![]() This can be done by first introducing words (e.g., cat, hat, rat, fat) using multi-sensory activities and stories. How should teachers prepare a phonics lesson for preschool children?Īs mentioned earlier, phonics instruction should be integrated with vocabulary instruction, because the ultimate goal is to help children make sense of what they have 'sounded out' from a text. The effectiveness of various phonics programmes depends on children’s ages. Research indicates that children who have learned strong phonological awareness acquire reading with greater ease and success than children who haven't. Sound manipulation includes combining sound units to form a word (known as blending, e.g., b + ad = bad) or breaking a word down into its component sound units (known as segmentation, e.g., bad = b + ad). Sound awareness refers to children’s abilities to identify the different sound units within a word, for example, syllables, onsets, rhymes (vowels with/without an ending consonant) and phonemes (individual sounds). Others take a different approach, for example by seeking to improve children’s phonological awareness – sound awareness and manipulation skills – before teaching letter-sound relationships. Some begin by highlighting the most frequently occurring letters in English (e.g., s, i, t) and then teach children how to blend these letters to form words (e.g., s, i, t to form ‘sit’). There are different commercial phonics programmes. ![]() Vocabulary instruction is followed by games through which children learn to identify and manipulate sounds. Key words that contain the target letter-sound relationships are first embedded in fun visuals that make sense to the children. Vocabulary instruction can go hand-in-hand with phonics instruction. It does not encourage children to learn how to use words in meaningful contexts, and stories that are used to highlight the target letter-sound relationships are often nonsensical. Knowledge of these patterns will help children sound out familiar words, and predict the pronunciation of unfamiliar words.Ĭritics of phonics often claim that this approach does not focus enough on meaning. Children would reflect on the shared spelling patterns across the target words. Teachers would highlight that, although the words ‘big’, ‘pig’, and ‘dig’ have different onsets (beginning sounds), the three words contain the same rhyme family ‘-ig’. In contrast, the phonics approach focuses on analytical skills for breaking the code of written language. They would not be encouraged to grasp that any other words containing the part ‘-ig’ (e.g., ‘fig’) would be similar in pronunciation. The pig is having a mud bath.' Children would memorise ‘big’, ‘pig’, and ‘dig’ as three separate lexical units. For example, to help children recognise the words ‘pig’, ‘big’ and ‘dig’, teachers might put these words in the following sentences and encourage the children to read these sentences multiple times: 'I can see a big pig. The whole-language approach encourages rote memorisation based on a child's visual memory of individual words. Studies on children’s reading development have shown that the phonics approach is more effective than meaning-based approaches, such as the whole-language approach, in improving young children’s reading skills. Children learn the sounds that each letter makes, and how a change in the order of letters changes a word’s meaning. For example, if we don’t pay attention to letter order, words such as ‘dog’ and ‘pat’ might be misread as ‘god’ and ‘tap’ respectively. Phonics teaches this information to help children learn how to read. It is important for children to learn letter-sound relationships because English uses letters in the alphabet to represent sounds. ![]() To read English successfully, children must learn to turn the words they see in a text into sounds, and make sense of these sounds. We often hear educators say, 'What children can say today forms the basis for what they can read and write in the future'. What is a phonics approach to learning to read, and how can you use it in the classroom with younger children? We asked Dr Richard Wong fromThe Hong Kong University of Education and Dr Susan Russak from Beit Berl Academic College, Israel.
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