Phonics Instruction

The central purpose of phonics instruction is to train young readers about the relationship between letters and sounds (or phonemes).

Suitable phonics instructions can help a child to develop the communication between letters and sounds.

Phonics instructions can help train the youngsters with the knowledge and skills to improve their reading.

The guidelines to teach phonics instructions can be applied either by incident or with a systematic approach.

The latter approach involves the teaching and explanation of a phonics sequence set.

The teaching depends on the phonic method and is made with complete clarity.

In the former incidental approach, the teacher does not advance in a pre-planned manner but instead specifies the typical components in the way they appear in the text.

Methodological variations in phonics instruction

There are different ways in which phonics instructional teachings are administered. Some of them are –

1. Analogy Phonics

Students are introduced to new and unfamiliar words with the analogy from their known words.

For instance, they might be able to read the new word “brick” with the co-relation of the expression “ick” in the old word “kick”.

Or, for that matter, they can use the analogy word “jump” to read the new word “stump”.

2. Analytic Phonics

Students can refer to their stock of old words, which they had learned previously, better understand letter-sound relations.

In this way, they do not have to pronounce the sounds separately.

In analytical phonics, whole word units are taught to the students at first.

Then they are instructed systematically to form a linkage between individual sounds and particular letters.

3. Embedded Phonics

The use of phonics instructions in reading a text can be a better approach to teaching phonics skills to students.

This process includes some aspects of incidental learning too.

Embedded phonics learning less frequently makes use of decodable texts with a systematic approach to learn phonics.

4. Spelling Phonics

Students can create segments or distinctions of words into phonemes.

They then choose the letters that best fit those phonemes.

5. Synthetic Phonics

Students are taught to turn letters into sounds or phonemes.

They blend those sounds into forms that appear as good words.

Pupils are taught to link each letter or their combination with the appropriate sound, which is then blended for word formation.

These synthetic phonic methods directly instruct phonic training and use a controlled vocabulary to apply such skills as decodable texts.

Variable feature in phonics instruction

Instructions in phonics vary according to the method involved in representing letter-sound variations before students or following the analysis pattern.

The variations in phonics depend on the way they are taught and exercised during text reading.

Some embedded phonics approaches tend to be less noticeable.

They make use of decodable texts through the systematic presentation of the phonics conceptions for reduced practice sessions.