Nursery World - The great phonics debate

One of the hottest debates in the teaching of reading is about the role of phonics. It is now widely accepted that young children learning to read need to be taught about phonics - letters and their sounds. But how should practitioners plan for children's learning in this area? Synthetic phonics

Synthetic phonics

Some researchers and practitioners advocate the 'synthetic phonics'

approach. This means that children are directly taught letters and sounds, and taught to blend the sounds together to create simple words.

Debbie Hepplewhite, newsletter editor of the Reading Reform Foundation, says, 'Children can rapidly and easily be taught the sound/symbol correspondences through multi-sensory programmes such as the well-researched Jolly Phonics scheme. After the introduction of the first six sound/symbol correspondences (s, a, t, i, p and n), the children put these to immediate use by listening for the sounds all-through-the-word for spelling, and by sounding out and blending (synthesising) the letters all-through-the-word for reading.

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