But is it really the best route into reading for very youngchildren?
Anyone who has ever tried to play 'I Spy' with a four-year-old knowschildren find it hard to think of the language they hear as a sequenceof sounds. Mapping those sounds on to the spelling patterns of Englishis harder still.
Synthetic phonics is no magic bullet. It needs phonically regular texts,so words like 'one' and 'two', 'was' and 'love' are frowned on, severelylimiting what authors can say. As I discovered when I tried to teach myown four-year-old son to read, children soon get bored with thelaborious business of matching sounds to letters, missing out on the joyof making sense of lively texts in natural language.
Of course, in any alphabetic writing system, phonics provides anessential tool for word identification. But in English, phonics alonewill not unlock such necessary words as 'are' or 'could'. Some wordssimply have to be learned as 'one-offs', but others have consistentpatterns. Helping children to draw analogies between known and unknownwords gives them a key to families of related words such as 'would' and'should'. Patterns like these don't work every time, but do have ahigher success rate than synthetic phonics.
Every child learning to read English also needs a third key - carefulguessing from context - when synthetic phonics and spelling patternsfail. This strategy has the added virtue of focusing children'sattention on the meaning of what they are reading. Pleasure in makingsense of texts is an essential driving force in learning to read.
Comparative studies show that despite our difficult spelling, we're notbad at teaching children to read in England. But we're markedly lesssuccessful at teaching them to like it. Those who insist on syntheticphonics as the one route of entry into reading have little to offer foraddressing this real problem.
