FIND BIS – Phonics Lays A Solid Foundation of English

/ / Published in Elementary Highlights, news & event

As one of the most popular English teaching methods throughout the world, Phonics is recognized as the most efficient way for children to develop language ability. Phonics is now also widely applied in schools among China. What is Phonics? What’s the difference between Phonics and a phonogram?

Today, we visited the Phonics classes in our Elementary School to have a better understanding about Phonics.

Q: What is Phonics? 

Words are made up from small units of sound called phonemes. Phonics teaches children to be able to listen carefully and identify the phonemes that make up each word. Phonics teaches the correspondence between the sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them. This helps children to learn to read words and to spell words. The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or, in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns.

Q: Why using Phonics to learn English? 
In some languages learning phonics is easy because each phoneme has just one grapheme to represent it. The English language is a bit more complicated than this.English only has around 44 phonemes but there are around 120 graphemes or ways of writing down those 44 phonemes.

English only has 26 letters in the alphabet, so some graphemes are made up from more than one letter.

Some graphemes can represent more than one phoneme. For example, ch makes very different sounds in these three words: chip, school, chef.

Therefore, students who mastered Phonics can not only pronounce fluently and accurately, but also can guess the meaning of new words by decoding the words. This way, their efficiency in learning English reading and writing is greatly enhanced and their interests in reading is improved.

 

Q: Why do non-native speakers need to learn Phonics? 
Take students whose mother tongue is Mandarin for example. Some English pronunciations are not found in Mandarin, such as th. By learning Phonics, students first will be immersed into an English environment and trained to listen and identify different phonemes. Then teachers will teach the pronunciation with scientific approaches.Students who learn Phonics will be closer to native speakers in pronunciation, and more likely to develop an interest in reading through leveled reading program. After a certain amount of reading, their writing ability will be improved as well.

Q: There are some accelerated Phonics courses offered by some institutions. Are they acceptable?

Learning Phonics is a long-term process. We don’t recommend an accelerated course. At Boston International School, we use a teaching system that includes six phases:Phase 1 – Focusing on a child’s ability to distinguish sounds.

Phase 2 – The formal letter teaching begins. It starts with sounds that are most frequent in English, allowing them to build words quickly.

Phase 3 – Students will learn the remaining letter sounds.

Phase 4 – Focusing on segmenting and blending more complex words.

Phase 5 – Alternative graphemes and sounds are introduced. Split digraph and more non-decodable words are introduced.

Phase 6 – Developing reading fluency and spelling accuracy.

Q: What’s the relationship between Phonics and reading ability? 

We don’t exaggerate Phonics. To be more rational, we should consider Phonics as a tool of learning English. Vocabulary and reading are still the foundation of language learning.That said, Phonics has a direct impact on vocabulary and reading ability. With the introduction of leveled reading, teachers will choose books for students according to their English ability and guarantee their reading qualities.

Our final goal is to develop students’ interest in reading and improve their ability in writing and speaking. Playing with phonics is an important tool in this process.

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