Maxine Burton - Phonetics for Phonics: Underpinning Knowledge for Adult Literacy Practitioners

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Underpinning Knowledge for Adult Literacy Practitioners

Maxine Burton

2011 National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (England and Wales)

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ISBN 978 1 86201 453 4

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My thanks are owed to:

NIACE for the invitation to give a presentation on phonics in March 2009 at their Leicester headquarters and for subsequently encouraging me to write this book;

Greg Brooks, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Sheffield, for all the tables in and for his expert advice throughout, especially regarding phonics for spelling; and

The National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC) at the Institute of Education, University of London, for funding the research projects on which this book draws, and for providing me, as Visiting Research Associate, with the use of a desk and research facilities during the writing of it.

The genesis of this book lies in a combination of factors: my decades of experience as an adult literacy teacher; my long-standing interest in and teaching of linguistics, particularly phonetics and phonology of English; and, most significantly, the insights gained from an NRDC project I directed at the University of Sheffield, 2007-08 (Burton et al., 2008, 2010). This research project not only aimed to assess the effectiveness of phonics in the adult literacy classroom, but included, as an essential part of the methodology, training of teachers over several sessions to prepare them to deliver phonics in the classroom.

In the absence of any phonics schemes and materials specifically for adults, and therefore no clear guidelines as to how to set about using phonics systematically with adults, I thought it important to give the teachers a thorough grounding in the basics of phonetics. This underpinning knowledge would give them the confidence to adapt existing phonics schemes for children to suit their learners, and the flexibility to deal with learners queries as they arose. Above all, it was intended to ensure that their phonics teaching was accurate and consistent.

To a great extent, this book is informed by the four training sessions I designed for the teachers who participated in the above project and, importantly, by the feedback from them. Although the study of phonetics formed the backbone of the training and will provide the main focus of this book - the aim is to de-mystify it as a subject, and relate this knowledge to what teachers need for phonics in the classroom. This is not a phonetics textbook, although you will be taught all the key terms and concepts you need. Nor is it, in any sense, a how to teach phonics book that topic will have to be addressed elsewhere.

It is probably better to work through the chapters in turn, although they are grouped into sections. The first two provide background: a brief rationale of phonics as a strategy; and why phonetics matters for phonics. The next two, explores the related issue of different accents of English. Each chapter has suggestions for further reading and the two chapters on phonetics and the IPA incorporate some tasks (with answers) to engage the reader. A full list of references can be found at the end, followed by a glossary of all linguistic terms used.

By phonics we mean an approach to teaching reading and spelling which focuses on the association of phonemes (speech sounds) with particular graphemes (letters or groups of letters). This relationship between sounds and letters is the basis of whichever type of phonics (synthetic or analytic) is involved. We shall examine in more detail in later chapters exactly what these concepts entail and these, and all other linguistic terms used, are listed in the glossary at the end of the book. There has been renewed interest in phonics over the past few years, at least as far as initial literacy is concerned, with the findings of the Rose Review (Rose, 2006) and the incorporation of phonics into the National Literacy Strategy (later the Primary National Strategy). There is strong research evidence that systematic phonics instruction, within a broad and rich literacy curriculum, enables children to make better progress in word identification than unsystematic or no phonics instruction. This finding rests on two systematic reviews of the research evidence, one in the US (Ehri et al., 2001), the other in the UK (Torgerson et al., 2006).

Prior to the recent major NRDC research referred to in the Introduction, little attention had been paid in the UK to the potential of phonics instruction for adults. Indeed, there has in the past been some reluctance on the part of adult literacy practitioners and teacher-trainers to engage with phonics. Certainly at the time we conducted our research (which will be referred to from now on as the Phonics Project) few adult literacy training courses seemed to give much guidance on this strategy. However, if youre reading this book you must at least be interested in using phonics, so I wont labour the arguments for phonics or against other approaches.

Phonics is the most reliable method of word identification. What it can offer, over and above other strategies, is an approach that goes to the heart of how the English alphabetic system works. And English is an alphabetic language, albeit one that lacks as many one-to-one correspondences as other languages such as Finnish or Italian. There is more regularity than is often appreciated (a point which will become clearer in later chapters).