Becoming a person of letters cannot start too early
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Becoming a person of letters cannot start too early
https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/becoming-person-letters-cannot-start-too-early
Phonics training can never start too early. From the outset children see lower-case and capital letters in the environment. These letters are, and should be, identified by name for example, BBC, BT, CA and so on. By naming letters, parents, siblings and nursery nurses are introducing children to the skill of spelling. With further exposure to individual letters and to letter combinations in the many words that they see, children can be taught to determine which of the 44 phonemes (speech sounds) the various spelling choices (graphemes) represent, for example, that ar in the words “car park” represents the vowel phoneme “ar”, as in the start of “arm” and the middle of “farm”.
Second, Maggie Snowling, cited in the article, assumes that awareness of phonemes comes after the capacity to distinguish onsets and rimes (initial consonant phonemes and the vowel with any following consonant phonemes, respectively). If she were to consider that young children do not only hear phonemes but also see them in words, represented as graphemes, then she might realise that spelling skills and reading skills interact, from the very beginning of the literacy process, to change the “abstract” phoneme to a concrete unit of sound that children can readily be taught to isolate in onsets, rimes, syllables and words.
ALAN DAVIES 11A Kilmorey Park, Chester
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