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7th Jan 10
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Move over, teaching context clues
, Real Books. Move over Phonics. The new path is Synthetic Phonics! But what does the term really mean?
Within each word are individual sounds called phonemes. For instance, the word plough has 6 letters, 3 phonemes and 1 syllable.
English has 43 phonemes in all, but is unusual in having over a thousand different letter combinations that can represent them.
Literacy education is split between two main approaches; Real Books and Phonics.
The Real Books philosophy is, teaching context clues
, 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.
Phonics teaching focusses on the understanding of the phonemes used in, teaching context clues
, words, 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, teaching context clues
, are taught and the child learns to blend these back together to form the word.
Which is the best approach?
In localised tests, synthetic phonics gets the best results.
But rolling it out across the school system is harder because it is a highly technical approach, which many teachers find hard to deliver.
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, teaching context clues
, then build on that with a real books approach using Easyread TrainerText.
Source: articledashboard.com
