Basic Phonics Skills

Pupils need to know

the letters of the alphabet well
the specific matches between sounds and
letters in words(e.g. /ch/air/)
that words are made up of separable sounds
(awareness of phonemes)
sentences are made up of words

The KSSR English

Language
Syllabus
The teaching of Phonics
as one of the
strategies to develop children basic literacy.

What is Phonics?
A method of teaching children to read (not

something they need to learn)

Phonics instruction teaches children the

relationships between the letters

(graphemes) of written language and the
individual sounds (phonemes) of spoken
language.

It teaches children to use these relationships

to read and write words.

It is NOT Phonemic awareness.

Theory of Phonics
Children must learn that connections between

letter patterns and the sounds they

represent.
The teacher must provide direct, explicit
instruction about phonics rules and patterns.
Children taught phonics using systematic
phonics made better progress in reading and
spelling.

Issues
English is complex:

44 sounds represented by 26 letters

Confusion because of the possible range of
correspondence between a sound and spelling
represented
/f/: f - /fish/, ph - /photo/

Issues
A proportion of commonly used English

language words that are not phonetically

regular.(e.g. /ch/air,
/ch/aracter, ma/ch/ine)
75% of the English spelling system is
phonetically regular the rest could be quite
problematic .

Approaches to teaching
Phonics
Synthetic Phonics
Analytic Phonics

Synthetic Phonics
Sounds and corresponding letters are learnt

first and in isolation

Blending and segmenting are taught
specifically and separately
Read phonetically regular books

Analytic phonics
Sounds are taught in connection with words
Children learn that multiple words share the

same initial sound

Learn phonics by deduction from texts e.g.
bat, bus, beg, bill

Phoneme
Smallest unit of sound /-/

e.g. /s/, /ch/,/ph/, /oi/oy/, /ee/,/ff/

Grapheme
Written form of the letters in the English

alphabet
a-z

Digraph
When 2 graphemes are combined to form a
phoneme
Consonant digraph ph - /f/, ff - /f/, kn - /n/, nn
- /n/
Vowel digraph ow - /ow/, ay - /ei/, ee - /e/, oo
- /oo/

Approaches to teaching
Phonics
Blending - to combine the individual sounds

to letters to form words

cat - /k/a/t/
Segmenting to break down individual letter
sounds to sound it correctly
/h/a/t/ - hat

Approaches to teaching
Phonics
Substitution - identify beginning, middle, and

end sound of a word. Then change the

beginning or end sound/letter
e.g. cat ca/t/, ca/p/; /c/at/, /h/at/;
Deletion - identify and omit the beginning or
end sound of a word
Word family a word ending consisting of a
vowel and consonant combination e.g.
/an/, /at/, /op/

Sight & High frequency

words
Sight words need to be memorized on sight

e.g. where, were, one, who, you

High frequency words - words that occur
frequently in English
e.g. it, he, them

Phonological awareness
Pupils need to know that
some written words are longer than the
spoken form
words are made of syllables
that words rhyme

Phonemic awareness
Pupils need to
understands that there are many words that
start with the same sound
know that spoken words are made up of
individual sounds
able to identify and manipulate individual
sounds
know that phonemes can be rearranged and
substituted to make new words