Basic Phonics Skills
Pupils need to know
the letters of the alphabet well
the specific matches between sounds and
letters in words(e.g. /ch/air/)
that words are made up of separable sounds
(awareness of phonemes)
sentences are made up of words
The KSSR English
Language
Syllabus
The teaching of Phonics
as one of the
strategies to develop children basic literacy.
What is Phonics?
A method of teaching children to read (not
something they need to learn)
Phonics instruction teaches children the
relationships between the letters
(graphemes) of written language and the
individual sounds (phonemes) of spoken
language.
It teaches children to use these relationships
to read and write words.
It is NOT Phonemic awareness.
Theory of Phonics
Children must learn that connections between
letter patterns and the sounds they
represent.
The teacher must provide direct, explicit
instruction about phonics rules and patterns.
Children taught phonics using systematic
phonics made better progress in reading and
spelling.
Issues
English is complex:
44 sounds represented by 26 letters
Confusion because of the possible range of
correspondence between a sound and spelling
represented
/f/: f - /fish/, ph - /photo/
Issues
A proportion of commonly used English
language words that are not phonetically
regular.(e.g. /ch/air,
/ch/aracter, ma/ch/ine)
75% of the English spelling system is
phonetically regular the rest could be quite
problematic .
Approaches to teaching
Phonics
Synthetic Phonics
Analytic Phonics
Synthetic Phonics
Sounds and corresponding letters are learnt
first and in isolation
Blending and segmenting are taught
specifically and separately
Read phonetically regular books
Analytic phonics
Sounds are taught in connection with words
Children learn that multiple words share the
same initial sound
Learn phonics by deduction from texts e.g.
bat, bus, beg, bill
Phoneme
Smallest unit of sound /-/
e.g. /s/, /ch/,/ph/, /oi/oy/, /ee/,/ff/
Grapheme
Written form of the letters in the English
alphabet
a-z
Digraph
When 2 graphemes are combined to form a
phoneme
Consonant digraph ph - /f/, ff - /f/, kn - /n/, nn
- /n/
Vowel digraph ow - /ow/, ay - /ei/, ee - /e/, oo
- /oo/
Approaches to teaching
Phonics
Blending - to combine the individual sounds
to letters to form words
cat - /k/a/t/
Segmenting to break down individual letter
sounds to sound it correctly
/h/a/t/ - hat
Approaches to teaching
Phonics
Substitution - identify beginning, middle, and
end sound of a word. Then change the
beginning or end sound/letter
e.g. cat ca/t/, ca/p/; /c/at/, /h/at/;
Deletion - identify and omit the beginning or
end sound of a word
Word family a word ending consisting of a
vowel and consonant combination e.g.
/an/, /at/, /op/
Sight & High frequency
words
Sight words need to be memorized on sight
e.g. where, were, one, who, you
High frequency words - words that occur
frequently in English
e.g. it, he, them
Phonological awareness
Pupils need to know that
some written words are longer than the
spoken form
words are made of syllables
that words rhyme
Phonemic awareness
Pupils need to
understands that there are many words that
start with the same sound
know that spoken words are made up of
individual sounds
able to identify and manipulate individual
sounds
know that phonemes can be rearranged and
substituted to make new words