Page 17 - ELG2205 May Issue 480

TRENDING IN PHONICS

It sounds

good

PHOTO BY SHUTTERSTOCK

Why phonics is a useful tool when teaching English, by Melanie Butler

he first time I used phonics in an EFL by letter. By contrast, the eyes of children students will pay teachers and schools to
class was in Italy in the late 70s – and who speak the most opaque languages, teach them.
I did it without even knowing what French and English, scan to the end of Another plus: phonics teaching works
Tphonics was. An intermediate level the word. brilliantly online and there are lots of jobs for
student was talking about some character We used to think that reading is a online phonics teachers.
called ‘the pop’. transferable skill. That is, if you learned to In most of the countries which have
Finally, she mentioned the Vatican and do it in one language then you didn’t need adopted them (see box below), the local
I understood. “You mean the pope,” I said, to be taught to read again in another, except British Council teaching centres have already
writing the two words on the board. “See, maybe if it had a different alphabet. But that launched commercial phonics teaching. If the
pope has the letter e at the end, so we use a no longer appears to be true. Council hasn’t added phonics to their criteria
long vowel.” I wrote some other examples on So, is teaching phonics the answer? for accreditation, could that be because they
the board: hop/hope, bit/bite, rat/rate, adding, As Gill Ragsdale makes clear in her article want to keep the business for themselves?
“You see, the long vowel sounds like the name opposite, the efficacy of teaching phonics,
of the letter.” particularly synthetic phonics, to English
There was a stunned silence in the class, language learners is not that clear. The effects Where phonics
then somebody asked, rather angrily, why are generally positive, but moderate and, as is
nobody had bothered to tell them this before? often the case in language teaching, a lot of the are taught
Like most British people of my generation, research is poorly designed.
nobody ever taught me this pattern, which In my opinion, phonics isn’t a magic wand
Americans call ‘magic E’. I’d just acquired it, and it certainly shouldn’t replace reading Countries where, according to Gazette
like I acquired the present perfect, implicitly. strategies in the EFL toolbox, any more than research, English phonics are either on the
But for students learning to decode the graded readers, as Sue Leather explains on curriculum or widely used (by language).
sounds a written letter represents in a foreign page 22, should replace authentic materials.
language it can be difficult, especially if your Both approaches are useful. Chinese language regions: mainland
first language is, like Italian, ‘transparent’, Teaching reading strategies is helpful China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore.
which means a single phoneme is always because L1 speakers of transparent languages
represented by the same single grapheme, don’t need to use them to read their own Spanish speaking regions: Spain,
or letter. language, they just need to decode, so they Argentina, Uruguay, Chile.
In fact neuroscience has shown us that the are not going to try and guess the word from Arabic speaking: Saudi, UAE, Qatar.
first language we speak influences the way our context or use visual clues to help them,
brain processes the written word. because that isn’t part of the way they learned Other: Japan, Malaysia, many Indian
For example, English children use eight to read. states.
different areas of the brain when they are And teaching phonics is helpful, because in
reading, while Italian children use only one, the English one phoneme isn’t always represented What do all these language groups have
area for decoding, according to neuroscientist by the same grapheme and the patterns of in common?
Sarah Jayne Blakemore. English spelling – think magic E – are difficult Apart possibly, for some of the more
Meanwhile, the Basque Centre on to acquire if your language is transparent. obscure Indian languages, all of them have
Cognition Brain and Language has used eye- Plus, there is another reasons why language five to seven vowel sounds. English has 20
tracking to look at the way children learn to schools and language teachers should vowels sounds, plus two semi-vowels, but
read. Even before their first reading lesson, consider introducing phonics: governments our alphabet only has five vowels and uses
children who speak Basque or Spanish, both around the world are putting them on their no accents or other diacritics.
transparent languages, look at a word letter English language curriculum, so parents and
editorial@elgazette.com 17