EdTalk | Phoning in Phonics: why teaching phonics shouldn’t stop after basic literacy training
In contrast to the approach of many Hong Kong schools, phonics improves contemporary literacy education, and should be used beyond preschool and early primary classrooms
There are few things more certain in education than the best approach to teaching a child how to read: synthetic phonics. The research is thorough and convincing, and the effects are tried and true.
Phonics is an approach characterised by teaching the sounds that letters make rather than their names; taking these sounds and constructing words, and using sounds to decode words when reading. It stands in contrast to old-fashioned “look and spell” approaches, where words are learned by visual memory. Look and spell is exemplified in traditional spelling tests, in which students memorise a set of words with no context or any attempt to systematise the language.
It is a surprise then, that the application of phonics in schools can be a mixed bag. Phonics is fairly ubiquitous in the very early years of education in Hong Kong, but it seems to disappear somewhere around Grade 3.
As a result, phonics has been treated as a stepping stone to literacy, not as part of it, and this causes some problems.
As a literacy specialist, I rarely bother to ask concerned parents if their young child has had phonics exposure. This is because their child usually will have learned at least the basic sounds for each letter. The story changes in later grades, however. Classrooms seem to fall back to the antiquated look and spell method, as if the usefulness of phonics stops beyond the simplest words. This is simply not the case. As students get older, teachers often act more like spellcheckers, swooping in to provide a correction, rather than continuing to develop students’ literacy tool kits. As they do so, they teach students how words are spelt or read a certain way, but not why.
This ties into literacy - and even learning - as a whole. Reading, writing, and spelling all benefit from a systematic approach. When teachers set students up with an excellent literacy toolkit, only to undermine it later, we invariably slow their progress. We also send a mixed message: phonics makes literacy sensible and rule based, whereas look and spell makes it seem arbitrary.
