An Introduction to Synthetic Phonics

The current trend in literacy education is to move towards Synthetic Phonics. This is a quick overview of what that means.

Words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes. So the word education has 9 letters, 7 phonemes and 4 syllables.

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.

There are two main camps of literacy educators, who believe in either the Real Books approach or in Phonics.

The Real Books philosophy is to expose children to interesting books with pictures. The child then steadily picks up an ability to decode the text, first by becoming familiar with a basic vocabulary and then by intelligent guessing using the context and pictures as clues.

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.

Within Phonics there are two principal approaches. Analytical Phonics looks at the main letter patterns within words and teaches those to the learner. So fat, hat, mat and splat would all be grouped together. In that way, the learner just has to become familiar with each letter group, and to differentiate within the group. So it tends to focus on syllables.

Synthetic Phonics goes further and works from the individual phonemes. The common letter patterns for each phoneme are taught and the child learns to blend these back together to form the word.

Which is the best approach?

In a controlled testing environment, 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.

For that reason, the results in general use tend to be dissappointing in comparison with the tests done.

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.

Article Source: http://www.a1-articledirectory.com

For more information on reading help and online literacy support and details on Easyread, click www.EasyreadSystem.com

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated