What method should i use?
So, what does a teacher (parent, tutor) need to know in order to teach effectively, resulting in a pleasurable and successful experience for the students? There are varying approaches to teaching reading. Some students “get it” whether reading is taught through a whole language approach, using sight words, or varied uses of some basal readers. However, limited approaches are not always successful for all students. Research has shown that a phonics approach is more successful than a whole language or sight word approach to teaching reading. The two basic phonics approaches to teaching word identification are through analytic phonics and synthetic phonics.
A Whole Language approach uses writing about specific topics within the child’s scope of understanding. With discussion and use of the child’s dictation of what to say, the teacher writes the information. This is then used to help the child read back what has been written and then try to identify words either by isolating a specific “sight word” or by connecting with letter sounds. Repeated reading of the written story is used to help the student learn to recognize more of the words. While this is a valid activity, it is not dependable for teaching the numerous reading skills necessary for independent word identification in order transfer the knowledge to reading about a different topic with many more unknown words.
Analytic phonics teaches a word first...such as dog...and then breaks the word down into individual phonic elements. Example: “This is the word ‘dog.’ What is the first sound you hear in the word? What is the last sound you hear in the word ‘dog’?” The difficulty with this approach is that the student has to be told the word before the individual elements can be discovered. Basically, this is using a sight word approach and then learning phonics through it. However, another difficulty with this approach is that learning one specific word and its specific sounds does not necessarily transfer to learning to read other new words.
Synthetic phonics teaches one letter sound at a time and then blends the sounds into words that have other known letter sounds. Example: After learning the sounds for the letters “a,” “n,” “t,” and “s,” the students learns to blend the four sounds together to form eight words, “at, sat, an, Ann, ant, ants, tan, tans” simply by combining individual, known letter sounds. If a student can do this, he or she can be more independent in identifying any other words that contain those letters. Ready Reading examples of lessons will show you how to do this systematically.