What are 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.

In literacy education there are two main streams of technique used; phonics and real books.

Real books teaching works on the principal of exposure to text and learning through experience. In real books teaching, the child picks up the patterns of letters by repeat exposure and intelligent guessing using the context of the sentence and other clues such as associated pictures.

In the other camp, the teachers work with the phonemes, the phonic structure of words and the relationship between different letter patterns and each phoneme.

Phonics is split into two philosophies. Analytical phonics looks at the syllable structures within words and groups them along those lines. For instance, the words spare, rare and care would all be in a group. The learner becomes familiar with the main groups and then just distinguishes the words within the groups.

Synthetic Phonics takes the opposite approach. It teaches the individual building blocks of each phoneme. And then shows how to decode a word using these individual building blocks. The learner is taught to recognise the letter patterns for each phoneme and then how to blend them together to form the word.

What should we be using?

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.

For that reason, the results achieved with Synthetic Phonics in general use tend to be lower than in a small trial setting.

We have developed a new path, that takes the best elements of both systems. We deliver the more technical aspects of synthetic phonics over the Internet and then build on that foundation with Easyread TrainerText, which is a more Real Books approach.

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

For more information on phonics and online literacy support and details on Easyread, visit our site EasyRead Coaching System

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