teacher can do is to understand her students, the methods, resources and systems available and work bloody hard to combine all these into a programme for all.

There are primarily two contrasting methods of teaching phonics, the synthetic and analytical. Following the Rose Report, the synthetic has been selected as the current trend and analytical phonics are out of favour. In typical Governmental style we have therefore turned educational guidance upside down to incorporate the new Primary Framework on this area and are completely disposing of the previously favoured analytical approach!

Synthetic phonics requires the discreet teaching of the sounds and learning how to segment a word into graphemes, sound out the corresponding phonemes and blend these to make a word. Synthetic phonics are explicit and children are taught what is right and wrong in exercises, however this rigid approach does cause difficulties when considering difference in accents and regional dialects.

It is also argued that phoneme-by-phoneme segmentation in individual speech sounds is a difficult and not realistic task in the English Language as it is not by nature phonetic. (Sound Practice – Phonological Awareness in the Classroom, Layton L., Deeny K. and Upton G.).

It was whilst working at an academy school in Swindon that I first became aware of phonics. I was amazed at the fast pace of the activities and the amount of active participation by the class. In a world where children are exposed to such a range of interactive stimulus (computer games, TV etc) this style of approach does make sense. The programme being followed did have a number of benefits; it was stimulating, easy to follow and was designed to appeal to all different types of learners. Despite feeling exhausted just watching the teacher performing her twenty-minute phonics slot, I was very impressed, however it is clear following the debate on this subject that synthetic phonics do have their drawbacks. One of these is the lack of real books! It appears that very little time is actually given to reading prose. Although prescribed books are available on synthetic phonics schemes, there is something altogether artificial and controlling in their content which although may fit in with the “sound of the day”. It feels as though the reality and more importantly, the joy of reading, may be lost. It will be wonderful if this scheme is able to create a generation of competent readers, however we may find that after they have finished this programme of decontextualised reading that none of them will want to read.

Reading is not just decoding the letters in a single word, in reality readers and learners use clues and context to help to determine a word or it’s meaning. Uta Frith (1985) argues that children start recalling word shapes which they have saved in their visual memory, for example road signs and logos, although this is a good start to their learning, it cannot go on forever as their visual memories will soon fill up. This sort of approach relies on remembering a lexical chunk and using context to guess the word. This points to analytical phonics as a more practical method of learning to read.

The whole to part style of learning in analytical phonics is undoubtedly more realistic, however this naturally makes it more haphazard and disjointed for learners. It is easier for non-readers to split words into onset and rime than into individual phonemes. This method therefore allows children to logically make analogies between familiar and unfamiliar words, to use rhyme, alliteration and context to read. The analytical approach has the added benefit of encouraging children to become emotionally engaged in reading and helps encourage a positive attitude.

It is apparent that both schemes have their drawbacks, but instead of considering synthetic and analytical phonics as contrasting, is it not possible for them to be used to complement each other? Children do benefit from understanding how to interpret graphemes into phonemes, however they would profit from learning how and when to use this most effectively and in conjunction with other linguistic clues. If the Government would incorporate previously used approaches with new recommendations (instead of scrapping the lot in each new government!) then it may be possible to create an open and adaptable system of teaching, allowing the teacher to teach to the students she knows and not to simply be the deliverer of a programme.