Synthetic phonics
• Synthetic phonics does not teach whole words as shapes (initial sight vocabulary) prior to learning the alphabetic code.
I hate to quibble...oh, who am I kidding? I
love to quibble! But this is not necessarily true. The "strictest" phonics proponents might insist against introducing sight words, but it would not make a program that is otherwise a systematic, careful presentation of phonics somehow non-phonics if a child were to memorize 100 of the least phonetic dolch words.
• Synthetic phonics does not teach letter names until the children know their letter/s-sound correspondences thoroughly and how to blend for reading and segment for spelling. Often when letter names are introduced it is through singing an alphabet song.
In whose opinion? Some phonics programs teach the letter names. They just also emphasize teaching the letter sounds, too.
So far, I didn't use a phonics program on either of these counts. But...I did.
• Synthetic phonics does not involve guessing at words from context, picture and initial letter clues. Children read print (at letter level, word level, digraphs, word level, text level) which corresponds with the level of knowledge and skills taught to date. This means they rehearse what they have been specifically taught and do not need to guess. This text level print is often referred to as phonically decodable text. Repetitive books are not necessary and children can rapidly access books described as 'real' because of the effectiveness of the synthetic phonics teaching approach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_phonicsNot always the most reliable source. ;-)
None of the above points actually states what synthetic phonics is all about. The first two points are non-essential. The third simply says that it is not a guess-from-context "whole language" approach.
So, without quoting Wikipedia, let me explain what synthetic phonics is, on my understanding, for those who don't actually know. It involves introducing word sounds--and, with them, of course, whole words--systematically. First, you might learn consonant sounds plus the short "a" sound. Then you can read "cat," "bag," etc. Then you go through the rest of the short vowel sounds. Eventually you work your way to diphthongs, long vowels, "ci" as in "special" and "tion" as in "action." Throughout, you introduce variants of consonant sounds, digraphs, and so forth. After a child has completely learned and practiced phonics, he can read aloud
virtually anything, when many whole language-taught students are stuck looking blankly at a word until someone tells them what it says. In short, synthetic phonics is what people in most parts of the world (with written languages that can be sounded out) regard as learning to read.
If you consider the full complement of phonetic clues, according to Rudolpf Flesch summing up the work of other researchers, English is 87% phonetically decodable. Of course, if you are only learning
the most obvious phonics rules, as is the case with "partial phonics" "balanced literacy" programs, then it will look a lot more irregular.
For anybody who wants all the tired old myths about phonics debunked, you can't do better with Rudolf Flesch's two books,
Why Johnny Can't Read and
Why Johnny Still Can't Read. And if you wish to learn more about the hard scientific basis for phonics, and why there is virtually a consensus in favor of phonics
outside of education schools, see books on the subject by Diane McGuinness, Marilyn Jager Adams, and Mona McNee (for the U.K. side of things).
By the way--the lists of the different ways of writing the long "a" sound? Well, most of those words are either phonetic (if you actually know the rules!) or fall into patterns predictable enough that you can try out one possibility or another and then "get it." Such examples of the alleged non-phoneticness of English are unimpressive to me. It's an old canard--debunked by all of the above writers, but my favorite is still Flesch.
The GD approach has the virtue of working with a high percentage of babies and it avoids the need to teach visual and auditory abstractions. The system starts with the ‘self’ vocabulary because babies first learn about their own body and progresses to words which name familiar objects such as wall and door.
I wouldn't want to deny this (though I sure would love to have a careful scientific study actually supporting it). My point is that hardly anyone has tried (on a large scale) using a more phonetic approach with babies. So maybe the percentage of babies that it would work with would be higher than with the traditional GD approach, eh?
After all, it is admitted by almost everyone that the whole word/whole language method works for most students. It just doesn't work nearly as consistently as with phonics; and it's
so much more inefficient. Why not think the same would be true of teaching babies to read?
Words are the units of language and if you teach the alphabet first you might make your baby a slower reader than he would otherwise be.
On what basis do you make the latter, very interesting claim?
Often the reasoning for such a claim (when applied to older children) is that children will silently sound out every word, because they have been taught to sound out words. This is wrong. Once a child learns a word, he tends to have it memorized in much the same way a "whole word"-taught child would have it. (It's just that, since he's learned the rules, he can figure it out if he
has to.) Classrooms that use sound, synthetic phonics produce more fluent readers than whole word classrooms. The reason for this is not hard to understand. The students in whole word classrooms were never taught how to decode words properly. So, if they don't have the word down
cold, they have to rack their brain to remember it, or use context, or whatever, which takes time. They can't just quickly glance at the
contents of the word, the phonetic makeup, and
sound it out. So...they...tend...to...read...like...this.
If you want to say that your baby or child has learned to read by memorizing whole words, and he or she is reading very fluently too, I think that's probably because your baby or child was clever enough to infer the phonetic code when first learning to read. This is what Robert Titzer believes happens with babies, which is why he has the moving arrow under the word: it helps the baby to connect up letters with sounds. There's no hard proof that this is happening other than analysis of many anecdotal cases, but it makes sense to me.
I don't think we have a lot of data, and I actually don't know how much of my own boy's ability to read came from him just naturally picking up words in the context of reading. Maybe a lot--that does happen. But I do know that when I taught him a new set of words, phonetically grouped (I was doing this intensively about a year ago), his reading ability seemed to improve tremendously. I also noticed that he was able to read new words that followed the new rules. And he reads and always has read very fluently.
An awareness of the alphabet will result in your baby reading the letters instead of the words.
We had no such experience when we taught our toddler to read phonetically, FWIW.
I would avoid teaching groups of words like-hand, hard, hot, hoot, head, hood as these are extremely similar in appearance and defying babies to tell them apart is crazy! It is simpler to discern the difference between the words ostrich and hippopotamus than to see the difference between the words hoot and hood. It should be noted that longer words are often easier to learn because of their unique appearance.
And yet my little guy
did learn such minute differences with no trouble at all...go figure. Well, maybe it's because he was 22 months old instead of 9 months old. Right? ;-)
I suggest that babies introduced to phonics learn to read despite rather than because of phonics.
Interesting suggestion. On what basis do you make it?
My children all read with inflection and meaning, in contrast to the average seven-year old, who reads each word separately and without appreciation of the sentence as a whole. Children who learn to read as babies tend to read much more rapidly and comprehensively than children who do not.
Well done! But the average seven-year-old is neither raised in a very language-rich environment nor exposed to systematic phonics. So-called "balanced literacy" (the latest description of what was formerly described as "whole language") still rules the day, except in those places where a sensible school board or maverick superintendent has bucked the education establishment.
DadDude
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