My thoughts on phonics (finally)!

My thoughts on Phonetics

I now have an appreciation of how hard learning the English language is and how difficult it is for children and adults who are EAL learners. With 44 phonemes for just 26 letters in the alphabet, English is a very hard language to make sense of. Context is also important as the same word could infer different meanings. The word Reading is a place as well as the term used to describe decoding of words in a sentence. The only way to distinguish which pronunciation is correct is from the context the word is spoken in.

Unlike other languages, there is a lack of symbols to stress how letters in words should be pronounced and often the correct pronunciation is based on the context of the sentence. In Gujarati, a dot is often placed on top of a letter to stress the nasal ‘i’ sound to a specific letter in the word. Also the alphabet is broken into 3 distinct parts with a lot more letters used to represent different sounds.

Looking back at my own experience of learning to read, I believe I was mostly taught using the synthetics technique, sounding out letters and blending. Whilst I believe there is merit to both approaches, I am more inclined to favour the synthetic approach as it encourages the blending of letters to make words using different methods and children take an active part in their learning, using the whiteboard and other resources to make new words. Looking back at my own teaching experience, I think using flashcards can be quite abstract, and I found that the children would be guessing the word from the pictures or just mimicking the other children rather than focusing on the lettering. There are merits to both the synthetic and analytic approaches and successful teacher will take the best of each and adjust their teaching according to class ability. I think the key to successful results has to be encouraging children to read independently and widely and the importance of reading at home and reading aloud cannot be emphasised enough.

Whilst I agree with the need for regular literacy lessons, it is still important to create an environment of constant learning and interaction. Literacy should be stressed throughout the day and taught in conjunction with other classes. In my first day at SSE I was surprised that the teachers did not seem concerned with sounding out the spellings of words which children asked for when writing their creative piece of work. The children were just given the correct spellings and not encouraged to try and work it out by sounding out the letters themselves. Whilst the aim of the lesson was not spelling, I was quite surprised at how many spelling mistakes I found in their writing. This also made me appreciate how children naturally use phonemes to compose their graphemes and how many exceptions there are to this rule in English.

I feel quite bewildered by all the research on phonetics and do think that there is a danger of over analysing which method is best. Clearly we all learn differently and at different paces and therefore a good mix of all techniques and resources should be employed. I think the key to a successful literacy class is to create an environment full of reading and resources that are fun so that it is not a repetitive and abstract but very interactive and creative.

I had a similar experience on SSE last week - when the teacher in a year 3 class wrote the word "Capacity" on the board and asked the students how they thought the word would be said. No one put their hand up. I was thinking to myself that she could have broken the word down into "cap" "a" and "city" (all simple words that they know how to pronounce). She just told them the answer instead!