I remember when I was in secondary school in Germany and read the word ‘Edinburgh’ for the first time. The teacher told me to read the word out loud and I pronounced it completely wrong. Instead of /ɛdɪnbɹə/ I said /ɛdɪnbɜːrg/. At that moment, I rethought my whole English literacy skills. I asked myself “How do British pupils learn to read English?’’. Well, I have to tell you that I have never had an answer for this query but today, I want to answer this enigmatic question. Consequently, my main aim in this blog is to focus on and evaluate the current UK government’s recommended method for teaching literacy skills to English pupils.
In the UK, pupils learn the synthetic phonics method to acquire literacy skills and at the end of Year 1, they are tested by the phonics screening check (Department of Education, 2019). The children who fail the test need to retake it at the end of year 2 (Ibid.). But what is synthetic phonics? And what is this screening check about? Let’s start with synthetic phonics. “In synthetic phonics programs, children are taught first to transform letters into sounds and then to blend these sounds to form words’’ (Dessemontet et al., 2019). In other words, synthetic phonics are Grapheme-Phoneme correspondences (Darnell et al., 2017). In the screening check, pupils are given 20 pseudo words and 20 real words which are not shown in a meaningful text (Davis, 2013). The assessment is about decoding the words correctly by using the synthetic phonics method (Darnell et al., 2017). But is this really efficient?
According to an educational psychologist Dr. Marlynne Grant, synthetic phonics promote literacy skills and even help disadvantaged children who come from a non- academic background or children with dyslexia (Adams, 2014). Also, some researchers claim that teaching phonics would be the best way to acquire reading skills (Gove, 2013 cited in Davis, 2013).
Nonetheless, the synthetic phonics approach is criticised because they only focus on decoding phonics but not on comprehension (Davis, 2013; Walker et al., 2013, 2014 cited in Darnell et al., 2017). In addition, “English is not written in a consistently ‘phonic’ way, so learning to read phonically will never teach a child how to read everything’’ (Dombey et al., 2010). This quote illustrates the issue that I have mentioned before with the word ‘Edinburgh’. And this is not the only word that may be mispronounced. Further examples can be shown in the poem “the chaos’’ by Gerard Nolst Trenite (2014) which promote the fact that in contrast to a language such as German, English cannot be taught mainly synthetically. So would it not be more efficient in this case to include analytic phonics?
According to Dessemontet et al. (2019), ‘‘in analytic phonics programs children are taught to identify words, and in a second step to analyse letter-sound relations in these words“. Therefore, pupils would still learn phonics but in a different way. However, this method is also criticised. Learners may be confused because they still have to split the words into onset and rhyme units (Hepplewhite).
Another alternative to synthetic phonics would be the “whole word approach’’. In this method, pupils focus on the shape of words which could be best acquired in nursery rhymes or texts with pictures (Davies & Thirlby, 2014). One positive aspect about this method is that children would concentrate on the meaning rather than on phonics and its decoding process (Ibid., 2014). But the problem here is that children would not be able to memorise all of the words (Hepplewhite).
So what is the best method? Teaching synthetic phonics is not completely negative. The problem so far is that firstly, it focuses not on the meaning. Secondly, critics claim that the problem lays on the testing of young English children (Lyle, 2014) which can pressure a child. I would support this claim because when we only learn something for a test we do not really concentrate on the main target which for the pupils is reading.
Consequently, the children would mainly learn for extrinsic reasons. Another problem is the focus on only one method. “If we want England’s children to get better at reading and to do more of it, we have to give them a diet that is attractive, nutritious and satisfying’’ (Dombey et al., 2010). Thus, each individual learns differently which demonstrates that all suggested methods mentioned in my blog can be used by different children.
SARA HUSSEIN, English Language undergraduate, University of Chester, UK
References
Davis, A. (2013). To read or not to read: decoding Synthetic Phonics.
Dombey. H. et al (2010). Teaching reading: What the evidence says. UKLA.
Hepplewhite, D. Debbie Hepplewhite’s advice on Synthetic Phonics teaching.
Lyle, S. (2014). The limits of phonics teaching. School Leadership Today 5 (5), 68-74
Thirlby, J., and Davies, M. (2014). The Great Phonics Debate. Babel, 9, pp.35-38
Language Debates 
It is interesting when you analyse how and why we say words the way we do and when you come across new words how you approach their pronunciation.