Phonology & Phonics

Phonology is the study of the speech sounds of a language. It is the area of language that deals with the rules that govern which sounds exist in any given language and in which combinations these sounds can be used. It is an incredibly interesting area of oral language.

Phonology is an oral language skill but has significant links to reading and spelling. When the average five-year-old child arrives at school, they typically have a developed phonological system. The phonological centre in their brain is able to generate the patterns of sounds needed to communicate spoken words. This allows them to speak and be understood. Likewise, when someone speaks to them, their phonological centre is able to detect and process the spoken speech sounds they are hearing. When this information is then sent to their meaning centre, this allows them to understand what people say to them.

When children begin their reading and spelling journey, one of the first steps they must make is to ‘map’ letters to the speech sounds represented in their brains.

Phonemic awareness is exactly that- awareness of phonemes (individual speech sounds). Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness and it is the most important subset for learning to decode and spell in an alphabetic language like English.

Blending and segmenting are the two most critical phonemic awareness skills in early reading and spelling development. If children are to learn how to read and spell a word like cat they must be able to a) hear the sounds “c-a-t” and blend them to make the word “cat” and b) hear the word “cat” and break this into its individual speech sounds “c-a-t” respectively.

Many children do not come to school with fully developed phonemic awareness. However, they must develop this if they are to ‘crack the code’ of English spelling. Some children will learn blending and segmenting quite quickly upon being introduced to reading and writing, but other children may struggle to develop these skills early. Indeed, children taught systematic phonics with an emphasis on decoding sound by sound and spelling sound by sound through a word are likely to develop blending and segmenting skills more quickly. However, in order to ensure that all children develop these skills adequately, they should be explicitly taught how to blend and segment sounds.

Phonics is both a set of skills we need in order to read and spell words AND a method of teaching word reading skills.

Phonics: A set of skills

When we read a word for the first time, we cannot recognise it. We laboriously identify each grapheme, retrieve their probable phoneme(s) and blend these together to make a word. All people do this. This is phonics skill.

When children first learn to read, nearly every word is a new word; therefore, they must laboriously use their phonics skills to decode many words accurately. The fact that we use phonics skills when reading new words is not a controversial stance in reading science.

After children practice these phonics skills over and over to help them identify words, they become faster at this skill. On top of this, once they have applied these skills to a specific word enough times, that word becomes automatically recognised through a process called orthographic mapping. A skilled reader has many words orthographically mapped, so they are able to read fluently and effortlessly; however, if they attempt to read a word they have never seen before (e.g. a word the writer recently saw for the first time- poinciana) they revert to that early, slow phonics skill they acquired many years ago.

In this way, phonics skills are critical for reading development. We must develop them if we are to become proficient readers. Having phonics skills is critical, while not sufficient in its own right, for reading.

When we spell a word for the first time, we must also utilise phonics skills. If we are able to taken the spoken form of a word, break it into its constituent sounds and generate spellings for each of those sounds, we will be able to, at the very least, represent the word in written form phonetically. More than phonics is needed in order to spell words in a deep orthography like English. However, if we cannot segment a word into sounds and provide plausible graphemes for each sound, we cannot spell (or at least, we cannot spell at all well). Once again, phonics skills are critical, while not sufficient, for being able to spell words.

Phonics: Teaching

Most people in education believe that teaching phonics is important. It would seem impossible to claim that teaching children one of the critical skills needs to read and spell words is not worthy of our time. However, the method of teaching phonics and how much time it should take up in reading instruction is often hotly debated.

While there are several ways to teach phonics to children, the consensus of contemporary reading research is that teaching systematic phonics will yield the best results for early word reading skills.

Systematic phonics is a method where students are taught the English language’s most common sound-letter relationships explicitly, sequentially and intentionally. They are initially taught a small number of sound-letter relationships. Children are taught to read and spell words of increasing length and complexity using the sound letter relationships they have been taught. They are gradually taught more and more until they have been taught enough of the alphabetic code in order to read many, or most, words in English.

PhOrMeS teaches systematic phonics. In particular, PhOrMeS utilises systematic, synthetic phonics.

Systematic, synthetic phonics (SSP) is systematic and teaches children how to read and spell words from the bottom up. SSP teaches the smallest sound units (phonemes) and their linked letter(s) (graphemes).

When reading words, SSP teaches students to convert graphemes into phonemes and blend these sounds together to synthesise, ‘make’ or ‘build’ the word as a whole.

e.g. lost = “l-o-s-t” = “lost”

When spelling words, SSP teaches children to convert the phonemes of a word into a series of graphemes to synthesise, ‘make’ or ‘build’ the word as a whole.

e.g. “bend” = “b-e-n-d” = b-e-n-d = bend

In this way, SSP teaches both the most common sound-letter relationships of English and teaches children to explicitly use the phonemic awareness skills of blending and segmenting to read and spell words respectively.

The early word reading and spelling sequence in PhOrMeS teaches children four sound-letter relationships each week while also teaching children to read and spell short VC and CVC words that contain only the sound-letter relationships they have been taught.

As children develop the skills of reading words by identifying the sounds for each grapheme and blending these together to ‘make’ words, more graphemes are added. Once children are successfully decoding CVC words, they are taught to read words of increasing length using these same skills of ‘sounding out’ and blending. The same applies for spelling. As students learn to segment words and spell words using the graphemes that have been taught, more graphemes are taught. From VC and CVC words, children are taught to spell words of increasing complexity such as CVCC, CCVC and so on.

While SSP has not yet been unequivocally supported by research to be clearly superior to other types of systematic phonics teaching methods, it is currently our ‘best bet’ in teaching phonics most effectively. SSP is used by a majority of good quality early reading programs and is often said to be the phonics teaching which aligns best with what we know about the science of learning. As such, this is why PhOrMeS used SSP to teach early word reading and spelling.