Phonics and why it is used to teach reading

Victoria has just announced all government schools will be required to use phonics to teach reading from next year. This brings it in line with approaches in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia.

Some Victorian schools already teach phonics. But Education Minister Ben Carroll says all government schools will need to do 25 minutes per day of "explicit teaching" of phonics from the first year of school (called prep in Victoria) to Year 2. Schools will also need to use an approach called "systematic synthetic phonics."

What do these terms mean and what do they involve?

What is explicit instruction?

Explicit teaching (also called "explicit instruction") involves introducing complex skills in small steps, with clear explanations and demonstrations of what students are expected to learn.

Students then practice what they learned and get feedback from their teacher until the skill is mastered and a new skill is introduced.

What is phonics?

Phonics is a method of teaching children to read and spell by explicitly teaching students the relationships between letters or letter combinations (also called "graphemes") and speech sounds ("phonemes").

Some of the first letters and sounds children learn might be "s," "a" and "t." When children know what sounds s, a and t represent, they can spell and sound out "at," "as" and "sat."

What is 'systematic' phonics?

Phonics teaching is systematic when teachers follow a specific order. Typically, they start with frequent single letters (such as "s," "a," "t," "p," "i" and "n") before moving on to frequent sounds with more than one letter (such as "sh," "th" and "ee").

The English spelling system is complicated by the fact that many letters and letter combinations can represent more than one sound (for example, "ea" in "heap" and "head"). Phonics teaching covers first the most common relationships between letters and sounds as they can be used to read many new words. Then it covers some of the less frequent relationships.

Research suggests learning 60 to 100 relationships together with some common words with infrequent ones— also called "sight words" or "exception words"—is enough for children to read independently.

What does 'synthetic' mean for phonics?

Phonics is taught "synthetically" when it progresses from parts to whole: children learn to sound out each letter or letter combination in a word and then blend those sounds to the pronunciation of the word.

A student who has learned 60 letter-sound relationships can then sound out thousands of new words one letter/letter combination at a time and then blend those sounds into a pronunciation of the whole word. This is called "decoding."

While initially slow, with practice, decoding becomes quickly automatic.