Thanks for this
Very interesting - it's great to have this breadth of discussion.
Thanks to David - his input is so useful
Frances


On 26/1/07 13:38, "James Simpson" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hello all
> 
> A message from David Thornton, forwarded by me, as he's having trouble sending
> to the list from Oman. It contains more on phonics, and the appropriacy of
> phonics-based approaches to the teaching of L2 literacy to adults. David sets
> out with great clarity some important and interesting points about teaching
> that are well worth reading.
> 
> Have a good weekend
> 
> James
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> DDT 25.01.07
> 
> It is generally accepted that initial literacy programmes for younger learners
> should be predicated on phonic approaches, and I would not disagree with
> advocates of phonics first and fast for young learners. I am, however, less
> convinced about the place of this fast, compact phonics-based work on an adult
> literacy course. The question is how well can phonics programmes, which are
> essentially designed for very young learners, be adapted for adults? Are there
> such things as adult phonics or phonics for adults? The basic reason why I
> become mildly worried at the mention of phonics in connection to adult
> literacy is because the literacy development of adults takes place in a
> complex environment in which their literacy skills develop in a social context
> and where the target language users are constantly interacting with other
> people. It seems to me that phonics cannot necessarily or easily relate to
> such circumstances.
> 
>  
> 
> Phonics is a method of breaking words up into sounds that entails teaching
> letter-sound combinations as parts of words. Its value for young learners
> seems undeniable. We teachers use phonics in initial literacy to provide our
> learners with a tool for reading, a word attack skill to help the young
> learners work out some of the words [but not necessarily all the words] that
> they encounter when they read but which are unfamiliar to them. Phonic
> approaches are predicated on the premise that young learners need to become
> aware of the sounds in words in order to become proficient readers and that
> proficient reading will not develop without an awareness of the sounds in
> words or the phonic insight and understanding that this brings. However, is
> this necessarily true for adult learners?
> 
>  
> 
> Helen Sunderland correctly makes a distinction between synthetic phonics and
> analytic phonics, and identifies potential difficulties in using the former
> with beginner readers of English. Helen suggests that an analytic approach
> might be more useful for adult learners, and I feel that this is a point well
> worth exploring. There has been a long-running debate between the two phonic
> approaches. In essence, synthetic approaches may be characterised as bottom-up
> approaches, and analytic approaches as top-down. These two approaches are not
> necessarily alternatives: they can be used side by side at different stages of
> initial literacy tasks and activities [and probably should be]. However, it is
> probably true to say that teaching adult literacy entails a top-down approach
> to reading rather than a bottom-up approach, hence, I would suggest, the
> greater appropriacy of analytic phonics.
> 
>  
> 
> The National Curriculum planners in the UK currently appear to prefer the use
> of synthetic phonics in initial literacy, an approach in which words are built
> up [or synthesised] from their component sounds. Advocates of synthetic
> phonics claim that letter sounds need to be taught first before words are
> built up, and attention has to be paid to the development of letter-sound
> skills. I would query whether this claim could be applied to adult ESOL. It
> seems to me that analytic phonics is inherently less artificial than synthetic
> phonics and its characteristics are more suited to the literacy needs of
> adults: its rationale is based more on words than letter sounds; it is a word
> attack skill rather than a word building skill; it starts with the word set in
> context and breaks it down into its constituent parts, which is probably what
> adult learners need.
> 
> However, it seems to me that adult learners need more than word attack skills.
> One of the points Kurvers makes in respect of word recognition amongst adult
> learners strikes a chord. I think that Kurvers is perfectly correct about the
> need to distinguish between sight words, and their functional use, and
> phonics-based work, which is essentially non-functional. I suggest that there
> is a very strong argument for an element of whole-word approaches to initial
> literacy, particularly for building up, from the very start, a basic sight
> vocabulary of those functional words that are phonically irregular [and a lot
> of them are]. 
> 
>  
> 
> As far as I am concerned, a key task for initial literacy teaching is the
> development of early rapid sight recognition of key grammatical and function
> words. In my experience, teachers often do not specifically target the sight
> recognition of high frequency words, the 12 words that comprise 25% and the
> 100 words that comprise 50% of all reading and writing texts, and the
> learners' reading skills often appear to be seriously impeded by not being
> able to decode these words efficiently. Phonics does not help this aspect of
> reading: as I have just indicated, many of these key grammatical and function
> words are phonically irregular.
> 
>  
> 
> The development of a restricted basic sight vocabulary is not incompatible
> with a systematic phonics approach: most advocates of phonic approaches seem
> to maintain that learners should not be exposed to text until they know all
> the words it contains and this has to include many words that are phonically
> irregular [particularly in the real-world texts that adult readers need to
> tackle]. It is interesting that recent research from the University of Warwick
> [Solity and Vousden: 2006] suggests that children need to learn just 100 words
> and 61 phonic skills to read the English Language. Significantly, the study
> found that words beyond the key 100 are used so rarely that the benefits of
> learning them are minimal. It may well be this aspect of literacy that really
> needs to be focused on, and this may have implications for adult literacy
> programmes, too.
> 
> My advice to primary teachers about phonics always begins with the reminder
> that phonics is only one tool in the teaching of initial literacy, and only
> one tool, although a very important tool, in a battery of word attack skills
> that young learners need; teachers certainly should remember that there is a
> strong argument for an element of whole-word approaches to initial literacy,
> particularly for building up a basic sight vocabulary of those words that are
> phonically irregular from the very start. Most experienced classroom teachers
> of English probably instinctively recognise that it would be ill advised to
> rely excessively on phonic approaches in the teaching of initial literacy.
> Phonics is seen as part of a literacy package [which Kurvers certainly seems
> to recognise]. The UK National Curriculum literacy initiative also clearly
> recognised this in its pilot schemes of work, although, since the Rose Report,
> the Government seems to have committed itself rather strongly [arguably too
> strongly especially when there appear to be no independent studies validating
> their decision] to phonics to the exclusion of more eclectic approaches. But
> this all concerns the use of phonics with young learners at the very start of
> their formal education.
> 
>  
> 
> One thing that I am aware of as an applied linguist as well as a trained
> primary teacher is that although phonics is a vital element in initial
> literacy, phonic approaches have a number of distinct drawbacks that limit
> their application in the literacy classroom with young learners. I suspect
> that these limitations might be even more restrictive with adults than they
> are with young learners. Let us consider these drawbacks.
> 
>  
> 
> Drawback one: the sounds of individual letters vary.
> 
> Teachers should be aware of the pitfalls in teaching the sounds of individual
> letters. It is a phonological fact that letter sounds are never produced
> singly or in isolation, but are produced in the context of words and of chunks
> of language. This is true in the context of both meaningful reading texts and
> meaningful utterances. It is a linguistic fact that the positioning of a
> letter in an utterance determines its particular sound, and that the
> positioning of a word can alter its sound further. Thus, if individual letters
> are sounded out, particularly consonants, there is a tendency for the schwa
> sound /?/ [or 'uh'] to be added to the basic sound. Consequently, the
> pronunciation is distorted. For example, <h> comes out as <huh>, <r> as <ruh>,
> and<g> as <guh>. Moreover, when these individual letter sounds are blended [or
> synthesised] in phonics, the words in turn tend to become distorted. For
> example, <cat> may sound like <carter>, <bat> may sound like <barter>, and
> <mat> may sound like <martyr>. This could be potentially very confusing to
> many learners. 
> 
>  
> 
> Drawback two: learners need a foundation of experience in the target language
> 
> It seems to me that phonic approaches to initial literacy demand a background
> of schemata and language experience in the target language of the reading
> material. They rely upon learners already possessing a body of the target
> spoken language from which they can make phonic generalisations and analogies.
> In an adult TESOL situation, the learners may initially lack this essential
> background. They have to at least begin to acquire this background before they
> can start using phonics.
> 
>  
> 
> Drawback three: learning styles vary
> 
> It is by no means certain that everybody learns to read most effectively or
> even mainly by a phonic approach or process. Learning styles most certainly
> vary, and what suits one learner may not necessarily suit another. In other
> words, we cannot be sure that learners do actually break down words into
> discrete sound units step by step [analytic phonics] or build up words from
> discrete sound units [synthetic phonics]. As adult readers, native speakers
> possibly have a sight vocabulary [a receptive or recognition vocabulary] of at
> least 50,000 words; however, this does not mean that there were 50,000
> occasions when they stopped to work out a word letter by letter or sound by
> sound. The very fact that most people [ultimately] learn to read suggests that
> they do not in the long term learn to read by a phonic process.
> 
>  
> 
> Drawback four: phonic approaches basically lack focus on meaning
> 
> Phonic approaches may produce meaningless drills because they emphasise the
> sounds of letters rather than the meaning of words, although phonic approaches
> often provide a link to meaning by using pictures to illustrate the meaning of
> some words. However, not all words are amenable to such an approach,
> particularly the phonically irregular key grammatical and function words that
> I referred to previously. Moreover, it seems to me, adult learners do not need
> meaningless phonic drills, because they need to learn to read for highly
> pragmatic reasons relating to the real world.
> 
>  
> 
> Drawback five: phonic approaches appear to provide over-generalised patterns
> and rules
> 
> From the viewpoint of an applied linguist, individual sounds do not in fact
> combine reliably and accurately to form meaningful words. In other words, what
> appear to be phonic patterns and rules are in fact unreliable and may be
> invalid. There are some broad phonic tendencies, but these are merely
> guidelines for readers, and they are frequently wrong or not applicable. For
> example, the Two Vowel Rule of phonics [When two vowels go walking hand in
> hand, the first one does the talking] may be shown to be wrong more often than
> it is correct in normal English utterances.
> 
>  
> 
> Drawback six: phonic approaches are not necessarily effective
> 
> I repeat the point that phonic approaches do not provide a means to tackle
> phonically [or phonetically] irregular words, of which there are many in the
> English Language. English vowel sounds in particular are highly irregular.
> English orthography just is not phonically [or phonetically] based and phonics
> does not help learners tackle irregular words. It is a matter of observation
> that learners who are good readers [for example, those who can read fluently
> by the age of five] rarely use phonic decoding to help them. It seems likely
> that they have found other more reliable and effective strategies to help them
> process the printed word.
> 
> In addition, phonic approaches are not particularly reliable tools because
> young learners are rarely able to identify the unfamiliar words that could be
> accessed through phonic decoding [and I cannot see why adult learners would
> necessarily be any better at this]. In other words, readers may find it
> difficult to know when to use phonic word attack skills [and may struggle to
> use phonics in inappropriate situations with words that are not open to phonic
> analysis].
> 
>  
> 
> Drawback seven: phonic approaches make great demands on memory
> 
> There are several hundred sound-symbol combinations in the English Language.
> It requires knowledge of some 225 phonograms even to produce many [but not
> all] of the target words that are either already familiar to adult learners or
> that they need to be familiar with. This suggests that the demands on a
> reader's memory will be high: such a volume of items must surely strain the
> memory of a learner until the items have been proceduralised. After all, we
> know that the short-term memory of learners is subject to severe limitations.
> The storage of essentially meaningless sound-symbol combinations may well
> overload the memory of some learners and impair their reading development.
> 
> I am not suggesting that any of these drawbacks are inevitable, although
> teachers should always be aware of them. They are not so much reasons for not
> using phonic approaches as reasons for using phonic approaches with caution,
> especially when these disadvantages might be even more marked for adult
> learners with their broader literacy perceptions and experiences.
> 
>  
> 
> On a slightly different subject, I thoroughly agree with Frances Nehme's point
> that the 'experience and methods of teaching English literacy to beginners who
> are illiterate in any language cannot be the same as those used for learners
> who are literate to some extent in another language and have therefore already
> grasped the concept of reading'. However, I would add that all learners bring
> experience of spoken language with them to the classroom [even if they are
> illiterate] and it is the nature of that experience [and the nature of the L1]
> that may affect the way in which they become literate in the target second
> language.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> ***********************************
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> research into teaching and learning ESOL. ESOL-Research is managed by James
> Simpson at the Centre for Language Education Research, School of Education,
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ESOL-Research is a forum for researchers and practitioners with an interest in research into teaching and learning ESOL. ESOL-Research is managed by James Simpson at the Centre for Language Education Research, School of Education, University of Leeds.
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