Phonics Research

• Parent: "Sound out the world. I want to hear you sound out the word."
• Child: "Bee Aye Tee"
• Parent: "OK. That's the letters. Now let's hear the sounds."
• Child: "buh .... ah .... t"
• Parent: "Now put them together into a word...."
• Child: Silence.... Eyes starting to wonder elsewhere on the page....
• Parent: (frustrated) "I can't hear the word. What is the word? Look at the word."
• Child: (noticing picture in next column of a van) "VAN!"
• phonics sounding out

• phonics sounding out putting the sounds together

• http://www.civitas.org.uk/blog/2006/03/are_they_sounding_out_a_uturn.html - UK schools making Phonics part of the legal curriculum, replacing years of other approaches such as whole language.
• synthetic phonics involves blending individual letter sounds to ‘sound-out’ whole words: c-a-t. The call for the phonics approach in primary teaching is not new. Widely used in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was later replaced by methods which relied on readers learning whole words and their meaning simultaneously – building up ‘word recognition’ by building banks of ‘sight vocabulary’.
• Support of phonics - http://findoutmore.dfes.gov.uk/2005/12/synthetic_phoni.html
• At the end of a 16-week study comparing the two methods, St Andrews University found that new school entrants studying synthetic phonics were seven months ahead of both their chronological age and their counterparts on standardised reading and spelling tests.

• http://www.specialeducation.ilstu.edu/csss/solutions/documents/phonics.html - Teaching sounding out words. Very good ideas, simple examples, for teachers to follow in teaching phonics.
• Example: (Teacher points to the word map on the board, touches under each sound as the students sound it out, and slashes finger under the word as students say it fast.) "Sound it out." (/mmmmmmmmaaaaaaap/) "Say it fast." (map)
• Important steps:
• Students orally produce each sound in a word and sustain that sound as they progress to the next.
• Students must be taught to put those sounds together to make a whole word.
• Students sound out the letter-sound correspondences "in their head" or silently and then produce the whole word.
• Teaching Letter-Sound Correspondences
• Example: (Teacher points to letter m on board). "The sound of this letter is /mmmmm/. Tell me the sound of this letter."
• Teaching Reading Connected Text
• Includes several phonics related games.
• Other sites:
• http://reading.uoregon.edu/index.php