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Government Guidelines for Teaching Systematic Synthetic Phonics

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International Research into Methods of Teaching Reading

Because of generally poor levels of literacy among school students despite many years at school, governments of all the major English-speaking countries (including USA, UK, Canada and Australia) have recently conducted major studies into the best ways of teaching basic reading skills.

ALL THESE STUDIES CONCLUDED THE SAME THING:

The best way to teach basic reading skills is to teach the spelling rules for each of the 44 sounds in English – this is called Phonics.

For example, using the Synthetic Phonics Method students would be taught to work out the sounds in the word ‘third’ by breaking it up into three groups of letters:

  • The group of letters ‘th’ which has the /th/ sound as in ‘three’.
  • The group of letters ‘ir’ which has the /er/ sound as in ‘germ’ and ‘girl’.
  • The letter ‘d’ which has the /d/ sound as in ‘dog’.

If you would like to go into more detail, the Australian Government Report from 2005 called ‘Teaching Reading’ is well written and relatively easy to understand if you refer to the glossary which will give you the meanings of the technical words. It also has references to many of the reports from other countries.

Not All Phonics Instruction is the Same

Not only do all the reports recommend the teaching of Phonics, more specifically they recommended teaching a particular type of Phonics called Synthetic Phonics (see the example above). Evidence shows the other four or five ways of teaching Phonics are not nearly as effective as Synthetic Phonics.

In 2011, the UK Government Education Department added another criteria – systematic. In other words, teachers need to follow a system so that all the letter-sound rules are taught. They have set out their criteria for assuring high-quality phonic work in detail here.

In summary the UK Government recommends:

  • Synthetic Phonics should be the prime approach to decoding print.
  • Children should be taught a formal program of Phonics from the age of 5.
  • The Phonics program should be broken into discrete daily sessions, progressing from simple to more complex rules as time goes on.
  • Enable children’s progress to be assessed.
  • Use a multi-sensory approach integrating visual, auditory and kinaesthetic activities.
  • Teach blending of sounds right through the word from left to right.
  • Teach spelling by teaching sound-to-letter rules.
  • Ensure that Phonics is the first approach a child uses when reading a word.
  • Ensure children are taught how to read irregular words.
  • Give children the opportunity to read texts at their level of understanding of Phonic rules – in other words – give them the opportunity to read graded readers.

The High Performance Learning Approach to Phonics

High Performance Learning has been teaching Systematic Synthetic Phonics for more than 35 years, long before it was fashionable in schools anywhere in the world. I wrote the first version of the Phonics Program in 1975 and have been using it successfully ever since. The version we use today includes multimedia text that is colour-coded for the rules of English, and readers can click on individual letters in words to hear the sounds they represent. Our Phonics Program satisfies ALL the guidelines just put out by the UK government, and more. Read more here: Learning Basic Reading Skills Using Phonics.

You can get a taste of our multimedia materials by clicking here.

To find out how you can access our Systematic Synthetic Phonics Program contact us by email here or phone us in Australia on (08) 8370 0110.

By Chris Brooks
Principal
High Performance Learning

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What Is Phonics?

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What Is Phonics?

basic phonic rules

Phonic Memory Aids

The word ‘phonics’ comes from the ancient Greek word for ‘sound’. Since the Greeks were the first culture to develop an alphabet to represent the sounds in their language, it is fitting that in English we use the word ‘phonics’ to mean the teaching of the letter-sound relationships for reading, and the sound-letter relationships for spelling.

A few hundred years ago, English spelling was not fixed as it is now – the practice at that time was to spell words in a way that reflected their language of origin. This meant that a single sound could be spelt a number of different ways. For example, the /f/ sound is spelt ‘ph’ in phonics which is derived from a Greek word, whereas the /f/ sound is spelt with an ‘f’ in font, from the Latin word for a fountain. With the invention of dictionaries, spelling patterns became set and have not changed very much since. Learning the phonic code of the English language is therefore not a simple task because there is not a strict 1-to-1 correspondence between the letters and the sounds, as found in some other phonetic languages such as Indonesian. To make matters worse, we have only 26 letters (from Latin) to write down the 44 sounds of English.

Teaching Phonics

Phonics instruction provides explicit instruction and practice with reading words, both in isolation, and in texts. Several approaches have been used to teach phonics systematically, including the following:

  • Analytic phonics

    Analytic phonics is a somewhat indirect approach in which the teacher gets the children to work out the letter-sound relationships for themselves by presenting them with groups of words containing the same sound. For example, the teacher might write the letter ‘f’ followed by several words such as fox, fish, fun and four, and then use a whole-to-part approach to get the children to recognise that all the words start with the same letter and the same sound.

  • Embedded phonics, analogy phonics and onset-rime phonics

    The embedded phonics, analogy phonics and onset-rime phonics approaches teach children by presenting groups of words which start or end in the same way, for example, bake, cake, make, rake, shake, and getting the children to learn the sounds made by the group of letters ‘-ake’. These approaches are also indirect because the focus is not on individual sounds.

  • Phonics through spelling

    Phonics through spelling programs teach children to isolate the sounds in words and apply a set of rules to write them down. In some programs, children are expected to extrapolate from these rules themselves so they can apply them in reverse when reading, whereas other programs combine this approach with synthetic phonics.

  • Synthetic phonics

    Synthetic phonics programs use a part-to-whole approach in that they directly teach children the rules to convert graphemes (letters, and groups of letters, used to represent individual speech sounds) into sounds. For Example, the word phonics would be ‘sounded out’ as /f/-/o/-/n/-/i/-/k/-/s/, and then blended together to make the whole word.

Which Approach Is Best?

The research literature strongly favours the direct approaches of teaching the phonic rules of English – synthetic phonics and phonics through spelling. This makes sense because the code of English is a complex one, so it is unreasonable to expect young children to work it all out for themselves. Furthermore, the indirect approaches, which teach group of sounds like ‘-ake’, make the code of the English language look more complex than it actually is – there are only about 100 reading/spelling rules in English, yet there are thousands of patterns like ‘-ake’.

Recent government studies by the major English-speaking countries (including U.K., U.S.A. and Australia) have all concluded that Phonics is the best way to teach basic reading skills. For example, the final report of the Australian Government’s National Inquiry Into the Teaching of Literacy, released in December 2005, is unequivocal in its support for teaching phonics to beginning and struggling readers:

Recommendation 2

The Committee recommends that teachers provide systematic, direct and explicit phonics instruction so that children master the essential alphabetic code-breaking skills required for foundational reading proficiency.

For recommendations such as these to be acted upon in English-speaking countries, they will need a revolution in their education systems because instruction in phonics has been out of favour in most schools and teacher-training institutions for about 50 years. Using a phonics approach to teach reading requires a high level of technical knowledge about the sound/letter code of the English language, skills that most teachers have not had detailed training in.

Chris Brooks

(Chris has writtten a highly successful program that teaches Phonics – for more information go to Learning to Read and Spell Using Phonics.)

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