Phonics

Using and Making Dictionaries

Learners should learn to use a picture-dictionary towards the end of Key Stage 1. They have to be trained during lessons to make the best use of the dictionary for spelling and finding out the meanings of words.

Learners can also be encouraged to make their own dictionaries, with the words they have learnt in the textbooks, readers or any other contexts. It is useful to have a theme for each of the dictionaries they make, e.g. a dictionary of games, clothing.

second language do not of course have the aural-semantic repertoire of a native-speaker. Teachers need to help them develop skills in reading for meaning. It is recommended that the learning and teaching of phonics should be covered in Key Stage 1.

Learning and Teaching Phonics in Context

Phonics can be taught to Primary 1 learners when they can recognize some words through listening or sight reading. Schools are advised to incorporate phonics learning into the school English programme, instead of adopting and implementing a separate phonics programme. It is not recommended that some regular English lessons be assigned to the learning and teaching of phonics. Teachers need to understand that there are more than a hundred letter sounds, and the teaching of all of them will overload the children as well as the school English programme.

Learners need to be helped to develop an awareness of the letter-sound relationships in English words through explicit teaching at an early stage of learning. Learning and teaching phonics in context helps young learners retain what they have learnt and transfer the knowledge and skills in new situations. Most primary learners learn phonics fast but also forget the letter-sound relationships very easily if they do not apply the knowledge and skills in meaningful contexts.

Phonics can be taught and practised in the schools’ General English Programme as well as Reading Workshops. Shared reading lessons in the Reading Workshops provide a good setting to incorporate the teaching of phonics as an exploration or application of previous knowledge, and as a kind of follow-up activity. Learners may have learnt some letter sounds before and they can be guided to apply their knowledge and skills to sound out similar but new words in the texts.

They can also learn one or two letter sounds that appear frequently in a reading text. Then they can apply what they have learnt in context every time they read aloud the same text and transfer the skills when they read

EXEMPLARS 1, 2 & 6

in the big books and develop visual aids (e.g. a word tree, a word wall) of the words collected to display in the classroom. Similar techniques can also be used with the reading materials used in the General English Programme. Teachers should help learners connect their learning experience gained in both kinds of lessons.

Different strategies can be introduced to help young learners consolidate their learning in phonics. Letter cards or picture cards with the meaning of a word that has the target sound (e.g. the drawing of a tiger for the “t”

letter sound) can be used to ask young learners to show their recognition of the target letter-sound relationships. Worksheets that require learners to provide a non-linguistic response to the target letter sounds (e.g.

colouring, matching) may help young learners consolidate their learning and serve as a record of learning for revision purpose. Keeping personal phonics books promotes independent learning and can help young learners retrieve the letter sounds they have learnt quickly. This is a kind of learning-to-learn skills and should be encouraged more.

Short, interesting and purposeful activities or games can also help young learners practise the target letter sounds in context. Examples of suitable activities^∗ are:

• Funny sentences/rhymes

• Letter-sound word steps

• Phonics board game

• Phonics tic-tac-toe

• Tongue twisters

• Word hunt

• Word pyramid

• Word search/maze

∗ For further explanation and elaboration on the teaching of phonics and examples of phonics activities and games, please refer to the resource packages Strategies and Activities to Maximize Pleasurable Learning Experiences and Phonics in Action produced by the English Language Education Section of CDI.

Selecting and Sequencing Letter Sounds

There are two main groups of letter sounds: consonants and vowels.

Consonant letter sounds include consonants with a single letter (e.g. d, k, s), consonant digraphs (e.g. ch, sh, th) and consonant blends (e.g. bl, dr, st). Vowel letter sounds include short vowels (e.g. a, i, o), long vowels (e.g. ay, ee, oa) and other vowels (e.g. ar, u, ou). These sounds may appear in the initial, medial or ending part of words.

Teachers working in the same school need to develop a plan on the letter sounds to cover and the sequence for introducing them. Selection and sequencing can be based on whether words bearing the letter sounds occur frequently in the learning resources and on whether the letter sounds are likely to cause difficulties to learners in reading and spelling.

Both consonant and vowel letter sounds need to be covered in a school year so that opportunities are provided for learners to practise the skills of blending and chunking letters and syllables and of working out the pronunciation and spelling of a whole word.