Phonic English Language Analysis

The English language consists of a mere 26 Letters, consisting of five vowels and 21 consonants. These 26 letters are where it all begins; reading, writing, phonics, phonemes, phonological awareness, blends, diagraphs, rimes, contractions, and so much more, but this assessments focus will be phonics. Phonics, what is it? What does the term mean for a teacher? This question along with some of the main strategies teachers use to instruct students with phonics including embedded, analogy, analytical and synthetic phonics and the effects that they have been found to have on children will be discussed, critiqued and analysed in this assessment. Phonics will also be compared with other reading methods and there will be examples given from many different recourses along with the units’ readings. Phonics is not just seen as the relationship between the letters and their sounds but it also seen as the method used by teachers to teach the understanding that there are relationships between letter patterns and sound patterns in English, and helping students to develop the ability to relate those letter patterns to sound patterns (Development, 2009; Hill, 2006; Liu, nd; Tompkins, Campbell, & Green, 2012; Trust, 2016). There are many different ways to look at phonics instruction, with many different theories to go along with them, but no matter what type of instruction is chosen there is one thing that educators all agree on and that is that phonics is a fundamental part of learning to read. Johnston (2007) believes that Phonic methods to teaching reading to capitalise on the fact that the English spelling system is alphabetic; that is, the letter sounds in words are a helpful, if sometimes imperfect, guide to pronunciation. However, Tompkins et al. (2012) considers that the importance is on spelling patterns, not separate letters because there is not a ‘perfect’ one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in English. Tompkins et al. (2012) also believes that there are 44 different speech sounds in the English language and when children learn to talk is when they first learn these sounds and the pronunciation of them along with the letter, sound association begins later when they learn to read and write. (Weaver, nd) infers that we should “have faith in children as learners." As children can and usually will obtain a grasp of letter/sound relationships with little direct teaching. Phonics has been around since the 1800’s with the work of Favell Lee Mortimer and her book Reading Disentangled from 1834, that had a set of illustrated phonics cards that 's been credited as the first flashcards in history (Mortimer & Pruzan, 2006). However, phonics fell out of fashion in the 1960’s when Whole language learning took over. Whole-word recognition was embraced as it was believed that children would learn to read without having to learn the alphabet by rote. However, over the past 50 years, this method has progressively been rejected by evaluators as "look and guess” due to children using supplementary clues from the page or memorise the stories which they then plan to read. This advance was brought on by the work of Piaget, who suggested that children constructed knowledge for themselves and that they were active learners. {Johnston, 2007} These philosophies were then pertained to reading, even though Piaget did not exactly deal with learning to read in his research, …show more content…
This information also supports the theory that it can quickly become apparent that some phonics programs are better suited to some students than others, as in the early grades, students are known to vary greatly in the skills they bring to school, as these skills a lot of the time will vary due to socioeconomic, cultural and social background the student comes …show more content…
The Embedded method is an approach to the teaching of reading in which phonics forms one part of a whole language programme and differs from other methods in that the instruction is always in the context of literature rather than in separate lessons, and the skills to be taught are identified opportunistically rather than systematically. Analogy phonics are a type of analytic phonics in which children analyse phonic elements according to the phonograms in the word & Children use these phonograms to learn about “word families”(Trust, 2016)