Phonics connects letters to sounds. It is used to teach people how to read and write by linking sounds to the symbols – the letters of the alphabet.
Phonics is one aspect of literacy critical to successful reading and writing. Instruction of Phonics should be explicitly and systematically taught as part of a balanced and integrated program and, where necessary, as additional intervention offered to students who require extra support. It is critical for the teacher to model and pronounce each sound clearly at all times and to continue this strategy when segmenting and blending a word. Understanding Phonics will enable students to make connections between sounds and letters in both reading and writing. Initially students may not be aware that each word is made up of different sounds. Effective teaching of Phonics will give students the confidence to produce words effortlessly, and in most cases accurately, enabling them to develop and improve their reading and writing skills. When students understand the concept of Phonics, they will be able to read and write pseudo words and feel far more confident in their ability to develop their own individual skills and increase their vocabulary and word bank.
The primary focus of teaching Phonics is to allow students to understand that letters are linked to sounds (phonemes). Each individual letter or letter combination (grapheme) has its own sound, and it is best to teach the sounds of the letters first with the most common sounds being taught first. Try to teach a few sounds each lesson, however, try to choose sounds that are different in sound and shape as this tends to avoid confusion, e.g., p, b, d, look very similar in shape. Teaching consonants alongside vowels will enable students to blend and segment, e.g., a s t, will enable students to sort the sounds to create the word sat (Synthetic Phonics).
Synthetic Phonics uses an approach to understand the connection between sounds and letters to blend and segment a word. Blending and segmenting is the ability to pull apart words and bring them back together. Recent research indicates these skills are the greatest indicators in reading and writing.
Analytic Phonics is an approach to the teaching of reading that starts at word level, not sound level, for students to analyse letter-sound relations once a word is identified. For example, a teacher may write a letter followed by multiple words that begin with that letter and sound. Analogy phonics teaches students to use parts of words they may already know to identify new words. An example of this is ‘at’, ‘r at’, ‘p at’, ‘s at’, ‘f at’.
Reading is moving from print to speech; therefore, reading is decoding with each letter and sound being ‘blended’ together to produce a word. Spelling is moving from speech to print; therefore, spelling and writing is encoding where each word needs to be segmented into individual sounds followed by a choice of a letter or letters. Elkonin boxes or sound cards as they are often referred to are a fundamental tool used when teaching writing. Students first break down the sounds in a word, count the sounds they hear and then draw a box to represent each sound. The sounds are then written in each box sequentially. See example below.
| r | ai | n |
‘Spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental representation of a word. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading’. Catherine Snow et al. (2005)
Teaching Phonics is very complex, and students will often struggle with the concept. Although the alphabet is made up of 26 letters, each with their distinct sound, Australian English is made up of over 40 different sounds that are produced by letters and their combinations. In many cases, when one letter is placed alongside another letter it can generate a new sound. For example, ‘c’ and ‘h’ have individual sounds but when written next to each other, these two letters form a new single sound (digraph). Even this digraph ‘ch’ has different sounds depending upon the word in which it is found. To further complicate matters, most phonemes are represented by multiple graphemes, e.g., ai, ay, a-e, ea, ei. With practice, students will begin to know which digraph or grapheme to use; however, to further complicate the issue, we also use words that are simply ‘tricky’ and don’t follow the phoneme system.
Teaching Phonics on a daily basis and using ‘English Fast with Phonics’ – a structured synthetic phonics program – will enhance the literacy capability of students and give them the knowledge to have a clearer understanding of Phonics.
