Jj is for Jottings 65.  What Is Synthetic Phonics?

We’re just taking a break from the series on How to Raise a Reader – we’ll finish it next time.

Synthetic phonics means “building words from individual sounds”.  For example, even if you had never seen it before, you could spell the word “step” by listening for the first sound – /s/ – and writing its corresponding letter; then the next sound – /t/ – and writing its corresponding letter; then the same with /e/ and finally /p/.  To put it another way, synthetic phonics simply means teaching children the relationship between the SOUND of the word or individual letter (how it is spoken) and the SPELLING of a word (how it is written).  This is where it is so important for the learning reader to know the sound made by each letter of the alphabet.  This is also known as sound-letter links or, in more technical jargon, the phoneme-grapheme relationship.

PHONEME=THE INDIVIDUAL UNIT OF SOUND.

GRAPHEME=THE WRITTEN REPRESENTATION OF A SOUND.

The perfect tool for learning sound-letter links is “Aa is for Alpacas.”

Ideally, children need suitable practice on how to synthesize words (‘building’ words) before they learn to recognise words ‘on sight’ (i.e. the ‘shape’ / picture of the whole word).  Why?  Because if they are in the habit of looking at the whole word, they are less likely to look at details within the word and therefore to accurately decode the word.  However, what usually happens is that children have picked up some words by sight before they get to the formal part of learning sound-letter links.  They learn words by sight from their environment – street signs, product labels, TV ads, and from having stories read with them, if they are looking at the words as the story is being read.

It is amazing how many children just guess a word on the basis of the overall shape of the word or its first sound.  Or they sit there and wait to be told, applying no decoding skills whatsoever.  A number of them can actually tell you the sound of each letter and blend them together, if you take them through it sound by sound: “What is the first sound?  Good.  Now what is the next sound?”  And so on.  Or they have to be told to sound out a word that they don’t instantly recognise.  Although they have the skills, at least to some extent, they have to be instructed to use them every time.  I often wonder if these children have everything done for them at home and don’t have to take any responsibility for themselves.