An investigation of the effects of phonics teaching on children's progress in reading and spelling
Abstract
Progressive child-centred education has led to the ascendancy of look
and say methods for children learning to read, perpetuating the use of a guessing
strategy and promoting a dependency culture. Explicit synthetic phonics with
direct teaching of the alphabetic principle has been replaced by gradual analytic
phonics or no phonics, leaving children to discover spelling patterns for
themselves.
This investigation was directed towards identifying the relationship
between different teaching methods and children's progress in word reading,
spelling and reading comprehension. Initially, such progress was monitored from
1993-1995 in 12 Primary classes. Analyses of the data collected indicated that
(a) accelerated letter-sound knowledge and the ability to blend letter sounds had
a significant effect on children's progress in reading, spelling and comprehension
and (b) the degree to which blending had been explicitly taught had a significant
positive effect on the proportion of spelling errors produced which encode
orthographic information.
The effects of accelerating letter-sound knowledge and sounding and
blending were then examined experimentally in Primary 1 children using two
experimental groups and one control group. It was found that explicit synthetic
phonics, which demonstrates how letters blend together to form words, (a)
accelerated reading, spelling and phonemic awareness more rapidly than just
learning the letter sounds at an accelerated pace and (b) produced a higher
proportion of mature orthographic spelling errors than in the other conditions.
It was found that the strategies children use for decoding and encoding
mirror the teaching methods they have experienced. Gradual analytiC phonics
teaching encourages phonetic cue reading, children only processing some of the
letters and sounds in words. Explicit synthetic phonics teaching encourages early
cipher reading, children processing all of the letters and sounds in words. This
method teaches children how to use their knowledge of the alphabetic code to
decode unknown words, thus establishing an orthographic memory for such
words.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
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