Synthetic Vs Analytical Phonics

Defence of Synthetic Phonics

Nicholas Bielby in “Balanced phonics and the teaching of reading” admits that there is some confusion as to what precisely analytic phonics comprises of. Bielby sites Strickland (1998) who describes analytic phonics in terms of reading rather then writing: children look at patterns and infer spelling through similar things they have read previously. Strickland emphasises that in analytic phonics children are active in their own learning and synthetic phonics by comparison must comprise of children learning tables of letters “phonemes” and “graphemes”. These sound a little hard to swallow especially if you combine them with processes children seem to have to learn in synthetic phonics: First isolating the sound e.g. “ssshhh” (phoneme) then associating it with its written counter part (grapheme) “Sh” then oral blending it with other phoneme-grapheme correspondences. However, these complicated names are descriptive of the complicated processes that take place on the way to learning to read. Knowing where a child is up to in terms of: identifying a sound, showing it in written form and blending it with other sounds helps the teacher provide a more personalised learning scheme in teaching the child both reading and writing.

The Letters and Sounds programme is approved by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools and the Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families. It follows the Rose Review and quotes Jim Rose in the foreword. Letters and Sounds however is not synthetic phonics in terms of learning tables or lists of words by rote. In Letters and Sounds children learn through prescribed activities like “Buried Treasure” which appears in phase four and phase three and can be viewed on the accompanying DVD or the instructions for the activity from the book, complete with list of props. I had the unfortunate luck of preparing this for Ofsted but I was not observed! For this activity a variety of gold coin cards are used with some real words written on them with the sounds we have practiced like “thing” There are also some words with the sounds that we have practiced but they are made up words like “thend.” The coins are at the bottom of a sand box and the children take turns delving into the sand to find a coin, blending the word on it and then deciding whether this is a real word with a meaning or a made up word. The real words go into a treasure chest and the made up words go into a bin. This is a synthetic phonic activity. There are elements of comprehension as to putting the words in the appropriate bin/treasure chest which is another wonderful element of synthetic phonics the “simple view of reading” from the Rose Review which identifies two separate elements when children read, “Word recognition” and “language comprehension” Which are linked but separate. One particular child that was doing the Letters and Sounds course could read fluently but when asked what she had read she would have no idea what the words had meant and she could not write words easily. Synthetic phonics could help her because it could identify the processes she could not accomplish and work on them.

The “Buried Treasure” activity also shows that in synthetic phonics children can be stimulated to read the words and find out their meanings just as much as in any analytic phonic activity. Furthermore it shows that synthetic phonics are not presented to children in a vacuum: although the focus is on the words there is always a context and/or a game.

Analytical phonics assumes that children already have a bank of some words that they can read already when they come to learning to read. This is an assumption fraught with problems. Children of primary school age are learning continuously and in the Letters and Sounds program the children can move fluidly between phases and it is easy for the teacher who can substitute words from the phase three words for phase four ones. This is much more realistic then assuming that all children can just read certain words and will have the drive to find out and discover similar words. The children that I worked with were those in the year group identified as being below average for literacy and how far below meant which phase they were in. The children had dyslexia, autism, aspergers, ADHD three EAL children and some with very low literacy. For these children it was not possible to have a bank of existing words, constant revision was required and there was little or no drive to seek out new endings for lots of reasons including: the difficulty of finding patterns, confidence and fear of embarrassment in the group. There were mistakes like “thinck” or “frened” in their literacy work in class which suggest that synthetic phonics would not help children do well in a test score but these are positive mistakes because the child has learned some reading and writing skills.

Conclusion

The synthetic phonics promoted by the Rose Review and practiced in schools involve teaching processes and building up a bank of reading skills that are not assumed to exist already for each child. I have attended an inset day on the Letters and Sounds programme and we were taught physical movement of the arms with each sound e.g. “s ew ing” for “sewing” with an arm movement for each sound that you can hear when you say the word. This breaks up the word into its phonemes and when I introduced this to the children they thought that it was great fun and used it successfully over and over again. Synthetic phonics are very stimulating!
The model of the “simple view of reading” is realistic and appropriate to children with educational difficulties which is the real test of a theory.

I think that schools use a combination of both analytical and synthetic phonics and I think that the activities in the government sanctioned Letters and Sounds programme contains elements of analytical phonics, for example in the “Buried Treasure” lesson where children see “thing” and “thened” and know that “thened” is not a real word from previous language experience and comprehension.

Buried treasure - that's a very apt game for you Fiona! I'll be picking your brains!