Teaching early years children to read using phonics
This Primary Headship article is from June 2008. To receive the latest issue, subscribe here.
Despite his initial scepticism about using synthetic phonics to help young children learn to read, Steve Mynard enthuses about its benefits
I am teaching a Reception class this year. They’re lovely – it’s hard work, but extremely rewarding! It has probably been the most challenging year of my 20-year career. I had never taught Reception before. I went in that direction after three years of headship and a career break running my own historical drama company, because I could see that it was the area of education where the most truly radical changes were happening.
Our biggest success, in the nine months that I have been teaching our 25 nippers, has been with reading. In my previous article I confessed to having no idea how young children learn to read – having been a KS2 practitioner for most of my career. I also didn’t really believe in phonics – although this was based on the rather simplistic notion that you can’t spell l-i-g-h-t phonetically (I now know better! It is l-igh-t.)
I went into Reception with an open mind, and got stuck into Jolly Phonics while I got my head round Letters and Sounds. My children clearly loved our daily phonic sessions and I did, too. Feeling a bit daft at first, as I scurried my fingers up and down my arm and chanted ‘a-a-a-a-a-a’ for ‘ants on your arm’, I soon got into it and looked forward to each new batch of letters.
One of the problems was with the provision of training. Our county hadn’t done the maths, and provided too few courses for all the early years practitioners to attend the one-day Letters and Sounds training. I finally got my training at the beginning of May. It was very useful, but I had already worked my way with my class through to the end of phase three of the programme.
I have a very good teaching assistant and we have timetabled specific one-to-one time for her and the children to work on reading skills, and I also have weekly guided reading sessions with ability groups. We probably are a bit over-the-top with all of this, but to me the importance of reading is central to a child’s education. I used to think we were a bit pushy in this country teaching our children to read so young. My current experience is that the children are eager to get going and, with a programme like Letters and Sounds, they can see their own progress, week by week. I will add a caveat here. The learning environment has to be rich in stories and poems, non-fiction texts, labels and captions. Children need to love stories. This isn’t about teaching them to bark at text.
The more I taught the Letters and Sounds programme, the more I found myself noticing words that just don’t work: simple words that children are quite likely to meet fairly early on in their life of reading. ‘Once’ cannot be sounded out. Neither can ‘girl’ or ‘two’ or ‘learn’. In Letters and Sounds ‘ear’ is a phoneme so ‘learn’ would be sounded out ‘l-ear-n’. Just try that and see if it makes sense! I’m not being picky – it is just that focusing on phonemes and graphemes does make you acutely aware of the inconsistencies in the English language. And that is not to mention all the regional variations!
What we used to call ‘blends’ has gone, too, and, at first, I was a little taken aback by this. Surely it is OK to teach ‘br’ as a sound. The phonic enthusiasts have replaced these blends with a new approach to clear and precise sounding out of individual letters and, when I make myself do it properly, I can actually hear the ‘b’ and the ‘r’ in ‘br’. I still haven’t quite worked out what to do with ‘ph’, but I only teach Reception, so I’ll leave that problem to someone else!
On a mission
There is something of an evangelist’s zeal about synthetic phonics. I felt the searchlights model of the NLS was useful and I don’t think there is particularly anything to be gained from ditching it completely. Children do need to use picture clues to a certain extent and need to be able to read on for meaning to help them read a new word. Also key word recognition is still important. Some children do just seem to pick up words as soon as they are told them. In the searchlights model I liked the idea that a word has a certain shape, depending on the pattern of risers and descenders it is made up of. This certainly felt like the way I had picked up reading myself as a child.
Phonics is a means to an end, and that end is children who can read the majority of the words they meet quickly and have strategies to tackle new words they are unsure of. Underpinning this has to be a love of reading. The outcome is children who can ‘read to learn’ as the Letters and Sounds programme would have it.
As the end of the school year approaches I am liaising with our Y1 teacher over transfer arrangements. One of the most striking improvements between the current YR and the previous year is in this solid foundation of phonic skills they have. The Y1 teacher had to start lower down in the Letters and Sounds programme than would have been expected with her current class and some of her children had to come into us for extra support. The YR class that is about to move on, with a small group of exceptions, are off to a flying start in reading, based on their newly acquired phonic knowledge.
Letters and Sounds is making a difference and I’m a fully signed up convert, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. A good phonic programme will build a sound foundation for most children – just remember to be aware that not all children will learn the same way.
Steve Mynard is a former headteacher and editor of Primary Headship
Comments
Reading Instruction
It’s good to hear of the amazing success of your class after a strong start in reading using Letters and Sounds.
Despite the progress your students have made, you expressed some concerns over the strictures of synthetic phonics. I will see if I can address these concerns.
The author states, “‘Once’ cannot be sounded out. Neither can ‘girl’ or ‘two’ or ‘learn.’”
What can be done is a matter of instruction. If you teach that in these words-‘once’ and ‘one’ and their derivative forms, such as everyone, someone, etc.-the letter ‘o’ says the sound /wuh/, then it can be clearly sounded out as o-n-ce and o-ne. If you teach that the letters ‘ir’ say the sound /er/, then all of a sudden a minimum of 130 words are accessible to a child (shirt, skirt, flirt, thirst, confirm, etc). The word ‘two’ is a singular word, however once taught (either tw-o, as a special case of o-/OO/ as in do, move, or as t-wo) at some point it can be shown that it was meant to remind the reader of twelve, twain, and twenty, and so distinguish it from ‘to’ and ‘too’. If you teach that ‘ear’ says the sound /er/ then a minimum of 30 words opens up to the child (earth, earn, yearn, etc.)
The author states, “What we used to call ‘blends’ has gone, too, and, at first, I was a little taken aback by this. Surely it is OK to teach ‘br’ as a sound.”
This instruction is meant to reduce the amount a child has to memorize. Since the sounds for the letters have already been taught and learned, there is no need to teach the sounds together as a unit. To do so dramatically increases the number of pieces of information a child has to learn. As the author noted, the English writing system is complex, however, such additions as ‘blends’ only increases the complexity.
The author states, “Children do need to use picture clues to a certain extent and need to be able to read on for meaning to help them read a new word. Also key word recognition is still important. Some children do just seem to pick up words as soon as they are told them. In the searchlights model I liked the idea that a word has a certain shape, depending on the pattern of risers and descenders it is made up of. “
Synthetic phonics instruction is aimed at reducing confusion and memory load on children. By eliminating the options of picture guessing, context clues, and word shape, synthetic phonics eliminates possible choke points for learning. How is this done? Many will say that options are the life blood of childhood and education. From the child’s view however, these options slow down the process of reading because a decision has to be made: is this a word I know, is its shape the same as something I’ve learned, is it a word I’ve memorized, I’ll read a few sounds and guess a word (in the process rolling through several wrong words). This decision time is the enemy of good comprehension and easy enjoyment of reading. With one method of word attack—all-through-the-word-blending—the child knows what to do and has only to remember and apply code knowledge to get as close as possible to the correct word. I think its important to remember that we read to learn what an author has to say, not what we think the author is saying. Inserting synonyms—as guessers often do—may feel reassuring to the instructor because it seems like the child is understanding, however, it misses the point completely of good reading and the unique contributions of each specific word to what is being communicated.
The author states, “A good phonic programme will build a sound foundation for most children – just remember to be aware that not all children will learn the same way.”
How children learn is a matter of how we instruct them. Some children will learn more quickly. Some children seem to magically get reading, with almost no instruction. However, if you ask them to read a word such as “antidisestablishmentariansim” or (more realistically) “audacious” children who can read will break it down by sounds or groups of sounds all the way to the end of the word. This is the primary skill of reading. Whether it comes naturally or with great practice, it is what needs to happen to access the richness of the English language and to participate in the Great Conversation of those who chose English as the medium of discussion.
Synthetic phonics is the surest way of creating accurate and confident readers. Throw the inefficient and mucky bathwater of Searchlights out and hold onto the clear logic and good instruction of synthetic phonics.
Melissa Tyler
Minnesota, USA
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