Mastering Phonics: Unlocking the Alphabetic Code

1. Phonics: teaching the complex alphabetic code Dr Wendy Jolliffe

2. Outcomes for the session To improve understanding of: • the role of phonics in the teaching of reading • the complex alphabetic code • methods of teaching the complex alphabetic code

3. How confident are you at teaching phonics? Line up Getting to know each other: sharing experiences

4. Reading has two essential key components

5. Diagnosing difficulties • Pupil 1 is quite competent orally and demonstrates wide vocabulary. He can read some words by sounding out and blending phonemes but is less secure with long vowel phonemes. For example, he knows that double ‘o’ makes the sound ‘oo’ in the word ‘fool’, but does not realise that the same soundis also made by ‘ue’ (blue), ‘ew’ (blew), ‘oe’ (shoe), ‘ough’ (through), ‘wo’(two) and ‘o’ (to). • Pupil 2is a pupil with limited reading experiences and poor oral vocabulary. She has ‘cracked the code’ of reading, but the effort of decoding distracts her from the overall purpose of reading –making sense of the printed word. Unlike good readers who know when the text does not make sense and reread, she will often continue decoding even though she has lost the thread of what she is reading.

6. The strands of skilled reading (Source: Scarborough, 2009: 24)

7. Five key areas in teaching reading • Phonemic Awareness • Phonics • Fluency • Vocabulary • Text Comprehension

8. Why is English complex? • Written English has an advanced code where frequently, sounds are represented by more than one letter and letters represent more than one sound. • A phoneme can be represented by one or more letters • The same phoneme can be represented (spelt) more than one way • The same grapheme (spelling) may represent more than one phoneme

9. Split digraphs Which of these words contains a split digraph? time made spike have come bride some shine

10. Teaching the split digraph tie time toe tone cue cube

11. Teaching the split digraph Ask two children to hold hands to represent the grapheme - the pair is split by another child who represents the phoneme between them.

12. Long vowel phonemes • Which of these words contain long vowel phonemes? trail hope swan pay frog saw toy mouse fern • How many ways can you find to spell the phoneme /ee/ as in ‘green’? • The phoneme /ee/ (as in green) can be spelt in ten ways as follows: ‘ee’ `(seen), ‘ea’ (mean), ‘e’ (be), ‘ie’ (siege), ‘ei’ (deceive), ‘e-e’ (serene), ‘ey’ (key), ‘y’ (folly), ‘i’ (radio), ‘i-e’ (marine)

13. Sound buttons rain bright slaughter witch

14. Diamond ranking activityRate the key aspects of effective phonics teaching most important least important

15. Teaching the complex alphabetic code

17. Grapheme choices glay glai proyn proin strou strow sproat sprowt dryt dright smayn smain groy groi

20. Plenary Doughnut What have your learned about the place of phonics in the teaching of reading? Name some useful ways of teacing the complex alphabetic code

21. Further reading Jolliffe, W. (2013) The Primary Teachers’ Guide to Phonics. Witney: Scholastic. Jolliffe, W. and Waugh D. (2012) Teaching Systematic synthetic phonics in primary schools. London: Sage/Learning Matters.