More Common Terms in Teaching Reading

Synthetic phonics is a popular system used to teach phonics to children. One of the best-known schemes used in schools to teach synthetic phonics is Jolly Phonics. It involves looking at each letter or grapheme within the written word, associating these to the sounds they represent and then learning to blend those sounds together in order to read the word. They also need phonemic awareness in order to identify the phomenes or sounds in spoken words and then know which letter or group of letters is used to represent these sounds in order to write the word. The UK government has produced their own ‘scheme’ which can be taught using a commercially published scheme or by making your own resources but which is now taught in all UK schools. This is called ‘Letters and Sounds’.  This is quite a long and complicated document aimed at teachers, but I use and explain various ideas from it in other sections of this site where I give ideas of how to help at home with reading, so don’t worry if you haven’t got the time to sift through it all!

Analytical phonics teaches children by analyzing and comparing words with identical sounds and they work out how each sound is represented by a letter or group of letters (for example loud, cloud, sound). The individual graphemes are not taught separately, but are identified within words. The focus is not on learning how to blend sounds and some blends (for example ‘sl’ and ‘st’) are looked at as a whole rather than as individual phonemes which are then blended together.

Embedded phonics is used in ‘whole language programs’, where the focus is on learning meaning through reading ‘real’ books.  Phonics are not taught as a separate or individual lesson, but are taught opportunistically as and when the need arises when reading.

Cues are the things which help people read. There are various cues that help:
•    Phonics cues – knowing the letters and the sounds they make help you to work out what the word might say even if it is one you’ve not seen before.
•    Picture cues – looking at the pictures can help children guess at a word they don’t know.
•    Semantics cues – using the context and meaning of the sentence helps children to decide what word is likely to come next and if their guess based on phonics is likely to be correct.
•    Syntactic cues – children without realising it know about grammar and what word would fit in to a sentence and make sense, sounding like real language.

In order to become fluent readers, children need to learn to use all of these cues to help them read.