Synthetic Phonics Explained

Move over Real Books. Move over Phonics. The new path is Synthetic Phonics! But what does the term really mean?

Within each word are individual sounds called phonemes. For instance, the word plough has 6 letters, 3 phonemes and 1 syllable.

English has 43 phonemes in all, but is unusual in having over a thousand different letter combinations that can represent 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.

Phonics teaching focusses on the understanding of the phonemes used in words, the phonic structure of words and the relationship between different letter patterns and each phoneme.

Within Phonics there are two principal approaches. Analytical Phonics looks at the main letter patterns within words and teaches those to the learner. So fat, hat, mat and splat would all be grouped together. In that way, the learner just has to become familiar with each letter group, and to differentiate within the group. So it tends to focus on syllables.

Synthetic Phonics goes further and works from the individual phonemes. The common letter patterns for each phoneme are taught and the child learns to blend these back together to form the word.

Which is the best approach?

In localised tests, synthetic phonics gets the best results.

But then, in order to achieve those results you need a highly motivated and technically trained teacher. It is almost impossible to achieve that uniformly across the school system.

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

We have been working on a new approach that takes elements of both systems. The technical aspects of synthetic phonics are delivered over the Internet. And we then switch to a more Real Books approach using Easyread TrainerText to build experience and confidence

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

For more information on reading help and literacy for children and more on Easyread, visit our site www.EasyreadSystem.com

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