Phonics Instruction And Summary And Analysis

To be able to teach phonics, you first have to understand what the term phonics represents and why exposure to phonics is essential to a child’s reading and literacy development. Phonics are often described as the reading, spelling and writing of words by the sounds heard (Edwards, 1964). It is the understanding that letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) are related to one another, thus forming the alphabetic principle (Armbruster, Lehr, Osborn, Adler & Noonis, 2000). The alphabetic principle advocates that each letter of the alphabet should denote only one sound (Tompkins, Campbell, Green and Smith, 2015). Foreman & Arthur-Kelly confirm “one of the key components of reading is the understanding that words are made up of consistent sounds

Teachers need to be flexible and use their professional judgement to observe and assess their student’s capabilities to successfully create an authentic phonics program. As children develop and learn at different paces, quiet often teachers encounter children with a range of diverse literacy understandings (Arthur, Beecher, Death, Dockett & Farmer, 2015). Rose states that “effective literacy teachers, plan sequence and directly teach phonic skills and ensure that all phonics instruction occurs in a meaningful context (2006). This does not mean that there is only one way to teach phonics, on the contrary, there are limitless ways in which teachers could explore and investigate phonics. Teachers are only limited by their repertoire of strategies’, they must be able to apply various techniques and strategies that are suited towards the educational needs and aptitudes of their children. Some of the most used approaches are Synthetic phonics – the conversion of letters into sounds and then blending them together, Analytic phonics – analyzation of the letter-sound relationship and not the single sound blends, Analogy-based phonics – using prior knowledge of words the know and decoding the rest, Embedded phonics - letter-sound relationships during the reading of connected text, Phonics through spelling – segmenting words into phonemes and matching letters to the phonemes and onset-rime phonics – recognition of common chunks within words and identifying the initial phonological unit of the word (Armbruster et al, 2000). Whatever the approach used, reseach has shown that phonics instruction needs to be