Synthetic Phonics. a Phonemic Awareness for the Instruction of the English Language For

SYNTHETIC PHONICS. A PHONEMIC AWARENESS FOR THE INSTRUCTION OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FOR EFL/ESL LEARNERS

MARIA JOSÉ RUIZ PALACIOS

[email protected]

1 Abstract

English has fast become one of the most widely spoken languages in the world as it is used as a lingua franca by millions of people. In Spain, English is taught as a foreign language. Spanish speakers learning English show weaknesses in their listening and speaking skills. In fact, Spanish speakers are easily recognised when talking in English by their strong accent. As a result, these production skills -listening and speaking- may need an extra reinforcement for Spanish speakers learning English. This paper will have a look at the method used in Britain to teach English to their native speakers and will try to draw conclusions about its possible implementation in an ESL/EFL environment. In our opinion, the adoption of this method in Spain could be done fully with very young children whereas other strategies must be added when this phonemic awareness is addressed to adult learners.

Keywords: English, lingua franca, pronunciation, ESL/EFL environment, phonemic awareness, method recommended, Britain

2 INDEX

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………..4

2. Methodology………………………………………………………………………6

3. Idiosyncrasy and a brief history of the English language…….... ……………………………………………………………………..6

4. Phonics…………………………………………………………………………....7

5. Synthetic and analytic phonics approaches……………………………..…….8

6. Synthetic phonics…………………………………………………………..…….9

7. The Jolly Phonics………………………………………………………………..10

7.1.Structure and pace: Learning the letter sounds

7.1.1.Rate of introduction

7.1.2.Order of letter sound groups

Letter groups Letter names Alternative spelling of vowels

7.2. Learning to read. The blending skill

Introducing storybooks 7.3.Learning to write. The segmenting skill. Identifying the sounds in words

7.4. Mastering the knowledge of language. The tricky words.

8. Conclusions…………………………………………………………………….17

References

3 4 1. Introduction

English has fast become one of the most spoken languages in the world as it is used as a lingua franca by millions of people. Consequently, the English language is one of the most studied languages in the world today.

In Spain, English is taught as a foreign language and becomes the children’s second or third language, depending on they are living in a bilingual autonomous region.

In relation to the English language, Spanish speakers show strengths in reading and writing skills but show weaknesses in their listening and speaking skills. In fact, Spanish speakers are easily recognised when talking in English by their strong accent.

Furthermore, Spanish speakers who are learning English, sometimes they feel frustrated in their learning when teachers keep correcting them because they are not able to predict the pronunciation of some English words, even in advanced stages of their learning.

Learners tend to produce the phonemes of L2 from the phonemes they know in their mother tongue. Phonemes in both these languages have differences among them. As a result, a phonemic awareness should be provided to Spanish speakers in their learning of the English language.

In addition to this, English may seem “chaotic” to a Spanish speaker. Spanish is a more “transparent” language than English in the sense that there is an almost one-to-one relationship between graphemes and phonemes. On the other hand, the English alphabet contains 26 letters but it is formed by 40-plus phonemes. If English native learners can decode their language, it may also be possible for an ESL/EFL learner.

In relation to these matters, Oxford University Press is incorporating in their ESL/EFL materials some aspects about English pronunciation and prosodic features of the English language in order to complement the existing materials.

5 Moreover, Oxford University Press is also mentioning the introduction of the synthetic phonics method in their annual conferences in Spain. We know that several schools in Spain are starting to put into practice The Jolly Phonics, a synthetic phonics method. In fact, there is a school in Asturias which has fully implemented The Jolly Phonics in two years. The teachers of this school assert that the children have acquired a much better pronunciation. However, it has been impossible to examine these results empirically yet.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how the British education system deals with the teaching of the English language and if the same method can be applied to ESL/EFL teaching as well. The synthetic phonics approach The Jolly Phonics will be chosen to be analysed and thus help us to draw our conclusions.

6 2. Methodology

The present body of this paper will briefly describe the history of the English language in order to try to explain the idiosyncrasy of the mismatched correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. Furthermore, we will take a look at how the education system has approached the learning of their own language through time and then we will analyse one of the present approaches recommended by the British authorities. Finally we will draw our own conclusions in order to assert if the synthetic phonics can also be applied in an ESL/EFL environment.

3. Idiosyncrasy and a brief history of the English language

Whereas the Spanish language maintains an almost one-to-one relationship between graphemes and phonemes, English is not a “pure” alphabetic system language and does not behave in the same way.

The complexity of its orthography is due to a number of different reasons including how its pronunciation has changed in the course of time while at the same time certain written forms have preserved their earliest pronunciations.

In addition to this, words from different languages have been directly imported with their foreign spelling intact. However, the departure from a more transparent orthography took place in the late 16th century when printers began to move to a fixed spelling of words (Baugh, 2002).

Nevertheless, English is not only a phonemic language but a morphophonemic one (Stubs, 1980) and the understanding of how these phonemes can be represented by single letters and other spelling patterns would be of great assistance in the development of English literacy. The knowledge of the principles of English spelling will provide the key to decode how the writing system relates to the spoken language (C. Chomsky, 1970).

This idiosyncratic orthography can be an issue when learning, especially if it is glossed over or if the student comes from a more “pure” phonetic system as it is the case of Spanish speakers learning English.

7 The complexity of the English language has in fact been an issue for the British government as well due to the existence of a high number of literacy problems in A level school exams. As a consequence British authorities have been forced to look into different approaches and put forth a number of recommendations.

Overall, the British government has decided that the most effective teaching method, and thus the recommended one, is synthetic phonics (DfES, 2006). Synthetic phonics is an approach which begins teaching children firstly the phonemes (the letter sounds). Then, the children proceed with a double process of separating the phonemes (segmenting) and putting them together (blending). It is claimed that children achieve not only the pronunciation of words but also develop their listening, reading and writing skills.

4. Phonics

Phonics is not a new method. Phonics has been a teaching method for the last two centuries in England and America. However, which phonics teaching method is the best has been the topic of hot debate.

Phonics as a teaching method made its entrance in 1850 but prior to this, teaching was done through the alphabet and the alphabetic method. The alphabetic method centred on teaching children to recognize and name the letters of the alphabet in alphabetical order. Alphabets descend from the Phoenician alphabet, which developed from a pictographic form into a more abstract form of a phonetic, consonantal alphabet. This was adopted by the Greeks and was modified to include the vowel representations. Greeks became the first Europeans to write using an alphabet and this alphabetic approach has since dominated the teaching of reading from the Greek period to the 19 th century.

However, around 1850 a new method was established for the learning the phonemes of the language: the phonics approach. The phonics approach was widely embraced in England and America but lost its influence and it was not until 1920 that it was revived again and became established in England.

This phonics approach was based on treating whole words as basic learning units with endless lists of words that had to be memorised. It prevailed until the

8 second half of the 20th century in which a debate took place due to the failure in achieving literacy among children. As a result, a reframing of phonics took place in the 1980’s and “analytic phonics” became widely practised from the late 1990’s. However, it lasted only for a brief time. (Maureen & Ellis, 2006)

The successful results from a school in Clackmannshire in which children were taught to read using synthetic phonics proved pivotal as the Clackmannshire findings put in motion a chain of events which included a national review of the teaching of phonics in England (DfES, 2005a). This culminated in the publication of “The Rose Report” (DfES, 2006) in which recommendations were made to use a synthetic phonics approach and to abandon the analytic approach.

5. Synthetic and analytic phonics approaches

In the debate about the role and the teaching of phonics, advocates of a “synthetics only” approach argue that the results obtained by such programmes are by far in advance of those obtained with the analytic phonics approach. But what are the differences between them?

On the one hand, the synthetic phonics approach systematically teaches children the phonemes associated with particular graphemes. First they learn to recognise and produce phonemes and later they learn to blend (synthesize) these phonemes together and create words. Blending is seen as a very important skill. In addition to the skill of blending, the skill of segmenting words into phonemes for spelling is also taught.

Both the processes of blending and segmenting are introduced as reversible processes. The order in which new phonemes are introduced and the speed at which this is undertaken is very important. Synthetic phonics programmes emphasize some easy to decode words which would be introduced initially. The people who favour this approach do not advocate teaching other reading strategies. Neither do they encourage the idea of introducing an initial sight vocabulary of high-frequency (non-phonically regular words) in the early stages of the synthetic phonics programme.

9 On the other hand, analytic phonics encourages children to identify phonemes in whole words and children are encouraged to segment the words into phonemes. Recognizing word families and patterns helps children develop inferential self-teaching strategies. For example, advocates assert that if they can read “cake”, they can work out and read “lake” without blending all the individual phonemes. (Maureen & Ellis, 2006)

6. Synthetics Phonics

Synthetic phonic programmes introduce phonemes in a series of steps. They usually begin with the learning of the letter sounds, distinguishing between vowels and consonants, recognizing initial and final phonemes in regular consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and introducing short vowels. From these simple CVC and CCVC combinations, words will be created through processes of segmenting and blending. Once the simple words have been created with these phonemes, the long vowels sounds will be later introduced.

Different programmes may introduce consonant and vowel phonemes in different ways, but the 40-plus phonemes will all be introduced systematically.

It is said that the ideal moment for the introduction of this method is the early years of a child, around three to five years old. Phonics is taught through an active and multi-sensory strategy that ensures a faster process of learning.

The excitement felt about the synthetic phonics programme can be traced to its apparent simplicity.

It is claimed that by the end of the programme children can discriminate between the separate sounds in words; learn the letters and letter combinations most commonly used to spell those sounds, read words by sounding out and blending their separate parts and write words by combining the spelling patterns of their sounds. (Johnston & Watson, 2007).

10 7. The Jolly Phonics Approach

This synthetic approach is used to teach children to read and write. Children will be taught 42 sounds of English, not just the alphabet sounds.

The aim of this method is that children will learn how to read and write in their first year of learning. The system claims that it will take about 8/9 weeks to learn all the letter sounds, about a letter sound per day. It claims to be a multisensory approach, active and suitable for young children, in which the learning of sounds will be accompanied by actions in order to make it easier to remember them and learn new knowledge.

This particular approach makes reference to how in the past reading was taught at school using essentially a visual, whole word approach and how though most children read well, there was always a group of children who had problems remembering words. These children could not cope with reading or writing satisfactorily. As a result, it was decided to teach with an approach to teaching the letter sound first and this proved to be much more successful and the group with problems became smaller.

Initially within this approach, the school in which it was introduced, structured blending in addition to the letter sound word. As part of this research experiment, the pre-reading requisite was a phonological awareness. Children were taught to listen carefully to the sound words to identify them and relate them to the letters. The approach claims that as a result of this pre-reading requisite, children became fluent readers much earlier than before and the group of children with reading problems was almost non-existent. Children learnt not only to read faster and independently but also their writing skills started much earlier and accurate spelling also developed quicker.

7.1 Structure and pace: Learning the letter sounds

As commented previously, the approach is a multisensory one in which children will be doing an action to help them remember the new letter sound taught. This multisensory action is thought to be very useful as it helps them to remember the sound introduced more effectively.

11 Initially only one way of writing each sound is taught. Afterwards, other main alternatives will be covered. For example, firstly “ai” in “rain”; later “ay” as in “day” and finally “a-e” as in “came”.

7.1.1. Rate of introduction

The rate is one letter sound per day. All the 42 letter sounds will be introduced at this rate so that they will assimilate entirely within approximately 9 weeks.

However, if children are younger than 5, The Jolly Phonics says that the rate should be slower.

In the beginning, the Jolly Phonics recommends concentration firstly on the lower case letters. At this early stage, it is also very important that all the letters must be introduced by their sounds and not their names, for instance, “ssss” and not “ess” for the letter “s”.

When “a, e, i, o, u” are taught, the children need to know that they are special letters and are called vowels.

In the English language there are 40-plus main sounds (42 sounds in Jolly Phonics) but only 26 letters to represent those sounds. This means that sometimes 2 letters will be together to make a new sound like in the case of ”sh”, “ch”, “th” and “ng”. This two-letter combination, which produces an only sound, is called digraph. It is important to know the difference between a digraph, two letters that make one sound, and the blending skill, which is the process of putting together two or more sounds.

7.1.2. Order of letter sound groups

The letters are introduced in groups of six, which have been carefully selected to help their learning.

The first 6 letters are selected because they can be used to make many simple words (“pin” and “sat”). The letters that get easily confused such as ““b” and “d” are intentionally not placed too close together.

12 Letter groups

1. s, a, t, i, p, n

2. c k, e, h, r, m, d

3. g, o, u, l, f, b

4. ai, j, oa, ie, ee, or

5. z, w, ng, r, little oo, long oo

6. y, x, ch, sh, voiced th, unvoiced th

7. qu, ou, oi, ue, er, ar

Letter names

When the first 3 groups of letter sounds have been taught, the children can be told that the letters have names as well as sounds. Then they are introduced to both sounds and names. The Jolly Phonics recommends the alphabet, sung or recited, as a good way of introducing the letter names.

Alternative spelling of vowels

As vowels have a wide range of different spelling ways for some sounds, once the children have learnt the 42 letter sounds in the initial programme, they can be taught the alternative ways that some of the vowels can be written for their own awareness.

7.2. Learning to read. The blending skill

When children will look at the letters, they will be able to say the sounds and hear the word. This is called blending and they will be reading the words. Then, they will need to understand the meaning of the words. This meaning can be provided through visual aids in the classroom.

With the ability to blend being practised more and more, children will be able to read unknown regular words by themselves. Then they will also be in a good position to master their learning knowing that in the language not all the words

13 are completely regular and in fact there are some irregular words that they will need to memorise as they do not follow any pattern.

Blending is a skill that needs practice and it can be started when the first six letter sounds have been taught. Within the first group, children will be ready to say the sounds and to watch out for words such as “tap, pan, pit, sit, pin”.

It is while children are blending and can hear the words, when they are able to understand that this alphabetic code is working for them. At this moment they will start to read words by themselves. As a result, they will realise that they can work out words independently and their confidence grows.

The system claims that blending is relatively easy for most children. However, some children can find it difficult too and they will need to be taught again what to do.

When blending is practised, the first sound needs to be louder than the others. This will help the child to remember the sound the word starts with. The Jolly Phonics also recommends that the sounds that follow in the word need to be spoken softly and quickly and “with as little schwa as possible”. This technique has been found to be the most effective and about three quarters of the children master it quite quickly.

When blending words with digraphs, the children have to remember to look at the two letters and say the one sound. This more complicated skill is mastered when regular words, using the digraphs, are practiced like for example using flash cards with “ai” words, like “pain, rain, train, Spain, hail, snail, etc.

One way to develop speedy blending is to snap the onset of the word. Once this is mastered another way to develop speed is snapping together the onset of the word (the initial consonants) and the vowel. Short vowels can be used first and then the practice of long vowels can follow.

Initially the blending of words will be done with the sounds being called out aloud. Gradually the children will be encouraged to blend silently in their head. This will promote fluency for reading.

14 Introducing storybooks

During the first 8-9 weeks the aim is to prepare the children for reading books. Stories and poems will be read to them but the children will not be expected to try and read books all by themselves at this time.

By teaching letter sounds, blending techniques and irregular keywords, the children will understand, before being asked to read books for themselves, that there is a code for reading and that most words can be worked out by themselves.

Decodable storybooks for children to read independently will be introduced once the children can work out simple regular words by themselves.

The Jolly Phonics provides word box sheets that are words graded to progress from simple words, using the first letter sounds taught, to more complicated words using the digraphs. All the sheets and decodable storybooks have been consciously prepared for the children so they can work the words out by themselves.

7.3. Learning to write. The segmenting skill and the identification of sounds in words

The main phonic skill for writing is to start with the spoken word, then listen, identify and write the sounds in that word.

This ability to hear the sounds in words is called phonological awareness like for example when you can hear the sounds /b/ /i/ /n/ in the word “bin”. Then if you know how to write those letter sounds, you can write the word “bin” without help. This skill is called the segmenting skill. In this skill, the children are asked, for example, if they can hear a /s/ sound in “sun” or in “snake” or in “dog”. In the beginning they may think that there is a /s/ in all the words.

The aim is to be able to hear the sound and to know where its position within the word, whether it is at the beginning, in the middle or at the end. This process develops their phonological awareness. Some children can hear the sounds easily and others require far more help.

15 As soon as most of the children can call out the sounds in three letter words, longer words can be tackled.

After identifying the sounds in words with consonant blends and then digraphs, virtually any word can be sounded out. Gradually, the children will become accustomed to hearing all the sounds and they will understand that sometimes one letter represents one sound and other times two letters can also represent one sound.

Other ways of encouraging children to listen to the sounds in words are through rhymes, verses or songs, and through other activities such as word families like cat, hat, bat, fat, rat or hearing the word after the initial sound has gone like pink…ink, mice…ice, etc. The Jolly Phonics also covers this kind of input as all the sounds are taught through rhymes and songs.

7.4. Mastering the knowledge of the language: tricky words

Unfortunately, not all the words in English will follow a pattern. There are some that they are irregular or just difficult to spell words. These words are called tricky words.

A list of sixty irregular words will be given to children after the fourth group of letters has been taught. The Jolly Phonics recommends three new irregular words a week as an appropriate pace. The tricky words make up a list of some of the most common words in English.1

When children have been introduced to the 42 sounds, the different ways of seeing them with some graphemes or with other alternative ways of spelling and finally they have learnt, this time, and by heart the list of the tricky words, children have finally been provided with the key to be able to pronounce, read and write almost any word in the English language (Lloyd & Stephen, 2005).

1 I, the, he, she, me, we, be, was, to, do, are, all, you, your, come, some, said, here, there, they, go, no, so, my, one, by, like, have, live, give, only, old, down, what, when, why, where, who, which, any, many, more, before, other, were, because, want, saw, put, could, should, would, right, two, four, goes, does, made, their

16 8. Conclusions

17 A phoneme is the smallest unit of meaning and if it is not learnt correctly it can lead to a problem in communication. The process of acquisition of a second language should include a phonemic awareness.

As learners usually produce the phonemes of L2 from the phonemes they know in their mother tongue, speech perception and speech production of L2 have to be developed in order to lessen the transferences that learners usually do.

The Jolly Phonics programme provides this phonemic awareness needed to acquire a good understanding and production of the phonemes in the English language. It also shows learners that the English language is quite consistent in its spelling and that it follows a pattern.

It is the recommended methodology to be used in England for initial English literacy (DfES, 2006) and it could also be fully integrated in the ESL/EFL curriculum for children when learning English as an ESL/EFL.

However, we should ask ourselves how to adjust this method to adult education ESL/EFL curriculum. As adult learners already possess the analytical capability to understand phoneme-grapheme relationships, they can be provided with the principles of English spelling directly.

Therefore, in the adult ESL/EFL environment our proposal is to begin with the main features of English phoneme-grapheme reference to consonants and then to vowels as most English consonants show a more direct grapheme-phoneme relationship. Afterwards, phonemic variations can be introduced when letters adjoin. On the other hand, as a greater irregularity appears in the matching of phoneme-grapheme with vowels, further instruction should be provided with the alternative ways of spelling the phonemes of the vowels.

However, as English is a rather morphophonemic language (Stubs, 1980), adults ESL/EFL learners should also be taught the morphemic principles of the English language. This, though, would not be necessary for children as they would acquire this knowledge unconsciously due to their permanent exposure to the language. Adults can be shown that, for instance, sometimes when suffixes are added to words, the stress shifts to another syllable such as in PHOtogragph>phoTOGraphy.

18 In conclusion, in an ESL/EFL environment the synthetics approach should be integrated to provide phonemic awareness to learners and thus to provide them with the keys needed to break the code of the apparent non-systemacity of the language. This is especially pertinent if they come from “purer” phonetic systems such as Spanish. In the case of the adult learners, whose cognitive skills are more developed than children’s, it is necessary to provide them with the morphemic principles as well. This will allow them to understand that English variations are not completely arbitrary because they follow underlying general rules that may be converted into phonetic realizations (C. Chomsky, 1970). As a result, this will speed up the learning process for the learners and develop their confidence in the language.

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