Teaching approaches to phonics

There are five approaches to teaching phonics, and they can all be used in the ESL/EFL classroom. These are synthetic phonics, analytical phonics, analogy phonics, and embedded phonics.

In synthetic phonics, the most widely used approach, students learn the individual phonemes within a word, then combine those phonemes together to form the full word. The word “dog”, for example, consists of the following phonemes: / dɒg /. Students will learn the three sounds that are in the word / d /, / ɒ / and / g/ and then blend them together to form the word.

In analytical phonics, students might study a common phoneme across a set of words. For example, they might study the phoneme / k / in cat, kite, kid, kind, and catch.

In analogy phonics, students analyze phonograms (rimes) in words to learn about word families. For example, a phonogram (rime) is comprised of a vowel and all the sounds that follow it. In the word ‘like’ the rime is ‘-ike’. Students would then study words such as like, bike, and hike which share the same phonogram.

In embedded phonics, sounds are taught in the context of reading texts. In this less systematic approach, what is taught is text dependent.