Intro to Phonics Early literacy

Alphabet Method  The alphabetic method of teaching reading – i.e. not phonics - dominated the teaching of reading up until the 19th Century  This involved teaching children to recognise and name the letters of the alphabet, both capital and lower case, in alphabetical order.

Look and Say  Another method, the "look and say" teaching technique, also known as the whole word method, was promoted by American psychologist Edmund Huey from 1908 and became established in the UK in the 1940s.  In the 1950s and 1960s the main characters used to promote this method were Janet and John, who became hugely popular with school children.  The "whole word" approach was to repeat words on each page enough times that children memorised them.

Phonics  Children are taught graphemes and their relation to phonemes  They DECODE the sounds in words, rather than learning whole words  DECODE =‘sounding out’ the word  COMPREHEND = understand the meaning of the word  Synthetic phonics – bottom up (starts with individual phonemes which are blended into a word) c+a+t=cat  Analytic phonics – Top down (starts with a whole word, and the child breaks down the word into separate phonemes) cat – c+a+t

Synthetic phonics  Current way of teaching reading to early years  Promoted by the ‘Rose Report’ and featured in the National Curriculum. A way of raising standards in literacy.  Children introduced to graphemes + phonemes and learn these before they learn a whole word  They are then taught to ‘blend’ the sounds  Emphasis on decoding in the early stages rather than comprehension  Children not introduced to books until they recognise a sufficient amount of phonemes to be able to decode the book  Reading schemes designed around the phonemes that children recognise

Difficulties: Pronunciation  Pronunciation of graphemes varies depending on where they fall within a word:  Cat  Tap  Butter

Difficulties: Split diagraphs  R-a-t-e  L-a-t-e  Mane

Difficulties: Vowel sounds – grapheme / phoneme relationships  Done  Gone / shone  Drone

Difficulties: Context  Polish

Key words:  Grapheme  Phoneme  Diagraph

Synthetic phonics - criticisms  More effective in other European languages - in English lots of different ways of spelling the same phoneme:  Head  Red  Said  Because children are only shown books containing the phonemes they have learnt prior to encountering the book, reading schemes are contrived, bland and don’t sound like real spoken language  Reading schemes are seen as dull and artificial  Emphasis on decoding means that some children ‘sound’ fluent when they read, but don’t comprehend  Teaches children to decode made up words – test in year 2, which if children don’t pass, they are seen as failing – artificial language

Reading Schemes – feature spotting  Repetition of sounds (particularly assonance)  Lots of monosyllabic words at first  Simple and compound sentences (again artificial)  SVO structure – well formed sentences  Adjectives added first to the end of a sentence  Familiar topics – here and now

Oxford Reading Tree

Oxford Reading Tree - stage 2

Learning activities:

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Learning activities: