What are Synthetic Phonics?

Move over Real Books. Move over Phonics. The new path is Synthetic Phonics! But what does the term really mean?

Within each word are individual sounds called phonemes. For instance, the word plough has 6 letters, 3 phonemes and 1 syllable.

In the English Language there are 43 phonemes in all, to make up every word. And there are 1420 possible letter patterns to generate them.

There are two main camps of literacy educators, who believe in either the Real Books approach or in Phonics.

The Real Books philosophy is to expose children to interesting books with pictures. The child then steadily picks up an ability to decode the text, first by becoming familiar with a basic vocabulary and then by intelligent guessing using the context and pictures as clues.

Phonics teaching focusses on the understanding of the phonemes used in words, the phonic structure of words and the relationship between different letter patterns and each phoneme.

Within Phonics there are two principal approaches. Analytical Phonics looks at the main letter patterns within words and teaches those to the learner. So fat, hat, mat and splat would all be grouped together. In that way, the learner just has to become familiar with each letter group, and to differentiate within the group. So it tends to focus on syllables.

Synthetic Phonics goes further and works from the individual phonemes. The common letter patterns for each phoneme are taught and the child learns to blend these back together to form the word.

Which is the best approach?

Well, the peak results of Synthetic Phonics seem to win, with 95%+ of learners successfully learning to read.

But it is hard to achieve the same results across the school system. Synthetic phonics is a technical approach not suited to all teachers.

For that reason, the results achieved with Synthetic Phonics in general use tend to be lower than in a small trial setting.

We have developed a new path, that takes the best elements of both systems. We deliver the more technical aspects of synthetic phonics over the Internet and then build on that foundation with Easyread TrainerText, which is a more Real Books approach.

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For more information on reading help and online literacy support and more on the Easyread Coaching System, visit our site EasyRead Coaching System

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