Literacy & Phonics: Effective Teaching Strategies

Literacy Development: Essential Skills

It's the ability to read and write to understand communication, but it also includes the critical and effective use of language for all purposes. The five steps in literacy development are:

1. Phonemic Awareness: The recognition of a sequence of individual sounds in a word.
2. Decoding: What a person uses to interpret a printed sentence; the ability to associate sounds with letters and use them to form words.
3. Fluency: Reading fluency indicates that a child can read successfully. Successful reading is reading with accuracy and automatically, with proper speed and intonation. Children will not be able to comprehend text if they do not become fluent readers.
4. Comprehension: Requires the reader to be an active constructor of meaning within a text.
5. Vocabulary: The ability to understand and use words to acquire and convey meaning.

Synthetic Phonics Approach

It's an approach in which children learn sounds first, and then they can pronounce words by putting those sounds together, even if they don't know the words.

Strategies Used to Teach Synthetic Phonics

• Teach the correspondence between the letter and the sound, and the blending technique to form words.
• Children also learn to write the shapes of the letters. Dictation is used as a technique for word spelling.
• It doesn't start from syllables.
• First, accuracy, then fluency to understand the meaning.
• Progresses from easy word formation to complications and variations of pronunciation.
• Irregular words are taught slowly after the introduction of the 42 sounds.
• The emphasis is on hearing the sounds in the word.
• The teacher provides pupils a wide range of literature examples.

Strategies Not Used in Synthetic Phonics

• It doesn't teach whole words because it starts from the sound.
• The names of the letters aren't taught until they know all the sounds and can blend for reading. They are introduced through a song.
• They don't guess how to read by pictures; they read real books.

Teaching Through Topics

Teaching English isn't only about learning vocabulary; it should provide a context related to the child's interests and needs because it is important for their motivation. If they are motivated, they learn easily.

Teaching through topics is an effective way of teaching because it provides opportunities for children to:

• Develop their knowledge and understanding of the world.
• Understand new concepts in a meaningful context.
• Develop socially, emotionally, physically, and cognitively through the teaching of all curricular areas.