Controversy has been widespread over the years about the best way to teach children reading and spelling.
Teaching letter sounds gives children the ability to work out simple words which can be sounded out, words like: bed, cat, log, pig, fish, deck, thin, etc.
The problem is that the most interesting words for children often cannot be easily sounded out.
Research findings now show that children who are taught using synthetic phonics make great leaps in progress compared to children taught by other methods.
But what about those exciting words the children need to maintain their motivation?
If they are only allowed to use letter sounds, they will be limited to reading uninteresting sentences like:
Ron and meg can run in the hut. Ron can run. Meg can run. Run, Ron, run! Run, Meg, run!
Whole series of children's reading books used to be produced with meaningless sentences like these, and the children quickly reached their boredom threshold.
As a reaction to these tedious stories, publishers began to ignore the need to sound out words, and moved on to the Whole Word method.
Children were given books with sentences like:
The sleeping dinosaur twitched.Edward and Lucy were terrified. They inched out of the cave but froze as the vast creature slowly awoke …
Engaging stuff - as long as you can read it!
What type of phonics program?
Letter sounds have been taught to children for many decades, but without the success that has been enjoyed by children in the most recent Scottish research program.
Traditional phonics programs have simply taught children to try to read a book and stop when they come across an unknown word. They should then try to work it out from its sounds.
This is known as analytical phonics and has never been as successful as synthetic phonics.
From the child's point of view, it has made it impossible to get on with the story and find out what is happening.
This has killed their motivation to want to read.
A program of synthetic phonics separates reading single words from reading stories.
Whilst it needs a trained teacher or parent with the techniques to train children to actively learn the letter sounds in a non-threatening manner, the method can be learned by any teacher or parent.
