Paper presented at the QATESOL Conference Brisbane, October 2002
Introduction:
On the swings and roundabouts of educational fashion phonics has
reappeared after a whole generation of teachers have missed its influence in
their own school days and in their teacher training.
So what is this phonics? It's a system of linking the sounds of
language to the symbols we use to represent those sounds in normal print
texts. It's not the more technical
phonetics, the accurate international symbols which represent the sounds of
every language. It's far more rough and
ready than that. It links the spelling
of English to the sounds and, since that link is by no means 100% consistent,
then nor is phonics an infallibly accurate representation of the sound
system. However, it is useful about 80%
of the time and therefore can provide our students with a huge improvement on
unaided rote learning to decode and encode written English.
Moreover, by focusing
regularly and systematically on individual sounds and their written
representations, we can at the same time enhance our students' listening and
pronunciation skills. Earlier this year
I was teaching a low & slow level one class. At the end of the term I tried
to persuade an elderly, well educated Chinese woman that she was ready to move
to the phase 2 level 1 class. Through an interpreter, she told me she wanted to
stay in the lower level class because she wanted "a strong foundation in
pronunciation"; that is, she saw the regular, systematic phonics we were
doing primarily as pronunciation.
There are, of course, limitations
to this method of teaching spelling and reading.
·
As I said earlier, English follows the rules of
encoding only about 80% of the time. I
describe the remaining 20% of words as stupid, a description which appeals to our students as they
grapple with the inconsistencies of English orthography.
·
Encoding and decoding individual sounds or even
whole words is a long, long way from reading and writing in any meaningful sense. We need to guard against the old barking at print syndrome by making sure we also use all the other
tools we have in our armoury as teachers.
Mere phonics is not enough, but it is in my view one of the essential
tools in the teaching of reading and writing.
Phonics
– the sounds of the alphabet
I use the alphabet chart on English
Spelling CD, Vol. 1 A complete set of alphabet hand cards, plus wall charts to accompany
the alphabet sound song are also available on the CD.
See Current Publications / Spelling Materials on this site.
With every low level class I drill the sounds and the names of the
letters of the alphabet, in order and randomly, every day. In higher level classes I drill only the
problematic ones weekly.
Although we know these are not the only sounds represented by these
symbols, they are by far the most common & students need to learn
them. In many cases they will have
learned the names of the letters but have no idea of the sounds. For students who use the Roman alphabet in their
first languages, they will have learned an overlapping, but not identical, set
of sounds which causes great confusion.
I specifically drill the pairs which cause particular difficulty for
specific language groups: l/r, v/w, a/u showing where to put the organs of
articulation and practising regularly. Charts showing these mouth positions can be found on English Spelling CD, Vol. 1.
Students cannot be expected to write down or say what they cannot
hear. Our job is to link the hearing,
saying and writing overtly for them over and over again until it finally
becomes automatic.
Digraphs
We have 26 letters but 44 sounds in English. We cope with this by combining letters in
what we can describe as "digraphs".
Unfortunately (or from another perspective of richness of vocabulary,
fortunately) we have a language which is truly mongrel: it is a mixture of a succession of languages
– Old English, Teutonic from the Vikings, Celtic from those difficult Irish,
Scots etc, Latin from the Romans, French from the Normans and so on. We have unashamedly taken words from every
language which has passed by or through England over thousands of years. Sometimes we have tidied up the spelling a
bit but, more often we have left it more or less as it was and adjusted the
pronunciation to varying degrees. There have been many recent attempts to
regularise the spelling but they all ultimately come unstuck because of the
great variation in pronunciation throughout the English-speaking world and the
humungous volume of print materials which use the existing spelling and which
would rapidly become largely inaccessible if we were to change our orthography
dramatically. So, at least for the
moment, we have to live with what we have and our students need all the help
they can get to cope with this historic porridge.
I introduce the digraphs gradually, at first with pictures to prod the
memory. (Again these appear in English Spelling CD, Vol. 1.) I start with those which the students meet most frequently and move on
to the less frequent.
I start by drilling these, always emphasising clear articulation, in a
systematic manner.
Beginners' Digraph List
a-e
(cake) ai
(rain – middle) ay
(tray – end)
e-e
(these) ee
(tree) ea
(leaf) -y
(puppy 2 or more syllables) -e
(he – little) ie
(chief)
i-e
(kite) -y
(sky – little) igh
(high) -ie
(pie – little)
|
o-e
(bone) oa
(coat) ow
(window) -o
(piano) old
(gold fish)
u-e
(mule) ew
(new)
er
(fern) ir
(girl) ur
(church)
ar
(car)
ing
(ring)
oo
(book) oo
(moon)
|
sh
(ship) ch
(chicken) th
(thong) wh
(whip) ph
(phone)
or
(fork) au
(daughter) aw
(saw) all
(ball)
oy
(boy – end) oi
(boil – middle)
-tion
(station)
air
(hair) are
(bare) ear (bear)
|
|
With more advanced classes, I use cards without illustrations to test.
Note: The year after I wrote this paper, Dorothy and I published English Spelling Vol. 2 (in book form - see under Current Publications / Spelling Materials on this site). In it you will find digraph hand charts, as well as a complet photocopiable booklet of English Sounds.
Then I ask students to write down 3 ways to spell the long a sound (a-e, ai, ay).
I point out the patterns: ai/oi in middle; ay/oy on end;
-y in little words; -y bigger
words; y- at beginning;
ow/ow – no pattern ("English is stupid");
er/ir/ur – er most common.
Not only do I drill these progressively, but I point them out as we
meet them in texts. In reading materials for low level students, I underline in
pencil digraphs as students hesitate over unknown words. The aim is to give another strategy for
decoding new or forgotten words, a method of giving hope to those who feel
English is impossible because it's too difficult to learn every single word by
rote – and they're right, it is. As native sp[eakers, we all
have help, not only in our comprehensive knowledge of sentence structure and
enormously greater vocabulary, but also in our conscious or sub-conscious
knowledge of the sound-symbol relationships.
Just as we teach sentence structure and vocabulary, we also need to
teach overtly and systematically the sound-symbol relationships.
Do student object to all this repetition? No. In fact, many tell me
that this is the most important thing they learn (along, of course, with the
grammar which teachers hate so much!)
Not only do low level students appreciate it, but students up to and
including CSWE level III value it in a less intensive and modified form. At
CSWE level IV, I still sometimes drill some phonics and overtly teach spelling, depending very much on the class and their mastery of English
spelling.
Contrast
between short & long vowels
I draw attention to, and exaggerate, the difference between short and
long vowels. I drill these contrasts
regularly. For this I use a table from English Spelling Vol. 2. (again photocopiable and designed to be enlarged)
Polysyllabic
words
It's relatively easy to see and hear the patterns while we deal only
with single syllable words. But we all
know we can't sustain that for long.
And, as soon as we have more than one syllable, we have to deal with the
demon of stressed and unstressed syllables and the dreaded schwa which
effectively hides the true vowel sounds. My method of dealing with this – and
you may have a better one – is to enunciate slowly and clearly first:
le/mon in two distinct, equally stressed syllables.
Then I demonstrate fast and replace the short o by schwa.
In any spelling and/or vocabulary list, with classes at all levels, I
follow this procedure to demonstrate both the spelling and the natural
pronunciation.
We all do this to some extent when we disentangle any fast, natural
utterance, such as, What are you doing? And this leads us, of course, into continuous
text which is merely an extension of the process I use with single polysyllabic
words.
Conclusion
Phonics is not some magic wand but it can help you and your students to
look at sounds and words more thoughtfully and see the patterns which
exist. However, to do this, phonics must
be taught regularly and systematically – it's not enough just to circle the
words which start with b or find several words which start with cl
or those which end with at .
If taught consistently, and referred back
to whenever appropriate (Teach, then nag), phonics can also aid pronunciation
and listening skills by heightening students' awareness of the sounds we make
and how we represent those sounds on paper (or screen).