What is Phonics?

'Phonics' has become a hot topic amongst parents over these few years, especially when it was integrated into KSSR curriculum. There are a few types of phonics in the market, yet many parents are unaware of what type of phonics their children learn in kindergartens or schools. This post aims to give more insight about phonics and hopes to clear the confusion created by the different types of phonics.

What is phonics?

•  A system of relationships between letters and sounds in a language
•  A method of teaching reading by correlating sounds with letters

Phonics as a method of teaching

There are several approaches that use phonics as the basis of teaching reading: synthetic phonics, analytic phonics, analogy phonics and embedded phonics.

Synthetic phonics

-     The teaching of reading in which phonemes (sounds) associated with particular graphemes (letters) are pronounced in isolation and blended together (synthesised).

-     Children are taught to take a single-syllable word, e.g. “cat”, apart into its three letters, pronounce a phoneme for each letter in turn /k, æ, t/, and blend the phonemes together to form a word.

-     This method is currently adopted by the Malaysian Ministry of Education in the KSSR syllabus.

Analytic phonics

-     The teaching of reading in which the phonemes associated with particular graphemes are not pronounced in isolation.

-  Children identify (analyse) the common phoneme in a set of words in which each word contains the phoneme being studied. For example, teachers and pupils discuss how the following words are alike: pat, park, push and pen.

Analogy phonics

-     A type of analytic phonics in which children analyse phonic elements according to the phonograms in the word.

-     A phonogram, known in linguistics as a rime, is composed of the vowel and all the sounds that follow it, such as –ake in the word cake.

-     Children use these phonograms to learn about “word families”, e.g. cake, make, bake, take.

Embedded phonics

-     An approach in which phonics forms one part of a “whole language” programme.

-    Embedded phonics differs from other methods in that the instruction is always in the context of literature rather than in separate lessons, and the skills to be taught are identified incidentally rather than systematically.