An Introduction to Synthetic Phonics

Synthetic Phonics is the new buzzword in literacy education. Read on to find out what the term 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.

Literacy education is split between two main approaches; Real Books and Phonics.

The Real Books approach uses reading books with pictures and text. The principal is that the child will learn by exposure to text and meaning. Some words will become familiar quickly and the others can be guessed from the context and with the help of the pictures.

In contrast to that approach, the phonics system focusses on the structure of words and relationships between each phoneme and the different letter structures.

Within Phonics that are two systems. Analytical phonics works with the common syllable structures in words. So words are grouped into lists with similar structures like car, smart, part and tart. The learner becomes familiar with each group and then just has to distinguish the individual words within each group.

Synthetic Phonics works from the opposite direction. The possible letter structures for each phoneme are taught and then the syllables (and words) are blended from the individual sounds.

What should we be using?

Well, the peak results of Synthetic Phonics seem to win, with 95%+ of learners successfully learning to read.

But it is hard to achieve the same results across the school system. Synthetic phonics is a technical approach not suited to all teachers.

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 then build on that with a real books approach using Easyread TrainerText.

Article Source: http://www.articlegoldmine.com

For more information on phonics and literacy for children 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