"Synthetic phonics" in the USA? Do they do it?

[TheNewStatesman]

I'm a Brit overseas in a non-English speaking country. We English speaking parents mostly have to teach our own kids to read English (unless we can afford international schools).

Something I've noticed is that while the British parents (including me) mostly seem to be using Jolly Phonics these days, the US parents mostly use phonics programs which are all about learning letter names and the alphabet song and learning the capital and lower case letters at the same time from the start. And lots of sight words. And then learning "the sounds of the letters" and "silent letters" and all that.

I am on one American forum, and the subject of teaching reading at kindergarten level came up (this being 5-6 year olds, I believe, in the states). There was discussion about whether children should know be expected to know all the letter names and be able to write their names on entering KG. I said something about how I am teaching my 4yo to read but am not doing letter names yet because I am waiting until blending is consolidated.... and got a slightly baffled response from the posters.

I didn't ask this to anyone on the forum, nor have I directly asked the US parents I know (because I don't want to get into arguments with them about teaching methods), but I am just asking anyone here who has experience of the US education system: is synthetic phonics really "done" in many or any US schools and kindergartens? How about homeschoolers and parents who are teaching their kids at home?

Or are the parents I have come across not representative of the US in general?

I am just genuinely curious.

[maizieD]

I don't have any direct experience of American schooling but I have, over the past few years, encountered many americans on forums dedicated to improving the the teaching of reading with phonics based instruction.

From these, my impression is that Look & Say/Whole word instruction is very much the norm and that synthetic phonics, or similar, is an outlier.

The thing about teaching letter names comes from research which shows that children who know letter names before learning to read are likely to learn to read more easily. However, correlation is not causation; there may be a host of other reasons why these children learn easily, including the possibility that their parents have already taught them before school! But this finding is taken as showing that for reading success children need to learn letter names. For me, it flies in the face of all that I know about the reading process and the best way to learn it, but, there you go!

Americans are also fixated on teaching 'phonological awareness' before teaching reading because that is one of the 5 components of reading skill identified by the National Reading Panel report in 2001. UK SP programmes work on the principle that phonological (or, more importantly, phonemic) awareness develops as children learn letter/sound correspondences and sounding out & blending so doesn't need to be taught separately.


the US parents mostly use phonics programs which are all about learning letter names and the alphabet song and learning the capital and lower case letters at the same time from the start. And lots of sight words. And then learning "the sounds of the letters" and "silent letters" and all that.

I would call this 'junk phonics'. The UK is light years ahead of the US when it comes to phonics.

[ouryve]

I'm guessing it's not a totally alien idea, as DS1 taught himself to read using the starfall website and with Scooby Doo and Diego phonics books.

[TheNewStatesman]

"The thing about teaching letter names comes from research which shows that children who know letter names before learning to read are likely to learn to read more easily. However, correlation is not causation; there may be a host of other reasons why these children learn easily, including the possibility that their parents have already taught them before school! But this finding is taken as showing that for reading success children need to learn letter names. For me, it flies in the face of all that I know about the reading process and the best way to learn it, but, there you go!"

I agree. When I was teaching EFL over here, I used to groan whenever I had kids come in whose parents had "helpfully" taught them letter names, because I was doing synthetic phonics and I knew from experience that kids who had not been taught letter names would learn blending more quickly and easily, because I would not have to waste time trying to stop them from saying "see" "bee" "em" etc.

I suspect that in the US, "knowing letter names" is a marker for having middle-class parents.

Starfall teaches phonics of some kind, but I think it is not synthetic phonics--more the old school type.

[ouryve]

This was a while back - before synthetic phonics was really pushed in schools over here. And well before there was an app for that!

[mrz]

The type of phonics taught in the US is very different to that taught in the UK (many aspects of mixed methods included - sight words, blends, onset and rime) which is why I would never recommend programmes such Starfall - they can confuse some children and do include American spellings. I would advice parents to be aware when downloading APPs or signing up for programmes.

As MaizieD says the US is a couple of decades behind the UK in terms of phonics very few teachers in the US seem to have heard of synthetic phonics.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

It will depend on the state. The common core should be emphasising synthetic phonics but I think different states have interpreted it in different ways. The NY scheme that they have put into schools is light years ahead of letters and sound IMO, but I'm not aware of any other states having produced anything similar.

[mrz]

Is the New York scheme new Rafa because one I've seen has sight words, long vowels and rime etc.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

New from last september. It's the one they've produced in conjunction with the core knowledge foundation. Tricky words are taught by identifying the tricky part and blending and they say they don't teach rime or consonant clusters such as 'sl' etc so it might be a different one to the one you've seen.

For some reason they've decided to redesign their website in a way which isn't going to make it easy to link to the document you want to, but here goes.

www.engageny.org/resource/kindergarten-english-language-arts

Ignore all the listening and learning stuff. It's the skills strand that deals with phonics and grammar. The general overview of skills document will probably tell you what you need to know.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

It's not the best scheme you are going to find. It's problably paced quite slowly given expectations in writing are very different compared to ks1 children of the same age. But a scheme going from decoding and spelling with simple sounds covering morphology and grammar and reading and writing simple texts was what the government should have produced. If nothing else it would have dealt with lots of the criticism about phonics only because it shows less experienced teachers exactly how it all fits together. The assessment and remediation guides would certainly have been useful.

[mrz]

Much better than most hope it spreads

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

That would be the slippery slope to a federal education system, so not likely .

[Bilberry]

That explains why I got so frustrated looking for phonics apps for my ds. Neatly every one I looked at called itself 'phonics' but was teaching capital letters and aye, bee, cee, etc. I wondered if Americans didn't know what phonics were.

[zebedeee]

Re. the learning of letter names

Johnston and Watson, Clackmannanshire authors, write in their book Teaching Synthetic Phonics 'it is logical to teach both names and sounds of letters together', and make reference to the The Rose Review, final report on the teaching of early reading, 2006 which states:

"Teaching letter names
79. The teaching of letter names is often left until after the sounds of letters have been learned, in the belief that it can be confusing for children to have to learn both together. However, research indicates that children often learn letter names earlier than they learn letter sounds and that five year olds who know more letter names also know more letter sounds. The reasons for this are not fully understood by researchers.
80. Given that children will meet many instances outside, as well as within, their settings and schools where letter names are used, it makes sense to teach them within the programme of early phonic work.
81. It appears that the distinction between a letter name and a letter sound is easily understood by the majority of children. Professor Morag Stuart has observed that it seems:
... sensible to teach both names and sounds of letters. Names may be
easier to learn because, being syllables rather than phonemes, they are more perceptible, and also because children expect things to have names and are accustomed to rapidly acquiring the names of things. "

[mrz]

"Easily understood by the majority" how do you suggest identifying those in danger of not understanding and being confused before they have problems?

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

I think it's difficult to talk about America as a whole. It's a very odd system if you are used to the UK one. On the one hand there's quite a lot of autonomy about what to teach even within schools and on the other there is much more teaching from off the shelf schemes dictated by school board.

You might have 8 classes in a grade and they should in theory be using the same textbooks etc for all the main subjects but how you use them and what you add on top and what you gloss over/leave out depends on what the teacher thinks is important. There didn't seem to be any sort of cross year group long or medium term planning like you might find here.

[maizieD]

Research may well indicate that children learn letter names before learning phonics but it doesn't make them of any use when learning phonics.

As I said earlier, correlation does not equal causation; the 5 yr olds who know both names & sounds could well have been taught both by parents or carers. I'd like to see the original research this comes from.

Johnston, Watson and Stuart opining that it seems 'logical' or 'sensible' to teach names and sounds together doesn't actually validate the practice. you don't know which children will be muddled until you've muddled them. How unkind when the letter name knowledge wasn't necessary in the first place.

[TheNewStatesman]

"you don't know which children will be muddled until you've muddled them."

Exactly. Over where I am, we English-speaking parents are having to take care of the English reading at home, and we have limited time and energy to do this, so it's especially important to use methods that don't waste time or create unnecessary confusion. If there is muddle or if progress is very slow, reading and writing in English may never happen, because the schoolwork in the main national language will just take over in the meantime.

I love the synthetic phonics programs because they are so pared-down and simple to teach. You don't waste time teaching kids to do something and then unteaching it all five minutes later!

[zebedeee]

Re. research - a quick google came up with this:

www.cde.state.co.us/coloradoliteracy/theimportanceofteachingletternames

[mrz]

www.spelfabet.com.au/2013/01/letter-names/

[Bilberry]

The links above are not research, I tried to find something more substantial. There was a systematic literature review (best level of evidence) here on phonics but doesn't mention letter names at all and is a few years old.

I did however find this which is not research but does fit well with how my ds is learning to read and talk within his specialist language unit.

[maizieD]

This is what I mean about the US being light years behind the UK. Bilberry's link describes the optimum way to teach phonics; from sound to letter. That is just what modern SP programmes have been doing for at least 2 decades. It is actually what some teachers were doing over 100 years ago (and writing programmes based on it)!

There are programmes in the US which work on this principle but as far as I know they are not particularly widespread. There are even people using Jolly Phonics (Sue Lloyd has done trainings in the US on at least one occasion). There may be other UK programmes in use.But the problem with the US, as I see it, is that they tend not to look outside their borders to what is going on in other parts of the world.

[TheNewStatesman]

There is now a US version of Jolly Phonics available now (it is slightly adapted for American accents and English).

Oh, and now I come to think of it, PhonoGraphix (written by the McGuinesses) is American. It is also a synthetic phonics program.

They just don't seem to be very widely used.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

A quick exploration of the website of the NY school I was in suggests they have chosen to adopt the state programmes for skills and language. Sort of. One K class is still sending home sight words from the Dolch word lists alongside but learning to blend them when they come up in the programme, one is sending the tricky words home for regular blending practice, the rest I presume are doing something in between. Except for the class that is using an entirely different scheme.

So the introduction of synthetic phonics to the USA seems to be going as well as it did here.

[TheNewStatesman]

Bloody hell. I am beginning to understand why parents homeschool....

[mrz]

There has been an American English version of Jolly Phonics since the early 90s but not widely used.

It seems to be that individual teachers have adopted SP but teaching methods within the same school can vary greatly. Methods used seem to be a bit of a hotchpotch with Dolch words and OG still high profile.
I know from friends in the US there is a problem accessing high quality decodable reading scheme books