[senco-forum] a defintion of synthetic phonics

Synthetic phonics (SP) works from discrete sounds and the way they are represented by a letter or letters.  As soon as the first few sound/letter correspondences have been learned children are taught how to blend them together to produce /make(synthesise) words.

Analytic phonics (AP) starts by teaching the whole word and then breaking it into its component sound/letter corrspondences.  Onset and rime has always been associated with AP, though I see no reason why words cannot be broken down further.

The essential difference is that AP presupposes that children have been taught to recognise words as 'wholes' before they learn about the sounds which comprise them.  This introduces an unnecessary level of learning and may confuse children as to just how they should 'attack' a word. It can also lead to 'incidental' teaching of phonic knowledge in an unstructured way, unless the words are specifically planned and chosen for progression in phonic knowledge. SP teaches decoding and blending as the only necessary word attack skill, causes no confusion and does not require children to learn words as 'wholes''.

There is a comparison of the two methods here:

http://www.syntheticphonics.com/pdf%20files/Synthetic%20&%20Analytic%20Phonics%20Teaching%20Principles.pdf

Maggie

Alice Chenneour Randall <alice.chenneour at btinternet.com> wrote: I would really like to pick your brains on how you would describe synthetic phonics in relation to analytic phonics - it's just that when I put it to staff that the focus of literacy teaching had moved from an approach which favoured analytic phonic to one favouring synthetic phonics, they jumped on this saying that all phonics teaching was largely of the synthetic variety. I did point out teaching literacy along the lines of onset and rime was an example of the analytical approach but I flapped. What do you understand by these terms!?

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