Crib Sheet

Our guide to educational jargon, teaching methods and the strange things children may bring back from school as homework. If there is a particular aspect of your child's education you wish explaining, use the POL Ask an Expert service.

Phonics

Phonics are one of the cornerstones of the government's literacy initiative. At its most basic, teaching reading by phonics means concentrating on the sounds that the letters make, and building these up into words. This sounds very commonsensical, but there are a couple of problems with it. Firstly, English isn't a phonically regular language, as a quick look at this list of words will show:

Through
Though
Thought
Cough
Chough

This means that children also need to learn that they can't always depend on "sounding the word out" as a strategy. Sometimes, they simply need to know what a word is - the "look and say" method. Second, a purely phonics based approach makes it possible to read a word aloud without ever understanding what it means.

Fenseted, traker, pablot, trachotting... these are all nonsense words I just made up - but because they are phonically regular, it would be easy to read them aloud. A child - or even a teacher - could easily be fooled into thinking they were doing better than they really were because of this.

On the other hand, teaching children to read use only "look and say" would be terribly limiting - partly because they would have to learn so many words off by heart, and partly because they wouldn't have any strategies to use when they came across new ones.

In reality, most teachers use a mixture of methods which they vary as they see fit. It's most likely that they will continue to do so no matter what the government guidelines say.

English in the National Curriculum

Helping with English Homework

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