Analytic And Synthetic Phonic Analysis

Phonics is the method for teaching reading or writing in which the sounds or phonemes associated with the individual letters or graphemes are combined to make a word (O’Donnell et al, 2016. p.331). Phonics is an important educational tool for developing early literacy. There are two major methods educators use for phonics instruction and these are the analytic and synthetic phonics approaches (Get Reading Right, n.d.). The two methods for phonics instruction will be explained, moreover, the problems with analytic phonics will be highlighted and the case will be made that teaching phonics is most effective if instruction is grounded in synthetic methods. Effective methods using synthetic phonics will be discussed for years K-1.

Traditionally,
As mentioned, a synthetic approach to phonics teaches the relationship between individual sounds or phonemes and their letters or letter groups (Phonics International, 2011). There are approximately 44 phonemes and synthetic phonics teaches to first split up the spoken word from beginning to end identifying the phonemes and graphemes that correspond to the sounds and then blend the sounds to read a word (Cole, 2013). Children are also taught that the alphabetical code is reversible using the synthetic approach, if students can read words they can also write them (Get Reading Right, n. d.). Arguably, the most important difference is that the pronunciation is not misunderstood as often because individual phonemes are examined by students and thus they can decipher longer and more complex words using their knowledge of phonemes (Get Reading Right, n. d.). Consider the words: “kiss”, “place” and “sell”, all words have the /s/ phoneme but have different spelling (Get Reading Right, 2005). Based on these factors and the evidence of it’s success we should consider how to implement a synthetic phonics approach for years K-1 as this is where the foundations of literacy are
Figure 5.6 of Tompkins et al, (2014) gives clear guidelines as to what sounds should be introduced to students at each year level. In the years K-1 students should be introduced to the common and uncommon consonant sounds as well as the five short vowel sounds (Tompkins et al, 2014). In year one the focus is on consonant blends, consonant diagraphs, long vowel sounds and common long vowel diagraphs (Tompkins et al, 2014). It is important to look at these more difficult sounds taught by experienced