ThatReadingThing

There are so many good questions and so many misunderstandings around the “phonics” label especially “synthetic phonics”. I wish we could stop the ride for a moment and start all over with some clear thinking and a new name. Even though I know it refers to synthesis and was coined in the 19th century, I can’t get beyond itchy, sweaty and poor quality. Personally, I’d like to call what we do “Whole Language” but someone beat me to that particular term so I prefer “sound-based strategies”.

Here’s what I’ve discovered through a little research and a lot of time in the trenches over the past few years.

Reading for every one of us involves seeing squiggles on a page (graphemes) and translating those squiggles into sounds (phonemes). Good readers do this astonishingly quickly and silently. The “sound” bit is accomplished inside our heads and we are not aware that we’re doing it. It seems as though we recognise every word by sight. Most people learn this implicitly and stop trying to memorise whole words.

People who don’t read or don’t read well DO recognise each word by sight and that is why they can’t access most text. They have a certain number of “sight words” and, beyond that, are unable to turn the printed squiggles into spoken words (inside their heads or otherwise). These are way too often the young people who think they’re stupid.

The purpose of phonics is to “correlate sounds with alphabetic symbols”(OED) so that struggling readers and beginning readers can access unfamiliar words in print. Synthetic (Linguistic, Explicit, All-through- the-word, etc) phonics has the student blend these sounds right through the word so that they are starting with meaningful words rather than individual sounds which have no meaning. The student learns to read and spell at the same time by listening for the sounds in a word then writing.

At the beginning level this is straight-forward as they learn the basic 1 letter to 1 sound spellings. But, of course, English is a mongrel language and notoriously complex. We have 26 letters, 40-44 sounds and a couple of hundred ways to spell those sounds. This information needs to be delivered in a structured way and, for older learners, it needs to include all the spellings and pronunciations in English.

The whole purpose of learning to read is to extract meaning from text and, in my ideal world, develop a love of literature. In the real world, where I work with lads whose favourite hobby involves driving dangerously in other peoples’ cars, the whole point is to get them reading for survival, some information, and, in my dreams, an expanded intellect and imagination. Comprehension develops through an increasing spoken vocabulary so a good reading programme also includes lots of time for discussing ideas and encountering new words.

Have a look at the The Basics on the About TRT page for a better idea of how this works.