[eal-bilingual] phonics and context

Gordon Ward and Clara Rizzi's posts indicate what I hope is growing 
agreement on this issue. Phonics is not language. It is a way of introducing 
children to the alphabetic system in order to learn to read and spell. In 
our first language, we have several years of hearing and using it, slowly at 
first, before we learn to read. In a new language, particularly if we go 
straight into a school, we hit the spoken and written language at the same 
time, and need to make sense of it. This takes time, and there is more than 
one factor involved.

I used Ruth Miskin's ditties recently with a six year old native English 
speaker who had become completely confused by guessing techniques used in 
his school, and got an immediate improvement in his behaviour as well as his 
reading.  Sue Palmer, who has watched me teach, says I use a kind of 
"systematic empathy" to match up the teaching to what children need to 
learn, and to make sure thay understand and are comfortable with the 
material. This kind of approach needs to run through all of the work. We are 
not programming computers, but teaching people, and we need to teach them 
what they need to learn, and in a way that enables them to learn. Phonics is 
a key part of the mix, rather than one reading teaching method among others, 
because of the alphabetic basis of English writing. This is true despite the 
irregularity in spelling that cuts down its efficiency. It is not the whole 
story, which includes,  tenses, idioms, pronunciation,  the chunks of 
language we need to survive, small words such as articles that give language 
cohesion and make it easier for listeners to process.

John Bald 