EYFS best practice: All about ... Linguistic Phonics

Rather than follow the example of England and introduce synthetic phonics into its curriculum, many schools in Northern Ireland have opted instead for the newly developing pedagogic strategy called 'Linguistic Phonics', with some impressive results.

Linguistic Phonics (LP) is a way into reading and writing designed to offer children a systematic approach that draws on their existing knowledge and their individual ways of learning. The word 'linguistic' indicates that the approach is linked to the scientific study of natural language, which offers a refreshing alternative to synthetic phonics. The central tenet of LP, in common with the first stage of Letters and Sounds, is that children need to grasp the relationship between spoken language and the written word. It is understood that this depends on significant experience of speaking and listening and a wish to communicate, as well as a growing awareness and appreciation of the purposes of literacy.

It was introduced in Belfast schools five years ago because of concerns about persistently low levels of literacy throughout primary (and post-primary) education. In some parts of Belfast, 70 per cent of children were leaving primary school without achieving Level 4 in literacy, with many having a reading age of only seven.

LP aims to address this challenge by building on what children already know about language and language patterns, going with the grain of early learning by ensuring that progress takes place through active involvement in a context that is meaningful to each child. Staff positively encourage exploration and discovery and adopt a suitable playful pedagogy.

The initial emphasis is on developing attention, listening skills and oral language during children's first year in school (Primary 1, equivalent to Reception in England). There is no pressure to introduce direct teaching of phonics before Primary 2, which allows children plenty of opportunities to enjoy language and gain confidence in expressing themselves during their first year in school. It also means that pre-schools are expected to avoid prematurely formalised approaches to reading and writing, and to foster emergent literacy in a playful and meaningful way.

A fundamental part of the methodology is that the starting point is the children's own speech. The children focus initially on hearing the sounds in their oral language and then 'discover' how these are represented in print, through a series of structured investigations. The children are given strategies that encourage them to investigate and solve problems. An emphasis on the development of receptive and expressive language continues in parallel to the development of decoding skills, so that children are constantly extending their capacity to interpret what they read, and to communicate their ideas more effectively.

We spent two days in Belfast observing the approach with children aged from four to seven and concluded that, in both principle and practice, this is preferable to a prescribed programme that ignores the way that people actually speak, and which is generally applied too rigidly and rapidly to groups of young children who have varied prior experience and levels of understanding.

Letter names are not introduced until Stage 5, when children are confident with the concept that sounds can be represented in different ways. Children 'discover' rules and exceptions through their investigations. This reduces the amount of unnecessary memorising in the early stages. so that more energy can be spent on developing phonological awareness and code knowledge through interacting with text.

Children develop the ability to segment by identifying the individual sounds in words and learning to blend those sounds together. Drawing on their experience and through the application of contextual cues, they make decisions about meaning - deciding, for example, that 'ow' is not pronounced 'oa' in cow.

IN PRACTICE

The way the approach operates in practice is that, in Primary 1 (Reception), the emphasis is on developing children's dispositions to read and write as they are immersed in a rich literacy environment. With the help of specialist support from speech and language therapists, children develop attention and listening skills, oral language and phonological awareness throughout the year. They are gradually introduced to how sounds are represented in print through modelled and shared experiences across the curriculum.

Primary 2, the equivalent of Year 1 in England and Wales, is part of the Foundation Stage in Northern Ireland. LP methodology is formally introduced in Primary 2 and 3 through brief, daily whole-class sessions. There is a focus on phonology so that children learn how to identify syllables, rhymes, and eventually individual sounds within words.

Each phoneme is then matched systematically with its corresponding grapheme (letter or letter-combination). Over time, children become familiar with the underlying principles and understand that words are represented by letters; longer words are made up of blocks of sound or syllables. They realise that sounds may be represented by more than one letter, and discover that some sounds can be represented in different ways (for example, go, snow, boat, cone - see box on LP session), while some spellings can represent more than one sound (for example, snow, cow) and some words that look the same mean different things depending on the context (for example, bow). The emphasis is on acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to 'crack the print code' as quickly as possible, so that children can read and write with increasing independence.

The team who developed the LP approach see it as an integrated component of a well-planned literacy curriculum that encourages children to think about meaning from the beginning. Because of the complexity of the language, readers of English need to make continuous decisions - for example, whether the 'ea' in 'read' is pronounced 'e' or 'ee', or something else depending on accent. Standard phonics can only hint at how to represent the words 'doll' or 'dog' in Northern Ireland, where they rhyme with 'ball'.

STRENGTHS AND CHALLENGES

A clear strength of the Linguistics Phonics approach is that it draws on work from speech-language pathology, psychology, philosophy, biology, neuroscience and sociology, all of which are relevant to the complex tasks of learning to read and write.

Specialist speech and language therapists have been closely involved in developing the programme for the early years, and help to train staff in nursery as well as reception classes - another key strength of the approach. As well as providing expert advice on relevant experience for individuals and groups of children, they model ways of promoting language development and are able to identify and address any problems very early.

This professional partnership is proving mutually beneficial in developing awareness, trust and expertise. Training is provided for learning support assistants and volunteers as well as teachers, and information talks are offered to senior management teams, whole staffs, parents and homework clubs to ensure that the approach is fully embedded.

The officer leading the programme in Belfast, Hilary McEvoy, says, 'The key lies not in instructing children by rote but in teaching them how to make connections, how to solve problems when they encounter the unknown and, thus, how to infer complex rules. Rather than being taught explicit rules about English, children are presented with a series of experiences which systematically enable them to crack the phonetic code. When they see a pattern emerging and are applying it in their reading and writing, an exception is introduced, which makes children think again.'

A lot of playful learning is generated through looking for the unexpected and rising to the challenges presented by the English language.

The LP approach is being monitored closely and evaluated by the advisory team and by the schools. In the early stages (2005-06), an evaluation by Stranmillis University College was commissioned by the Belfast Education Authority. Its findings show that LP has been particularly successful in raising reading standards among primary school pupils. The writing of primary pupils in lower ability reading groups improved significantly. Parents indicated that children learning through LP were more likely to enjoy reading and to read books other than their school books than pupils using other approaches. Interestingly, in post-primary schools, teachers believe that LP has been effective in raising pupils' confidence and self-esteem and has had a positive impact on written work.

Schools are currently gathering anecdotal, but strong evidence of children's individual development using the scheme. For example, we were shown impressive examples of children's writing in a Primary 3 class, collected over a three-month period, in which it was evident that significant progress had been made by a range of children of different abilities, not only in the quantity of writing but in the quality of the vocabulary, spelling and complexity of content.

The approach is still relatively new to the teachers, and some have not yet developed the potential for playful problem-solving. As teachers become more confident in their use of the LP strategies they will be able to make more use of opportunities to help children make their own connections through exploration as they arise. In common with many new initiatives, another challenge is in ensuring the teachers are consistently embedding the principles and practices of the approach. The commitment of schools and the Belfast Education and Library Board is a major factor in the success of using LP.

The adaptability of LP, which can readily take account of different pronunciation and speech patterns, is a great strength. Children's growing phonic knowledge is applied to reading matter that they enjoy, not just to a restricted range of predictable material.

Adults share the reading of text, modelling fluency of expression and encouraging discussion about the story and features of print - for example, syllables, full stops and sentences. There is no rush, simply a conviction that children will learn to decode print, and do it quickly when they are ready for systematic teaching.

Staff trust that children are motivated by focusing on meaning from the start and are developing significant problem-solving and decision-making skills along with a love of reading, writing and spelling.

Because the LP approach recognises the unique nature of each child, the value of positive relationships, the importance of a playful, enabling environment, and because it respects the fact that children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates, it is entirely in accordance with the principles of the Early Years Foundation Stage in England.

Wendy Scott is an early years consultant and president of TACTYC. Janet Moyles is professor emeritus at Anglia Ruskin University. The authors appreciate the help given by staff in the Belfast Education and Library Board together with the Cathedral nursery, and Knocknagoney, St Joseph's and St Therese of Lisieux primary schools, who kindly hosted their visits.

A LINGUISTIC PHONICS SESSION

This is one of several sessions that we observed while in Belfast. Although it is clearly a phonics lesson, it is significantly different from what has become accepted practice in England.

First ...

A class of six- and seven-year-olds works with their teacher on the sound 'oa'. The teacher writes words from a story on the board for the children to read. She then helps them to identify which letters represent the 'o' phoneme, by sounding across each word.

As each new grapheme is 'discovered', in words such as 'road', 'low', 'go' and 'toe', the teacher writes it at the top of the board, adding any matching graphemes in columns below.

Children are helped to recognise that the 'oa' in 'home' is represented by 'oe', but that the grapheme has been separated.

They then write the individual sounds of some words on small squares of paper, physically splitting the grapheme up and repositioning the letters so that 'h-oe-m' becomes 'h-o-m-e'.

Next ...

The teacher asks children to write down any way they know to spell 'oa' on their whiteboards. Again, each new grapheme that they discover is written at the top of the board.

In pairs, the children are then asked to find words containing the 'oa' sound in their own storybooks. They eagerly look for ways that the class has not yet discovered.

The teacher looks for children who fall into the 'overlap trap', selecting a word that contains a similar grapheme but not the 'oa' sound, for example, 'down'. She helps the children 'discover' through their mistake that although it looks like 'oa' it represents a different sound in this word.

Finally ...

The children attempt to spell words using possible options. The teacher 'has a go' before getting the children to eliminate some of her attempts.

She then encourages them to select the way they think is right. The teacher playfully tries to catch the children out, making a guessing game out of the process. She then helps them to think about the tricky parts that need to be memorised and encourages them to try out different ways to remember them.

THE SIX STAGES IN THE LP APPROACH

Stage 1 (yellow): One letter one sound - children need to understand that sounds are represented by letters for reading and writing.

Stage 2 (orange): Building longer words - children need to understand one letter to one sound correspondence.

Stage 3 (blue): Multi-syllable words - children need to understand that longer words are made up of blocks of sound called syllables.

Stage 4 (green): Sounds represented by more than one letter - children need to understand that a sound may be represented by more than one letter.

Stage 5 (red): Categorising sounds in single-syllable words with orthographic diversity - children need to understand that a sound can be represented in more than one way and that the same letters may represent more than one sound.

Stage 6 (purple): Multi-syllable words with orthographic diversity - children need to be able to read longer words and to understand the impact of schwas*, unusual beginnings (prefixes) and endings (suffixes) often derived from foreign languages such as Latin, Greek or French.

*The schwa sound is only used in unstressed syllables, and may be represented by more than one letter. In some words, it takes several letters or even a whole syllable. For example: 'This present is for my brother. It's a book about a boy wizard.'

COMMITMENT TO LP
Schools' commitment
- Identify literacy as an issue in school development plans
- Review existing policies and schemes to ensure appropriate integration
of approach
- Attend training sessions
- Provide an initial information session for the whole staff team or the
English department
- Release staff for follow-up training in clusters
- Participate in evaluating the approach, including pre-testing and
post-testing
- Provide samples of pupils' writing each term
- Ensure internal co-ordination of the programme
Belfast Education and Library Board Commitment
- Fund training for teachers, learning assistants and others
- Provide a training folder and materials
- Organise demonstration lessons, team teaching and observations
- Organise and lead cluster groups
- Liaise with school co-ordinators
- Provide on-line support

NOTE

In Northern Ireland, children who become four before 1 July start school in the September after their fourth birthday. This means that children in Primary 1, equivalent to Reception in England, are on average two months older than those starting school in England. Primary 2 is comparable to Year 1. These two year groups comprise the Foundation Stage, which lasts until the oldest pupils are seven, and the youngest in the P2 class are at least six years and one month old, on average more than a year older than English children at the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage.

MORE INFORMATION

- The LP evaluation by Stranmillis University College is at: http://arrts.gtcni.org.uk/gtcni/bitstream/2428/12964/1/ LPAReport2006.pdf

- For information on the implementation of Linguistic Phonics in Belfast, contact Hilary McEvoy, assistant advisory officer for literacy (primary) at HMcEvoy@belb.co.uk