Different Approaches to Phonics Instruction

The following extract is taken from award-winning PETAA Book  Teaching with Intent 2: Literature-based literacy teaching and learning, written by Bronwyn Parkin and Helen Harper, published 2019. It is meant to be a very brief overview of different approaches to phonics instruction, and there is significantly more reading that should be done on the topic for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding. An excellent place to start is PETAA Publication The Alphabetic Principle and Beyond...surveying the landscape, edited by Robyn Cox, Susan Feez and Lorraine Beveridge, published 2019.

The term 'phonics' is an abbreviation of graphophonics, which refers to sounds written down. It's useful for us to understand the different approaches to teaching phonics:

  • Analytic phonics starts with the whole word, which is split into its graphophonic components. These components are isolated for further study, and then used to make new words. Supporters of analytic phonics argue that the little bits of a word can only make sense in the context of meaningful communication, so meaning must precede splitting a word apart. 
  • Synthetic phonics starts with the graphophonic components, which are then used to make words. Supporters of synthetic phonics argue that students should learn the phonics content before embedding that knowledge in a wider context (Buckingham et al., 2019). They also often argue that sounds and letters are best taught in a particular order so that students can quickly generate a large number of three letter words (Lloyd & Wernham, 2018).
  • Systematic phonics instruction is recommended by the National Reading Panel (NRP) in the USA, which conducted a major study of all research into reading instruction (2000). The NRP's role was to identify effective aspects of reading instruction, and it did not recommend synthetic phonics over analytic phonics. It recommends systematic phonics instruction (ibid.), that is, planned and regular phonics teaching, at the same time pointing out that phonics instruction improved word recognition skills in older children, but not reading comprehension (NRP, 2000).