Phonics: teaching the complex alphabetic codePhonics: teaching the complex alphabetic code

Dr Wendy Jolliffe

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

How confident are you at teaching phonics?

Line up

Getting to know each other: sharing experiences

Reading has two essential key components

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 sound is also made by ‘ue’ (blue), ‘ew’ (blew), ‘oe’ (shoe), ‘ough’ (through), ‘wo’ (two) and ‘o’ (to).

• Pupil 2 is 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.

The strands of skilled reading

(Source: Scarborough, 2009: 24)

Five key areas in teaching reading

• Phonemic Awareness

• Phonics

• Fluency

• Vocabulary

• Text Comprehension

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

Split digraphs

Which of these words contains a split digraph?

time made

spike have

come bride

some shine

Teaching the split digraph

tie time

toe tone

cue cube

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.

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)

Sound buttons

rain bright

witch slaughter

Diamond ranking activityRate the key aspects of effective phonics teaching

most importantimportant

least least importantimportant

Teaching the complex alphabetic code

Grapheme choices

glay glai

proyn proin

strou strow

sproat sprowt

dryt dright

smayn smain

groy groi

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

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.