The current trend in literacy education is to move towards Synthetic Phonics. This is a
quick overview of what that means.
Within each word are individual sounds called phonemes. For instance, the word
plough has 6 letters, 3 phonemes and 1 syllable.
In the English Language there are 43 phonemes in all, to make up every word. And
there are 1420 possible letter patterns to generate them.
In literacy education there are two main streams of technique used; phonics and real
books.
The Real Books approach uses reading books with pictures and text. The principal
is that the child will learn by exposure to text and meaning. Some words will become
familiar quickly and the others can be guessed from the context and with the help of the
pictures.
In the other camp, the teachers work with the phonemes, the phonic structure of
words and the relationship between different letter patterns and each phoneme.
Phonics is split into two philosophies. Analytical phonics looks at the syllable
structures within words and groups them along those lines. For instance, the words spare,
rare and care would all be in a group. The learner becomes familiar with the main groups
and then just distinguishes the words within the groups.
Synthetic Phonics works from the opposite direction. The possible letter structures
for each phoneme are taught and then the syllables (and words) are blended from the
individual sounds.
Which is the best approach?
In localised tests, synthetic phonics gets the best results.
But then, in order to achieve those results you need a highly motivated and
technically trained teacher. It is almost impossible to achieve that uniformly across the
school system.
As a result, it has never had such good results in general use as in the test
environment.
The alternative that we have been working on is to combine the two approaches.
We deliver the essential technical side of the synthetic phonics over the Internet, and then
build on that with a real books approach using Easyread TrainerText.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For advice on reading help and online literacy support and details on the Easyread
Coaching System, visit our site www.EasyreadSystem.com
