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An Introduction To Synthetic Phonics
Move over Real Books. Move over Phonics. The new path is Synthetic Phonics! But what does the term really mean?
Move over Real Books. Move over Phonics. The new path is Synthetic Phonics! But what does the term really mean?
A phonemes are the small individual sounds that make up words. So the word photo has 5 letters, 4 phonemes and two syllables.
In the English Language there are 43 phonemes in all, to make up every word. And there are 1420 possible letter patterns to generate them.
Literacy education is split between two main approaches; Real Books and Phonics.
Real books teaching works on the principal of exposure to text and learning through experience. In real books teaching, the child picks up the patterns of letters by repeat exposure and intelligent guessing using the context of the sentence and other clues such as associated pictures.
In the other camp, the teachers work with the phonemes, 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 better?
Well, the peak results of Synthetic Phonics seem to win, with 95%+ of learners successfully learning to read.
But it is hard to achieve the same results across the school system. Synthetic phonics is a technical approach not suited to all teachers.
As a result, it has never had such good results in general use as in the test environment.
The alternative that we have been working on is to combine the two approaches. We deliver the essential technical side of the synthetic phonics over the Internet, and then build on that with a real books approach using Easyread TrainerText.