5th December 2014 1:00
By Blue Tutors
Tuition for primary aged students will often have a focus on phonics, to develop early reading and writing.
In recent years, the teaching of phonics has been much discussed. The Rose Report (2006) recommended that early literacy would be much improved by the discrete teaching of “high-quality, systematic phonic work”. Systematic phonics, then, is breaking down language into the smallest possible units, or phonemes, and using these as building blocks for decoding (be it for reading or for writing) unfamiliar words. This has led to the development of a wealth of phonics resources and programmes, aimed at progressive, rigorous teaching and learning of phonics, seeing this as the basis of confident and fluent reading and writing in primary aged children.
However, as stated by the Rose Report, this stand-alone phonics teaching must be set into a “broad and rich language curriculum”. Given that there are many different, recognised learning styles, and that primary aged children requesting tuition for English will have had this systematic teaching at school, would a repetition of this approach (albeit more intense and more individually taught) be enough to make the desired progress?
And so we see some tutors and teachers raising the argument for analytical phonics teaching: an approach to phonics which looks at whole words, letter patterns and sounds within them and encourages the student to analyse these, deducing understanding and applying this to new or unfamiliar words. Criticism of this method is that pupils have far more to memorise, being taught “blends” such as /spr/ or /str/ instead of using the single units of sound to build these (as the systematic method would encourage.
So which is right? Which is better? The beauty of one-to-one tuition is that the attuned tutor can develop an understanding of their pupil and tailor a specific learning programme to accelerate progress and build confidence, using whichever of these approaches fits the pupil better.
Surely, if it were possible, this would be the recommendation of any educationalist for the best progress, understanding and success for each individual pupil. The use of whichever method worked, not as best fit, but as best for each student.