What is “phonics”?

Everyone agrees that “phonics” is important, but are they all talking about the same thing?

“Phonics” teaches the sounds associated with letters and groups of letters in normal spelling. This is often confused with “phonetics” which is to do with how to actually make the sounds, which are then represented in a dictionary using a “phonetic alphabet” or something similar to explain how words are pronounced.

There are two main problems that people see when talking about phonics:

1. Confusion about the different ways in which phonics can be taught – “… we do teach phonics.”
2. “It’s so complicated and there are so many exceptions.”

There are two main ways in which phonics is taught – “synthetic”, “explicit” or “systematic” phonics in which the sounds of letters and groups of letters are taught first and then blended together (synthesised) to make words, and “analytical”, “incidental” or “embedded” phonics in which whole words are analysed to see how they are made up. These methods are very different. The first tends to be logical and sequential, the second more ad hoc.

Synthetic phonics starts with the simple and progresses to the more complex. Children are given graded reading books that only use the letters and groups of letters that they have learned. “Sight words” are kept to an absolute minimum. Children never need to guess.

Analytical phonics often also tends to be associated with learning common, high frequency words as sight words, as well as guessing from context.

Because synthetic/systematic phonics starts with the simple and progresses to the more complex, children are not overwhelmed by “exceptions”. For example, if children learn the most common sound of each letter first and have lots of opportunities to practise using these, before they learn the name of the letter or combinations of letters, they will not be confused.

E.g., with the letter “a”, teach it as /a/ in ant, cat, man … and make sure that children are comfortable with this (and the sound of “m” and “n” …) before introducing silent “e” (cake), then later “ai” (wait), “ay” (play), “ar” (car), etc.

If we join a class to learn something completely new, e.g. computer programming, we need and expect to start with the basics and not launch straight into the complex. Otherwise, we as adults are likely to give up and drop out. This is also true for our children, because learning to read is a complex task that does not happen automatically like learning to speak.

Synthetic phonics is a beginning. It forms a firm foundation. I use games to get children to practise common high frequency words (a common approach), but only after they have learned the letter-sound correspondences in the words (not part of the common approach). Later children can use context to pick up if they have misread something and need to go back and check it, rather than to guess what a word might be. They progress naturally to the enjoyment of reading “real books”. But without this firm foundation many students will continue to struggle, sometimes for their whole life.

A further explanation, with details of the variety of approaches within systematic phonics, can be found at http://vasblog.com/category/teaching-methods/. Then scroll down to find: The Charlatan “Phonics” – Analytic or Embedded Phonics, 7/12/2013. My work largely falls into the third category of “REAL phonics” referred to in this article – one symbol to one sound learned at a time and then practised before moving on to the next one.