Robs Phonics discussion thoughts............so far

The way in which we learnt to read is taken for granted in later life, personally not something considered until being re-educated in the approaches used, my early speech and reading were directly affected by hearing issues at an early age. My mum’s approach unlike my expectation of it being a synthetic phonics technique, it hadn’t been instead she had used the more traditional analytical approach, mum had learned this from my sisters school and found it to be the easiest way to teach me to read, though at the same time my sister struggled with this method and a synthetic approach was being used, between us both styles had crossed over as mum had read to both of us together. It’s odd as from memory it seemed that we had often sounded words in parts and merged them, though this may have been more as an aid to spelling rather than pronunciation.
The synthetic phonics method involves examining each individual spelling within a word as a solitary sound and then merging those sounds together to complete the word. For example, shrouds would be read by pronouncing the sounds for each spelling. The aim is to gain an understanding of how to identify the sound symbol correspondences and to learn to blend the phonemes automatically. This method means students will be learning to read words using sound blending and making unnecessary the need for repetitive texts, though this method does not teach initial sight vocabulary or words as shapes when using the 44 letter sounds that make up words in the English language.
It seems that often the analytical approach to learning how to read has its strengths in being able to recognise words quickly by the makeup of the first and last letters and by the context of the text it is in, this means that once a level of vocabulary has been established words can be easily recognised and often the rules that are expected can be applied for the pronunciation of new words. These lessons can be a little difficult to completely comprehend, the use of synthetic and analytical phonics are clearer when seen in use, fortunately on placement the following day it started to make more sense when seeing children working out new words and also in helping them to work through a spelling or how to say an new word a combination of the blending of synthetic phonics into a complete word and using analytical phonics to realise correspondences between words.
For me this is the beginning of a steep learning curve, from the little known so far and from personal experience it seems evident that different children will respond to either method in differing ways and whilst one child may find synthetics helpful another will find the analytical approach to be of better use. The debate will rage on, that much is clear but the only reason a debate is needed is because there is no clear cut right or wrong method, especially if certain children will only respond to the teaching of either one.