TEACHING

LITERACY
THROUGH
PHONICS
CHRYSSA LASKARIDOU
EFL STATE SCHOOL ADVISOR
 Teaching literacy

How do you teach

young learners to read
and write?
An important part of learning to
read and write is being able to
hear sounds in words
Young learners are already
familiar with many words or
language chunks but also with
sounds which do not exist in
their mother tongue.
For example, sound
differences such as those
between long and short
vowels, or those between /s/
and /sh/ sounds are easily
discernible by them.
 The English system

26 letters in English

42 main sounds (e.g.,

tch, sh, etc.)
 Reading in English

English is an exceptionally
inconsistent alphabetic language
because it suffers from a large
amount of inconsistency in both
reading and spelling.
 A letter can be pronounced in
multiple ways (e.g. the letter a in
English maps onto a different
phoneme in the words cat, was,
saw, made and car)
Some letters have more than one
sound (e.g., vowels and consonants
like c, s, y, etc.)
 How to teach phonics
Forget about the traditional
approach (the alphabet)
When we start teaching phonics, we
start with one sound only. We start
with the most common sounds
(eg. /a/, /t/, /s/, /d/, /e/, /i/, /p/)
Gradually move on to the more
complicated ones(/ph/, /th/,/-th /,
/sh/)
 When you have given them the first
basic sounds, you can start building
with them the first simple words
(transparent) through simple sound
combinations. (sit, sat, tin, pin, pen, ten,
set etc.)
Let your students create their own
nonsense (or silly) words (testint,
piten, satiapata.) and later their
own nonsense (or silly) sentences (a
mat in the tub, the cat sits on the
hat) and even short stories.
A multi-sensory method
Using TPR in teaching phonics
Invite pupils to:
Touch and feel the new letter-sound
 Form it with their bodies
Sing and dance it (h can be
hop, t is playing tennis and
d is drum.
Each sound has its own
action and song
This fun way helps the pupil
learn the sounds more easily
 Sing and dance it

ddddd hhhhh
 The pupils trace the letter
following the arrows.
Lower case and capital
letters
We first focus on lower
case letters

In the same lesson we also

deal with capitals
 More complicated sounds
Later on start introducing the different
and more complicated vowel sounds
and vowel combinations (/ai/, /ee/,
/oo/, /ow/, /i-e/, /o-e/ etc).

This needs lots of practice and you will

need to employ different approaches
and techniques /methods such as
games, songs colouring, matching etc
Building Word Families
ay
Pray
Tray
ai spray
Pain
Train
paint
o-e
Bone
Cone
home
Playing with word families
 Rhyming
We can make up silly rhymes and focus on
specific vowel sounds:

The funny
clown
is in the town
Look! He can
bow!
 REMEMBER !

Teachers should
always detect and
respect different
learning styles
and strategies.
 Opaque words
What do we do with words such
as
one two or are?

We teach them as sight words

 Help with reading
Dots are used to show how
many
sounds in each word
Pupils can put their finger on
each dot
Do we teach Alphabet?
Other helpful material
Mini books
Colouring pages
Matching activities
 Some tips
Phonics-based instruction is an
ongoing process. We dont teach all
the phonemes till we come to the
end.
After 6-7 phonemes we do other
activities and projects giving pupils
time to assimilate their new
knowledge
Why learning with phonics?
It helps learners acquire accurate
pronunciation
It helps them make associations
between
spelling and pronunciation
It helps them recognize and read
patterns (e.g., if they know how to
read leaf it will be easier for them
to read the words bean, eat, etc.)
THANK
YOU!