Writing and Phonics
When children are learning to read, there are a number of strategies they can use. Reading on, guessing, using picture clues, supporting their deductions by grammatical and meaning context, are all possibilities. All of these strategies are supported by phonic knowledge; 'it can't say 'giraffe' - it begins with an h.' The strategies are available to all readers; children who have difficulty in acquiring or organising phonic knowledge in reading can still become competent readers by using them. This is why the National Literacy Strategy, which teaches children to use and orchestrate these skills, through modelling and demonstration, has been so outstandingly successful at turning children on to reading. The results after two terms have astonished many teachers who were initially uncertain about the outcome of the inclusive approach. Knowledge of phonics, in terms of reading, is a necessary adjunct to the skills developing in reading through the use of all strategies.
When it comes to writing, however, there is no choice of strategy. To write a word requires that the child be able to discriminate a sound and then write the symbol, or grapheme, which represents that sound before moving on to the next. That is what the ability to write is; being able to hear the sounds in the word and then write them. If a child is not yet able to distinguish the sounds in words, either because of poor listening skills or lack of practice, the link between hearing and writing is not made. The forty four phonemes which make up spoken English must all be reliably recognised. A choice can then be made between possible ways of representing the sound in writing; some sounds (phonemes) have three or even more graphemes which may represent them, eg. The long vowel sound -a may be represented by -ay, - ai, or -a-e.
Children who are naturally able as readers and writers make these connections for themselves without a great deal of difficulty. For many children, however, the connections remain mysterious unless they are directly taught; without that teaching, such a child may never develop any confidence in her or his ability to write, believing the knowledge of spelling to be beyond reach. The National Literacy Strategy makes provision for this direct teaching by creating a daily fifteen minute slot for phonics teaching in KS1 and identifies an order in which the phonemes and their associated graphemes can be taught. Children who are reading at all will certainly have met all of the spelling choices for each of the forty-four sounds in their reading, by the end of Year 2; the rapid introduction of the phonemes and graphemes, intended to be completed by Year 2 Term 3, complements this and provides direct teaching about it. The process is no longer mysterious; letters in blends behave in understandable ways, and choices can be made about which grapheme to write to represent a particular sound.
Children in Year 2, taught by this process, may be making spelling choices which are legitimate, in that the grapheme they have chosen represents the sound, but incorrect; for example 'pooshing' (pushing), 'kicing' (kicking) and 'swering' (swearing) in a list of undesirable playground behaviour.
Before Dr Johnson's work on standardising English spelling such alternatives would have been quite acceptable, but are so no longer. The technique of word collections, taught in the daily fifteen minutes at KS1, is an activity through which children use their reading to become familiar with the spelling conventions of modern English. For example;
In whole class word level work, the teacher introduces the sound '-oi'. Children offer examples of words they know in which the sound '-oi' can be heard. The teacher writes these up on the board or flipchart, organising them according to their spelling:
-oi-oy
spoilboy
oiltoy
pointroyal
The children now understand that there are at least two possible ways to write this sound. In activity time, they can use their reading material - any reading material - to add to these lists and make word collections, developing at the same time their ability to skim and scan. They can then share their discoveries at plenary, which gives the teacher the opportunity to draw to the attention of the class any exceptions that the children have discovered, whether or not the collectors have noticed them. They may for example have collected words with the right letter combinations, but that make a different sound; this helps to develop the skill of mental listening to a sound which is an essential stage in the process of writing and spelling.
Reinforced by other word level activities, etymological investigations into root words and the frequent use of dictionaries and thesauri, this process of becoming familiar with spelling patterns continues all the way through KS2, enabling more children to become confident spellers at a much earlier stage. Once they are freed from the constraint of having to think all the time about how to spell, children are free to attend to the composition of what they are writing, and to begin to put into practice the higher order writing skills which are being modelled for them in Shared Reading and Shared Writing.
Understanding phonics is as basic a skill for literacy as the understanding of number bonds is for numeracy. Where children at the end of KS2 have not acquired these skills, teachers will want to revisit the programme for introducing phonics (laid out on page 64 of the National Literacy Strategy Framework) to decide which phonemes should be directly taught. Older children are mostly secure in single consonants; often such a catch up programme would start with the long vowel sounds, though some revision may be needed of the more difficult consonant blends. Once these have been taught in the whole class work, the teacher will decide which children need to do further work on a particular sound, through guided work or in independent and collaborative activities, until all children are confident in their ability to spell.