The Alphabetic Principles Of Spoken Language

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The understanding that spoken language is made up of sounds that are mapped to written letters, is the notion of the alphabetic principle (http://www.readingrockets.org/article/alphabetic-principle). Mary Clay (1991, as cited in Harris et al., 2006) suggests children need to recognise letters and words and understand that words are made up of letters. In the beginning stages, alphabetic principles can be taught through songs, creating letters from play dough and shared reading with alphabetic books. Having developed linguistic knowledge along with an understanding of the alphabetic principles, children move into the phonological phase of reading acquisition.

The alphabetic principle and early reading acquisition is best taught through …show more content…

Phonics is the relationship between sounds and letters, and involves understanding the alphabetic principles of spoken language, as sounds that are mapped to letters to create written texts (Hill, 1999). As children begin to read and write they require the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes and graphemes and require explicit instruction, practise and exposure to develop successful letter sound knowledge (Konza, 2006). Phonics is an important part of reading acquisition as the English language is alphabetic and early readers rely on phonics to decode and decipher written text to bring about meaning (Mesmer & Griffith, 2014). The two main approaches to teaching phonics to early readers are the synthetic phonics approach and the analytic phonics method of …show more content…

They reread the book several times drawing children’s attention to phonetic elements, modelling decoding strategies and mean making strategies by asking questions like, “what do you think this word might be”, “what letter does it begin with” and “what do you think might happen next in the story” (Savage, 2007, p. 114). Goodman (as cited in Oakhill and Cain, 2006, p. 379), suggest that using contextual cues during shared reading and providing the initial onset, is one of the ways children learn to read. Educators need to have the skill of coaching and how to scaffold learning as well as providing children with phonics experiences based on the shared reading book. For example, they may ask children to develop a word wall or word families from words taken from the book, while the educators model phonetic strategies. As with shared reading, guided reading is a strategy educators can use to support children to develop phonetic skills and phonemic awareness, which are important reading

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