"Phonics, a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with symbols
in an alphabetic writing system." Well, I guess the answers all my questions...
Hi my name is Jema Perry and welcome to Mooncake. For the past eight years I've
been working and living in China as a teacher, manager, and recruiter. So if
you're teaching ESL abroad make sure you subscribe below and hit that
notification bell for weekly ESL teaching tips. Phonics, an essential part
of any ESL curriculum. But what is phonics? Put simply phonics is how we
teach students to read and write. It's putting sound onto paper. How do we go
about teaching that?! Well there are five basic skills that students need to
master in order to become good readers and writers. So stay tuned because by the
end of this video you're going to understand these fundamental skills. This
video is the first of six in my phonics tips series. So today let's get started
with the basics. First and foremost you need to understand that there are
different approaches to teaching phonics. This is why you might be asked to teach
phonics differently in different schools. The most widely used programs are
analytic phonics and synthetic phonics. In analytic phonics the letter sounds
are not taught in isolation. Students take the whole word and then try
to break it down. Once they understand a word they can then make associations
with other words. So for example if I know the word mate then I'm going to know
the words late and fate. Analytic phonics really focuses on that initial sound
recognition without breaking down the whole word into individual sounds. As a
result this this encourages a lot of guessing. In synthetic phonics however,
every every sound in a word is important and students learn to decode words from
the beginning to the end, so from part-to-whole. And this skilll can be
reversed and help students to spell. In my opinion synthetic phonics is a much
better methodology for second language learners. This is because it gives
students more skills to decode unfamiliar words. And let's face it,
second language learners are going to meet a lot of words that they just don't know.
So today we're going to be focusing on synthetic phonics so let's get started
by looking at the five fundamental skills. First up is the
letter sounds. Now we all know that there's 26 letters in the alphabet but
did you know that there are 44 sounds in English language? This is why English is
so confusing. Now students need to learn these sounds and the letters that
represent them. That's both the uppercase and the lowercase as well as
diphthongs and diagraphs which put simply are two letters coming together
to form a different sound. Now this is the first and most important step in
students phonics learning. Without learning the letter sounds they won't
be able to start reading. So it's really important that they learn these sounds
well. Make sure you check out part 2 of my phonics tips series where I show you how
to teach the letter sounds without students getting bored. Writing. Along
with recognizing the letters that represent the sounds of the English
language, students also need to know how to write
them. Students need to know how to write both the uppercase and the lowercase
letters, but should start with the uppercase letters as these are the easiest to
write. Each letter has a specific stroke order and pencil grip is also very
important. Once students know the letter sounds then they're able to start
putting these sounds together to create words. This process is called blending.
Literally blending sounds together to create words. So students see a word on
paper and say the individual sounds out loud. Students then say those sounds a
little bit faster and faster until they hear the word, cat. Now blending is a
skill that takes time and practice and some students are going to learn quickly
and others they're gonna take a little bit longer. That's okay, give students
plenty of opportunity to practice and over time they'll learn at their own
pace. Segmenting is the reverse process of blending. So instead of seeing a word
as a whole students hear the word and have to break that word down into
individual sounds. This is how students learn to spell. So they hear the word cat
and they break it down into individual sounds. To learn how to do that students
need to be able to recognize that beginning, medial, and ending sound in
individual words. Once again this is a skill that will take time to develop and
some students will master this faster than others.
Sight words. So sight words are words that can't be blended together or that are used
with high frequency. Students need to be able to look at these words and
recognize what they mean and how to use them in a sentence. So that's it, the five
fundamental skills of synthetic phonics. Understanding these skills will help you
tackle your school's phonics curriculum and understand what skills your students
should be working on. If you like this video let me know by giving it a thumbs
up and by sharing with your fellow teachers. If you found it helpful, let me
know by commenting the word helpful in the comments below. That's it for this
videos thanks so much for watching. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and
notification bell for more weekly ESL teaching tips from Mooncake.