Approach to Phonics

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 7

Salient Points:

There are many approaches to teaching phonics.

Synthetic method: phonics generalizations. It is deductive and taught using clever rules. Teachers use worksheets and blending. However, this method is involves learning about a language rather than acquiring it.

Linguistic method: learning key spelling patterns. It did not provide early readers with motivation and did not emphasize meaning as the purpose to reading. Teachers use nonsensical words or silly stories.

Smart phonics: both phonics and whole language. Expert readers use resigning by analogy and contextual info in the form of frames. They store knowledge of typical rimes and onsets, morphemes, and syllables that show consistent spelling patterns. They also apply chunking of a graphic image and obtain a storage of chunked info on frames. They have a reduced memory load because of this chunking ability and can understand words better. The smart phonics method uses rhyming games and rhyming books.

Ehri (1998) has four stages in the acquisition of expert English L1 reading, which are:

1. The Pre-Alphabetic Stage: Readers connect the graphs on the page to the phonemes in their heads.
2. The Partial Alphabetic Stage: readers use knowledge of consonants, such as the rime and and the onset of work.
3. The Full Alphabetic Stage: Readers have a good knowledge base of the probabilities of the words and can read accurately and automatically. They can see the separate sounds and tap them out.
4. The Consolidated Alphabetic Stage: Readers have a large knowledge base of graphemic and phonemic patterns and use frames to soon out words. They blend graphemes together and read more fluidly.

Implications:

We as teachers must give our students practice in using an analogy to frame strategy (patterns) so they can sound out words correctly. ELLs can have a storage of frames (patterns) in their head that they can use to help them sound out difficult words. If we know the different first stages of reading, we must create differentiated reading activities in our classrooms.

We also have to model reading strategies such as tapping out words and play games with our students--anything that has them practicing oral language such as making up rhymes, singing songs, or using the Benchmark Method.

The Benchmark Method can be used by having a wall of pattern words, where the students break up the unknown word into syllables and onsets and rimes. They find words on the wall that have similar patterns to the different syllables, onsets and rimes.

We can also have our students read aloud, but it must be in a supportive environment. Sometimes it is helpful for the students to practice silently by themselves before their turn comes up. They can listen to a book on tape and read silently with it or low-level students can be paired with high-level students practice reading together. The high level reader starts reading and the low-level reader waits a little and then starts reading. The low level reader can hear the high level reader and try to match their pronunciations with them (shadowing). This also works with choral reading, where low-level readers can hear how words should be pronounced.