So, what is real systematic phonics teaching?

Simply, phonics is the process of teaching how the 26 letters of the English Alphabet are used to represent the 44 spoken sounds of English. English is a morphophonemic language which means that it is based on both phonics and meaning.

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It is important to remember, when learners start school at five years of age, they have an average acquired vocabulary of over five-thousand words (words which they can speak and understand). The words a child can speak are made using 44 individual speech sounds.  When we teach how to read and spell spoken words, we teach how the letters of the English Alphabet are used to represent the sounds we speak. One of the difficulties in learning to read and write in English is that the code is not a transparent code, that is, each letter of the English Alphabet does not represent only one sound and speech sounds can be represented in various ways. The way a sound is represented will in many cases be meaning based.

Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a word, and morphemes are represented by phonics patterns. Teaching phonics helps explain the reason a morpheme is written a certain way. Teaching morphemes makes word study fun and helps children quickly understand and make connections between words for meaning.

Teaching ‘tw’ is a morpheme ling to meaning two, helps teach connected words such as twin, twine, between, twist, twenty, twilight and so son.

The phonics in words can quickly change with the change in the morpheme. When teaching the word ‘sign’ which has three phonemes s-i-gn, the phonics changes when the word changes to signal, s-i-g-n-a-l, the ‘gn’ is no longer representing just one phoneme/speech sound.

Unfortunately, over the decades, people have tried to simplify phonics when setting the foundation to literacy teaching. Unfortunately, this simplification has led to the cycle of phonics being valued or demonised, and this cycle has been repeated now for decades.

It is exciting that the cycle is now dialled to ‘value phonics’ but this may quickly change once again, if those now championing phonics continue following the rigid path of ‘synthetic phonics’ as the only phonics process to be used in our classrooms. Research evidence has always been clear on the value of phonics, sadly the teaching process employed to teach phonics can very quickly determine its value as an essential element in literacy learning. In fact, when taught incorrectly, phonics can have disastrous effects on literacy acquisition. Understanding what systematic phonics teaching really means is the key to successful and sustainable phonics teaching.

Here and now in Australia there is a misguided understanding that ‘systematic phonics teaching’ means a sequential and laborious ‘diet of phonics’ in a particular instructional order, delivered only using a ‘synthetic phonics’ teaching process that is supported with ‘Decodables’ reading books. Many learners are left waiting for phonics sequences to catch up to their needs and as such are being held back in the reading and writing/spelling processes. What they are being taught is not transferable or sustainable in the world of print around them. It gives no agency for implicit learning or the ability to problem-solve at their level of need.

This misguided understanding of ‘systematic phonics teaching’ will once again distort the ABSOLUTE POWER of phonics in literacy teaching. The ‘misconceptions’ by some of how phonics should be taught will once again see phonics devalued as it creates a psycholinguistic guessing game of how the English code and orthography works.  We need a middle ground in the ‘polarising war’ of teaching reading in which explicit and comprehensive phonics teaching is part of a systematic process that provides for sustainable and transferable learning.

Systematic phonics teaching means that phonics is routinely taught as part of our literacy teaching system, not ad hoc, or not at all, and not only. Phonics is directed at word-level instruction and is the teaching process of learning to identify the letters and letter combinations we use to represent sounds in words (graphemes).  We teach the graphemes (phonics patterns for sounds) to build our visual memory and orthographic mapping of words for sight vocabulary.  As we build our understanding of these patterns, we build our reading and spelling ability.

It is important and indisputable that phonics should be taught in all the recognised ‘teaching’ forms, to build the understanding of the phoneme-to-grapheme and grapheme-to-phoneme relationships in all words. Importantly, phonics must be used across the curriculum and grades.  Phonics is an essential part of systematic word study teaching and underpins the teaching of morphemes and etymology needed for building oral and written vocabulary.

The process of ‘synthetic phonics’ (part to the whole blending of graphemes to phonemes) is best to serve the teaching of blending used in the decoding process, but it is indisputable that learners must also be explicitly taught analytic phonics and phonics in context. These phonics strategies build the orthographic mapping of words to develop our sight vocabulary. Along with handwriting, this rich mixture of phonics teaching supports the development of reading and writing to supersize literacy outcomes.

Time to rethink what is best for all our learners.

This article was written by Denyse Richie, Teacher, Teacher Trainer and Author. Ms Ritchie is Honorary Chair of Literacy and Fellow, Murdoch University, Western Australia.