Controversy has been widespread over the years about the best way to teach children reading and spelling.
Should they be taught using the letter sounds - synthetic phonics - or by learning whole words?
Teaching letter sounds gives children the ability to work out simple words which can be sounded out, words like: bed, cat, log, pig, fish, deck, thin, etc.
The problem is that the most interesting words for children often cannot be easily sounded out.
Children are stimulated and excited by words like: dinosaur, ghost, ice-cream, delicious, skeleton, mummy, etc. So which is the better method?
Research findings now show that children who are taught using synthetic phonics make great leaps in progress compared to children taught by other methods.
But what about those exciting words the children need to maintain their motivation?
If they are only allowed to use letter sounds, they will be limited to reading uninteresting sentences like:
Ron and meg can run in the hut. Ron can run. Meg can run. Run, Ron, run! Run, Meg, run!
Whole series of children's reading books used to be produced with meaningless sentences like these, and the children quickly reached their boredom threshold.
As a reaction to these tedious stories, publishers began to ignore the need to sound out words, and moved on to the Whole Word method.
Children were given books with sentences like:
The sleeping dinosaur twitched.Edward and Lucy were terrified. They inched out of the cave but froze as the vast creature slowly awoke …
Engaging stuff - as long as you can read it!
Fast learners had little problems: they seem to be able to learn by almost any method.
However, the average children and those with a learning disability like dyslexia were stuck.
They could not read the words.
It appears that children need to use both methods.
Starting with synthetic phonics, they can learn to work out those little words which can be sounded out (bat, dog, cat, etc.), and, if they are introduced gradually, more exciting words can be added (dinosaur, ice-cream, etc.).
This allows them, after the introduction of a few 'sight words' (Whole Word method), to read much more interesting sentences, such as:
Jan and Meg are in the hut. Jan has an ice-cream. Jan drops the ice-cream. Jan is sad. Meg gets …