Using Synthetic Phonics is an effective but often desperately dull and tedious way to teach a child to read. And does this tedium ever create in children a strong internalized need to read? Mike Lake suggests that putting fun and real reading into phonics teaching can add the missing, magic ingredient.
Synthetic Phonics is now a recognised method of reading instruction, used by many schools. What does Synthetic Phonics mean? Definitions vary – and can degenerate into little more than long lists of what it isn’t. A neat, no-nonsense definition is given by Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson (who did, after all, start the whole thing moving): “Synthetic Phonics teaches letter sounds very rapidly and children are explicitly shown how to blend the sounds together to pronounce unfamiliar words.” (Johnston and Watson 2005).
Somewhat enlarged, and with an emphasis upon listening, would be a definition derived from Diane McGuinness, who has analysed all known writing systems for the last five thousand years. She has concluded that all written code systems follow the type of spoken language which gave rise to them. Modern European languages are coded by phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and therefore must be coded and de-coded alphabetically.
Listening to the sounds in words comes first. (In all languages, writing is a code for the spoken word which preceded it.) Her basic requirements for reading and spelling contain not only blending, but also segmenting (isolating the sounds in words) and auditory manipulation (holding a word in memory, while pulling sounds in and out – necessary for spelling correction.) (MsGuinness, 1993).
There can no longer be any serious doubt that a synthetic phonics approach to teaching reading works – and not only works, but works better than any of the other approaches which have been used in the last few decades.