Reading is an extremely demanding task. As adults, we read constantly, so it’s easy to forget how complicated a process it really is. For a person to understand a written text, our brains have to perform a variety of functions accurately and simultaneously.
These include decoding - the act of recognising sounds represented by written symbols.
Although this process is instantaneous for experienced readers - we’re not even conscious we’re doing it - for young learners, decoding is slow and effortful.
Phonics explicitly teaches young children how certain sounds are represented by letters and words, helping them to commit these to their long-term memory through frequent exposure.
How does it work in the classroom?
There are a number of different phonics schemes that can be used in the classroom - 23 of which have been validated by the Department for Education.
In an interview with Tes in 2020, Julia Carroll, a reader in child development and education at Coventry University, and one of the world’s leading authorities on phonics, said that teaching children in small groups, pushing them on from the level they’re at, is the “most effective factor”.
“Often, schools will use whole-group teaching to introduce a new letter sound, to talk about some sounds and relationships. They then use the small groups to reinforce that, and work at the level of the individual children, so that the more advanced children can be using more complex words and using a wider variety of words, and the children working at a lower level can be supported to do the less complex words,” she says.
“In other areas, differentiation can cause more individual differences in the classroom - the top children really get on but the children working behind that lead group really fall behind. But actually it seems like, in phonics, all the groups do better by having a bit of differentiation.”
Most schemes, she says, use synthetic phonics, which sees teachers introduce and teach a few letters, and then move on to how to segment and blend using those letters, before introducing more letters and repeating the process.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) is an independent charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement.
To achieve this, it summarises the best available evidence for teachers; its Teaching and Learning Toolkit, for example, is used by 70 per cent of secondary schools.
The charity also generates new evidence of “what works” to improve teaching and learning, by funding independent evaluations of high-potential projects, and supports teachers and senior leaders to use the evidence to achieve the maximum possible benefit for young people.
