Synthetic Phonics Discussion

‘Synthetic’ and ‘Analytic’ Phonics

Synthetic phonics, learning to read using the correspondences between phonemes (the smallest unit of sound in a word) and graphemes (the letter or letter combinations used to represent the sounds), was introduced in the 1960s and even then was surrounded by widespread debate about its effectiveness, illustrated by the title of a book advocating phonics teaching at the time, Reading Made Easy In Spite Of The Alphabet (Diack 1965, as cited by Graham and Kelly 2000). The title refers to the earlier established method of teaching children to read using the alphabetic approach, the sounding out of letter names to identify the words.

The synthetic approach has had a recent revival of support, following the Rose Report (2006) and is the current Government endorsed approach for teaching children to read. Letters and Sounds: Notes of Guidance for Practitioners and Teachers (2007) organises the teaching of phonics into six phases that support a systematic approach to learning the phoneme-grapheme correspondences. The aim of teaching phoneme-grapheme correspondences is to enable children to read and write words independently. According to the Rose Report with a sound grounding in the correspondences children will be able to segment and blend the phonemes, enabling them to read and write unfamiliar words.

However, teaching children to read with phonics is littered with flaws. Firstly, phonemes can be represented using more than one grapheme, for example the /s/ phoneme can be represented using the graphemes <s>, <c> and <ss>, causing confusion for children. Secondly, graphemes using two letters (digraphs) can be split by a letter to make a split digraph; in the example of cake the <a-e> digraph is split by the letter k, making it more difficult to identify the phonemes. Thirdly, it is an artificial process dividing words into phonemes. Layton, Deeny and Upton, in Sound Practice – Phonological Awareness in the Classroom (1997), argue that segmenting words into phonemes is a difficult process for children and that children first learn to segment words by syllables and then by dividing words into their onset and rime.

The onset of a word is any consonant sound that precedes the vowel sound and the rime is the first vowel sound after the onset, for example in the word dad the onset is ‘d’ and the rime is ‘ad’. In words with two or more syllables there may be two onsets and rimes. Children are able to identify syllables, and onset and rime more easily than phonemes because they are features of speech. The analytic approach uses syllables, and onset and rime as the starting point for teaching children to read. The approach relies on children being able to find spelling and pronunciation patterns between words and to then apply the patterns to unfamiliar words. For example, children will recognise the rime ‘at’ in sat from their understanding of the word cat. Browne in Developing Language and Literacy (2001) argues that once children have an understanding of onset and rime they are ready to learn about phoneme-grapheme correspondences.

Using the synthetic approach Rose (2006) states that readers will first ‘learn to read’ and then ‘read to learn’, however, the early separation of word recognition and language comprehension means that children are learning to read without a context. Helen Bromley in Nursery argues that children need to be emotionally engaged in a text to develop positive experiences of reading. Books should be at the heart of any process of learning to read. The over-emphasis on phonics and the decontextualised teaching approach ignores research supporting shared reading experiences as a prerequisite for future success as a reader (Wade and Moore, 1992, as cited by Bromley). Bromley further argues that phonics teaching places too much emphasis on accuracy not rewarding the ‘reading like’ behaviour of children who memorise stories and imitate reading the text.

As demonstrated teaching reading primarily with phonics is fundamentally flawed, and inhibits the development of reading as a pleasurable experience between reader, text and with (in shared reading activities) a third party. In order to promote reading in young people all experiences with text should be encouraged and learning to read should not be solely concerned with the stripping down of words to their component parts.