[senco-forum] a defintion of synthetic phonics

Martin,

I think you're placing too much value on your interpretation of the words synthetic and analytic!

Synthesise means 'to make or build'.  The 'artificial' only comes in when talking about man made artefacts.  You could either say that language /words are man made artefacts, or you could say that they are synthesised from naturally occurring sounds.  Whichever way you look at it, the written word is synthsised from the symbols for speech sounds.  If you're going to teach children how to read it, you might as well follow the logic of the original devisers of written words; learn the symbols for the sounds, 'decode' the symbols and synthesise the spoken word from them.

Analytic only means breaking something into its component parts.  The 'reflective' element is a cultural add on...

I agree that segmenting the spoken word into phonemes for spelling is an analytical process, but that's not how Analytic Phonics works. Onsets & rimes are not phonemes, they're usually clusters of phonemes.

Maggie

Mmilesep at aol.com wrote:  
In a message dated 11/10/2007 20:15:36 GMT Daylight Time,  
tgrupp at ntlworld.com writes:

I think  that what has been pointed out is that synthetic phonics is 
constructive  while analytic phonics is destructive

I think the clue is in the semantics.

Synthetic - made up, artificial, not real etc

Analytic - thought about, considerered, lateral, reflected upon.

Make it too artificial and the learning is shallow. 

just a thought.

Martin

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