Synthetic v analytic phonics
The phonics debate
It is now accepted that phonics is one of the essential components of a balanced approach to the teaching of reading, alongside:
- promoting a positive attitude to reading for pleasure and for information (involving the teaching of all of the necessary strategies and skills; ensuring texts chosen are at appropriate interest, decoding and comprehension levels)
- motivating readers to read for themselves, not just for school purposes
- teaching sight vocabulary (involving semantic, syntactic and graphophonic cueing)
- teaching of comprehension strategies and how, when and why to apply them
- actively raising awareness and appreciation of the writer's craft.
There are two main approaches to teaching phonics: analytic and synthetic. Both approaches require the learner to have some phonological awareness (the ability to hear and discriminate sounds in spoken words). Both approaches can also contribute to furthering children's phonological development. Phonological awareness is an essential skill for reading, writing, listening and talking.
Approaches that use a phonics drill may seem effective in the short term, but unless they are embedded within meaningful and purposeful texts and reading activities, they may well remain to be viewed as exercises for school and not as reading 'for real'. Wray and Medwell (1999) reported that the most effective teachers of literacy put into context the skills needed for decoding using meaningful texts for a real purpose. This would apply to both synthetic and analytic approaches.
Synthetic phonics
Synthetic phonics involves the development of phonemic awareness from the outset. As part of the decoding process, the reader would learn up to 44 phonemes (the smallest units of sound) and their related graphemes (the written symbols for the phoneme). One phoneme can be represented by various graphemes, e.g. 'oa', 'ow', 'ough'. This is, of course, one of the reasons that the English language can be so difficult to learn to read and spell. The reader would be expected to recognise each grapheme then sound out each phoneme in a word, building up through blending the sounds together to pronounce the word phonetically. This approach works well with phonetically regular words.
Some of the most popular synthetic approaches involve a highly systematic whole-class teaching programme that is usually started very early in Primary 1. The sounds and their corresponding written symbols are taught in quick succession - up to five or six sounds per week. A multi-sensory approach is included where children see the symbol, listen to the sound, say the sound and accompany this by doing an action. This multi-sensory approach appears to support most learners in remembering many of the sound-symbol relationships.
There is no one way that works for the decoding or spelling of all words in our language. There is no one way that works best for all learners. There are powerful arguments for the inclusion of both approaches in any infant teaching programme. They each involve and develop different skills. Each of these skills is important to effective and efficient development of reading and spelling.
Synthetic Phonics
Extracts from part 2 of the 'Dumfries and Galloway Programme of Synthetic Phonics'. The programme is split into three sub-programmes of 30 weeks each and is based on a well-known phonics series. This material is copyrighted for Dumfries and Galloway use only.
The Abbey Programme
The early years staff of the Abbey Primary School, North Ayrshire Council, developed this programme for the teaching of synthetic phonics.
A Phonics Lesson
This indicates a suggested way of conducting a phonics lesson with Primary 2.
Promoting Phonics
Inverclyde Council's publication 'Promoting Literacy in the Early Years' includes some detailed advice on programming the teaching of phonics.
Analytic phonics
Analytic phonics involves analysis of whole words to detect phonetic or orthographic (spelling) patterns, then splitting them into smaller parts to help with decoding, for example onset and rime - onset (vowel sound(s)) at the beginning of a word or syllable and rime (always beginning with a vowel to form the remainder of that word or syllable).
The rimes of words can be used to help children read and spell by analogy. For example, the right rime, once known, can be used to generate another 96 words. It is therefore an efficient way to help children develop a large sight vocabulary for both reading and spelling. It works particularly well for those words that young children cannot work out sound-by-sound, for example 'light', 'through', 'rake'. It is also an effective way of helping children to adopt the common sight words, for example when teaching the word 'could', children would be supported to generate and read the rhyming words that share the same written pattern - 'would', 'should'.