New phonics 'boosts skills'

Linguistic phonics builds on children's existing language, developingphonological awareness before introducing children to letters.

Linguistic phonics was developed with advisory speech and languagetherapists for a revised curriculum to start in September 2008, whichdelays the formal teaching of reading and emphasises problem-solving andthinking skills.

Lead researcher Dr Colette Gray from Stranmillis University College inBelfast said the study showed significant gains in children taught usinglinguistic phonics compared with children who were not.

The study evaluated linguistic phonics with 745 children in Year 2 andYear 3 in 12 Belfast schools. The group was split between children whowere taught using linguistic phonics and children in a controlgroup.

Dr Gray said that prior to the introduction of linguistic phonics, therewere no significant differences for Year 2 children from both groups.But when children were tested at the end of Year 2, she said, those inthe linguistic phonics group 'significantly outperformed the controlgroup and made the greatest gains in reading'.

In contrast, for Year 3 children, baseline testing showed 'a huge gap'in reading attainment, with children in the control group ahead of theother children. But once exposed to linguistic phonics, Year 3 madegreat gains in reading attainment and almost closed this gap by the endof the year.

'You wouldn't expect such a dramatic improvement,' said Dr Gray. 'Inthree to six months, children in the linguistic phonics group would haveoutperformed the control group.'

Hilary McEvoy, an advisory officer with the Belfast Education andLibrary Board, who helped devise linguistic phonics, told Nursery World,'The research indicates that this multi-sensory approach is gettingexciting results, without pushing children into learning to read andwrite too early.'

Taking this approach, in Year 1 (when children are five and six) thefocus is on developing phonological awareness. Children are onlyexplicitly introduced to letters following work on syllable, rhyme andphoneme awareness.

Most children are using synthetic phonics techniques - segmenting,blending and phoneme-manipulation - by the end of Year 1. In Year 2,children continue to 'discover' how the 44 phonemes in speech arerepresented in print, as they systematically work through a series ofmulti-sensory activities designed to help them 'crack the code'. They'problem-solve' unfamiliar words using sound-letter knowledge anddrawing on context.

Ms McEvoy added, 'Synthetic phonics teaches children what sound isassociated with a letter or letter-combination - for example, this is"ay" - and children learn the sound. If this is not the sound thechildren use in speech, there is a problem.

'Linguistic phonics starts from speech. It's the basic principle of "Yousay tomato, I say toma(y)to". Both are spelled the same way. Childrenhave to "work out" what makes sense to them.'

The report is available at www.stran.ac.uk/news.