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Synthetic phonics teaches reading by starting with basic letter sounds and decoding and encoding individual letters before moving on to blending sounds to form words. Sight words are only taught once phonetic concepts are mastered. This differs from whole language methods that teach sight words first. Educators often combine different approaches.
Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching reading that starts with the basic letter sounds, mixing and playing the words. It is often used in the very early stages of learning to read, before students are able to sight recognize words. This differs from whole language or analytic phonetics methods, which emphasize sight words and book reading over sounding words.
The process of synthetic phonetics generally begins with learning to decode and encode the sounds of individual letters. In this initial stage of learning phonics, decoding refers to recognizing a letter and identifying the sound it makes. Coding refers to hearing a sound and knowing which letter that sound represents. Decoding and encoding are the basic skills required for phonics-based reading and writing, respectively.
After learning how to decode and encode individual sounds, students are taught how these basic letter sounds combine to form words. At this stage, students should be able to spell, or decode, simple three-letter words and sentences made up of three-letter words. For example, the sentence “Jim and Hal sat” contains only words that follow very simple phonetic rules. Students are eventually taught blends of sounds, such as /th/ and /sh/, and then learn to play more complex sounds.
Only when students have mastered these basic phonetic concepts are they taught high-frequency sight words, such as “said” or “one,” that cannot be sounded out. Because so many common English words fall into this category, students taught according to the synthetic phonics model are usually unable to read even very simple books at first. Students only move on to reading books once they have a solid understanding of a large number of phonetic rules.
Other methods of teaching reading, such as the whole language and its variants, reverse this process. Whole Language begins by teaching sight words as encountered in book reading. This method is often combined with analytical phonics, where students learn phonetic rules by analyzing words they already know. For example, students would learn the word “cat” by seeing and hearing it read repeatedly in the context of a book or story. They would then be taught that the individual letters in the word “cat” correspond to the sounds /k/, /a/ and /t/.
Educators often combine aspects of different approaches to reading. Synthetic phonics is very useful for pre-literate students who are not yet able to sight recognize words. Once students have learned some basic phonetic rules, they can increase their reading fluency by recognizing words without having to spell them out.
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