musings on fonix

Jon Tue Nov 11, 2008 2:55 pm

As far as I can remember - I might be one of the lucky few of us who learned phonics synthetically. To me there doesn't seem to be a great deal of difference between the two approaches - both the red and the blue corner seem to agree that the starting point is the alphabet. The aim is to learn to recognise and read words - whether or not they are put into context at the time of recognition or at a later date seems to be an issue about time more than anything. This is hardly surprising mind you when you read the military junta style Letters and Sounds report ("Letters and Sounds is designed as a time-limited programme of phonic work aimed at securing fluent word recognition skills for reading by the end of Key Stage 1" - no pressure then).

I think both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. I understand that the synthetic approach could become tedious and nullify pupil's enjoyment of reading and language as a whole, but on the other hand there is page 48 of the Reading and Phonics handout - where the article writers talk about exposing young children to "alliteration, assonance...rhyme...and literary language at its best" - steady on!

The Letters and Sounds report worries that an analytic approach might neglect understanding of the rules of English, but how many "fluent readers" understand the phonics behind the differences between bough, trough, borough and through? Perhaps its ok if children pick up word-recognition through association - it doesn't seem to have an effect on pupil's future reading prospects.

I think on the whole that the debate is a bit of a dichotomy. I think a degree of the synthetic is important to teach the relationship between phonemes and graphemes - but that once pupils have some practice in this they can make connections between what they have learned and what they observe, for example in high-frequency words. Different pupils have different ways and speeds of learning, so it seems strange that this should be the fashion alongside Every Child Matters. A purely synthetic approach is a good way to meet targets mind.

One final worry with the synthetic side - last SSE Wednesday the Y6 pupils were creating a "non-chronological report" - and were clearly learning "good writing" in a parts to whole manner, so the habit seems to spread throughout a pupil's development - and so if the argument that the synthetic approach is less enjoyable is true - this would be exacerbated by its continuation. I certainly raised an eyebrow or two when the teacher demanded a rigid limit on the number of words in a sentence, the number of sentences in a paragraph and the number of paragraphs in a report.

I might have misunderstood this all completely, and sorry for over-using the word approach, over and out.