Letterland teacher trainer Lesley White tells Ross about phonics. We touch on the history, the advantages of phonics over other approaches, different options to teachers within the phonics system and some of the differences between learning to read in your first language and in your second language.
Teaching Phonics (With Lesley White)
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. This week, I'm speaking to Lesley White. Lesley is a trainer at Letterland. She's got many, many years of experience working there as a young learner, teacher‑trainer. She's been running phonic sessions in the UK and overseas since 1992, which is indeed a lot of experience.
In this episode, I got to ask Lesley all about phonics, a bit of background about where it comes from, how long it's been around for. Then we also get into a lot of practical advice for teachers. If you've ever taught any students to learn to read, then I'm sure you'll find a lot of valuable information from Lesley.
Where should teachers start in teaching reading?
Ross: Hi, Lesley.
Lesley White: Hi.
Ross: Very simple question to get us started. Where should teachers start in teaching reading?
Lesley: Well, within our system, we start by teaching the very young children all the prereading and prewriting skills before they even get as far as learning to read. We want them to have those very early stages because we're working with children around about the three‑age range.
Before they start even thinking about reading, they need to have the tools to be able to read. For that, we introduce them to using the knowledge they have about the sounds. We want them to then blend them together to be able to read.
If they only know a couple of sounds, they don't have very much in the way of background or the very many tools to help them to read much. Start small and then keep growing.
Ross: You mentioned there are prereading skills. What exactly are prereading skills?
Lesley: Babies learn by imitation. That's how they develop their native language skills. That should be the same way for other languages as well. The nearer we can replicate what they do naturally, the easier it is to give them the baseline, the starting.
We try to give them the prereading and writing skills, the ability to spot odd ones out, learn about logic and how things go together, think about the sequences. All those what I call prereading and prewriting activities, then provide them with a basis. Without that, the actual skill of reading becomes far more difficult because English is not a purely phonic language.
We need to introduce the children to a systematic and explicit way of learning so that they have the tools to then be able to decode the message that's carried within those shapes.
Ross: When I was a teacher, phonics was just starting to become popular, at least, in China. Could you give us a bit of a sense of what the history is of phonics and, maybe, how it's been used in comparison to other approaches?
Lesley: I remember when I was at school, which is long before you were a teacher, and long before you were at school. I remember I was taught to use those sounds and talk about the C‑A‑T, the cat, sat, S‑A‑T on the M‑A‑T. The phonics has always been around and about for very many, many years.
It goes in cycles as to whether it's popular within the educational elite, but phonics came back into vogue towards the end of the last century. The beginning of this led, in part, by the UK government's desire for all children to be introduced to phonics early in their careers, so the letters and sound document.
As far as phonics for a second language, that's slightly more difficult because if the children don't have a vocabulary, then they don't know the words they're trying to create.
That's why I say those early stages, those prereading, prewriting stages, includes helping the children to begin to develop a vocabulary and have some understanding of the language. It's not just picking up a book and barking at print.
It is actually being able to blend the sounds together, read the words, but read them with understanding because so often parents will say to me, "My child can read these words, but they don't know what they're reading." That's as useless as not being able to read, if you like.
Ross: It sounds then ike children really need that foundation in listening, maybe speaking, and definitely having vocabulary knowledge before they start to learn to read then.
Lesley: Without those skills, then the next stage can't be reached. When we get children walking, for instance, they don't just stand up and start to run, they start with falling down and bringing themselves up again.
We have to look at reading in exactly the same way that they have to take those steps slowly, little by little, adding to their knowledge and their understanding. The more that they enjoy and are entertained by it, the better their knowledge acquisition becomes, and the more they enjoy the experience.
There are different types of phonics. There's synthetic phonics. It's the buzzword in many educational circles. That's about blending the sounds together in order to read words. We also have linguistic and analytic phonics, as well.
Now, how relevant is that for very young children? It's about enjoying books. It's whatever way that they can look at print and get meaning from it. It is about getting meaning from it, not just what I call, barking at print.
Stages in Learning to Read
Ross: What are some of the different stages that students go through in learning to read? Presumably then, the first stage there is for students to start to link letters to sounds. What happens from there?
Lesley: I'd say the first stage is speaking and listening. As far as the silence, I think it's vitally important that the children begin to have a feel about the rhythm of the language, about the knowledge that sounds. So getting to that stage before they get as far as putting those sounds together and being able to do anything more than that.
The first stage, as far as I'm concerned, is speaking and listening. We then go on, as you very rightly say, to identifying the sounds. There are 44 sounds in our English language. It's not just learning about the 26 letters and the shapes of those letters, but it's then about the combinations.
If we think about it, consonants, B, C, D, are never ever confused in reading, but the vowels confuse and complicate because they make a variety of different sounds. Somewhere without making it too unfactual for young children, we have to engage them and help them to make those connections and understandings.
Ross: Is there an order that is best for teachers to teach the different sounds and letters and in others, SATPIN, which is a common one? There's also A, B, C, D, which is very common. What are some such things and considerations teachers might think about before choosing the order they're going to teach the letters in?
Lesley: My answer to that is it depends on your objective. If you're wanting the children to learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G, that's fine. That's the order that you'll find in a dictionary, or an index, or anything else. Getting the children to sing A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., is part of learning a rote about the names of the letters.
That's not going to help the children blend the sounds together to make words. The SATPIN teaching order, which is a sequence that has been suggested as recommended in various publications means that you can start making words after you've covered the first four letters.
Simple words, but you've got S,A,T making S‑A‑T, sat, P‑A‑T, pat. Then we can turn that round and have T‑A‑P, tap. Already, even after four letters, we're able to blend those sounds together.
That teaching order also makes sure the letters that are similar‑looking to young children like the B and the D...Some children are very confused by those two shapes, because they're very similar just turned round the other way, if you will.
Teaching out of sequence means the children can become used to one of them as if you're teaching A, B, C order, the B and the D are very close together. The only word you can make out of those first four letters, you can make bad. You could make cad, but not very many young children are going to need that word.
Now, other schools of thought would say that you want to be concentrating more on handwriting as opposed to the voice‑sight systems that will concentrate on getting the children to make a circle, an O. There are a variety of different strategies about which teaching order is most useful. I think you pay with your money and take your choice.
At the end of the day, the children have got to know all 26 letter shapes, and the sounds associated with them. Once you've decided that your objective is to help your children to read, as well as to write and to spell, then you choose the order that works for you.
My one piece of advice to all teachers though is follow a system because I've come across teachers who decide that they'll just do their own thing. They dart from one letter to the other because the weather was nice and we'll use this letter for some particular topic or something.
I understand why, but in all honesty, letters like Q, X, Z, they get forgotten about. I would always suggest that teachers should use a systematic approach that captures children's imagination. Whatever that system happens to be, I can justify a variety of different systems.
Ross: What about some of the more difficult sounds and letters then like "th" and "ck," etc.? When would you decide to teach those?
Lesley: The order that has been put together by the letters and sounds document, which is the UK government's suggested order, make sure that the children are covering the S‑A‑T‑P‑I‑N to begin with. Then we keep going, we add all 26 letters.
Then, sh, ch, th, are the digraphs, which will be introduced earlier, whereas some of the more complex spelling patterns, the E‑A‑R, all those sorts of things. Whatever program, whatever system one decides to adopt to cover all the sounds, eventually. There are 44 sounds in our English language. There are over 150 different spelling patterns.
If you told me that on the first day I went to school, I'm sure I'd have said, "I don't know what on earth you're talking about." It is about trying to engage the children and add to their knowledge in time.
Ross: Then what do teachers do about more difficult words? They are sometimes called sight words like, the, one, you, words that don't follow this typical phonetic rules in English.
Lesley: Absolutely. You've got "the," even something that looks as if it would be very simple, a word like "no." When the letters are the other way around, and you have the O coming before the N, then it makes the O‑N sounds and the word is "on," and the children think this is fine.
Then we put the letters in the opposite direction having the N coming before the O, and it doesn't make the sound stand. We don't say no, we say no. Why? Yes, those tricky words, high‑frequency words, sight words called variety of different things, depending on which expert is talking, are necessary to make reading have any sense.
Ross: How can teachers teach those words?
Lesley: To begin with ‑‑ I'm sorry ‑‑ It's a bit of rote learning. It is a bit of just stretching the word to hear what sounds you do know and identify the known sounds, but then also thinking, "Uh‑uh, that one's not making its normal sound. I've got to remember that for the future," so they remeber that tricky word.
Ross: Once again, that was Lesley White. If you're interested in finding out more about Lesley and the program that she uses at Letterland, please go to www.letterland.com. Thanks for listening. See you again soon.