Teaching Phonics - Spelling and Order (Part 1)

Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2007 8:53 am

Listen to the show.

It's tough to cover all of phonics, but Mark and Ron give it a shot. The show takes a look first at spelling through the ages and why English spelling is the monster it is. There are a lot of things that have happened within English spelling over the past 1000 years. Mark goes through a few of the things that have had a big impact on English spelling.

Hopefully the lecture doesn't lose you and you continue listening for part one of teaching order. While order is a widely debated, we will go ahead and give you our take on it and why. Hopefully, it will give you some ideas and you can take them back to your classroom and adapt the ideas as need for your classes.

We'll be back with part two of teaching order in the next show.

Discuss the show here at the ESL Teacher Talk forums (register with this VIP code: 7575.) Leave comments about this show, more phonics teaching ideas or feel free to disagree Smile

Game of the Week: Word Baseball

Ron gives us a great game this week, Word Baseball. You can use it in your phonics lesson or it can be adapted to other lessons. It requires little to no preparation and can be used on the fly if you need more practice or need to fill some extra time.

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2007 3:45 pm

Haven`t had a chance to listen to the show here at work yet.

But I have enjoyed using a phonics flipchart and wanted to share.
You can buy them but I made my own copy, printed and laminated, because there is no budget for buying resources available to me here. But there is heaps of paper, printing and laminating sheets.

Anyway the flipchart has three sections to it. The first one just does single consonants and vowels (cvc). flip over the first letter in each section and get the students to sound the letters and read the word. Then change one of the sections, sound the letters and read the word. I only change one section at a time for the first few times I use it.
The aim is to help the students see how words are made and read. I don`t tell the younger students that most are nonsense words. They have enjoyed the opportunity to make their own `words` and read them.

I only see elementary classes once (occasionally twice) a month and have been making sure, in the year I have been here so far, that I do some phonics with them every lesson. I have been using the flipchart with 4th grade and up.

MES-Member Joined: 04 Oct 2007 Posts: 5 Location: London

Hello ESL Teacher Talk.
Thanks for making the podcasts available. I have downloaded many of the previously available 'casts and enjoyed the 'Game of the Week' items.

One thing though, what is Phonics?
The first (and last) time I have ever heard this name was when watching the South Park episode in which Cartman's mother (mom) tries to improve his spelling with the Phonics Monkey (etc etc Wink

)
In my years of teaching and during the training (CELTA) I received, I haven't come across Phonics. It is obvious from listening to the podcast that Phonics has something to do with helping learners tackle spelling English words, but I without looking it up, I can't say more than that.
At first, I though it might be an American English term for the Phonetic (Phonemic) alphabet and of course having 'phono' in the name, is connected with sound, right?

Perhaps you could enlighten us 'non-Phonics Monkeys' Wink

(or at least suggest some links)

Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2007 7:26 am

Garret - Thanks for listening and welcome to the forums! I hope you enjoy the shows. We don't really try to educate, but just give you some ideas you can work with and hopefully use.

Well, phonics is roughly the reading rules of the English language (I'm not sure if Spanish, French, German ... use the same word or similar word. I know Japanese doesn't.) It breaks down the language into code (graphemes) for pronounciation.

So, it's teaching things like how to read individual letters, consonant combinations, vowel combinations and other set combinations:
a, b, c, d, ...
ch, sh, th, ck, ng ...
ee, ai, oi, ou, ea ...
igh, a_e (cake)

and things like that.

Students would then use that code to sound out words. And that's 'phonics.' I'm pretty sure you are aware of it, but maybe just didn't know that is what it refers to.

You can take a look at my phonics section. It has a few resources that might give you an idea of how some people teach it. www.mes-english.com/phonics.php

Here's another website with on-line resources and books www.starfall.com

I generally can get a feel for a technique by looking at how it's taught, but if you want more indepth info on the methodology and/or theory, do a google search of teaching phonics or phonics methodology. You'll get more than you bargained for.

MES-Member Joined: 04 Oct 2007 Posts: 5 Location: London

Thanks for that Mark. I'll look into it when I have the time.
You're right about the Google search - information overload!

---

A podcast on how to effectively monitor Ss while activities are taking place would be helpful - i.e. when the game is in full swing, how do you best record the Ss' errors etc (noting down, trying to memorise, etc)
Cheers,
G

Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2007 11:53 am

To the original poster,

What nationality of students do you teach, and what's their age group?

Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2007 4:32 pm

me?

or garret?

Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2007 8:09 pm

mesmark wrote:

me?

or garret?

...eerrr, the other original poster, Garret.

I don't think there is a smooth way out of this mistake...

MES-Member Joined: 04 Oct 2007 Posts: 5 Location: London

"previous" then?

I teach mixed nationality groups (10 max) of adults (hence the earlier mentioned Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults qualification, Cambridge University accredited) - which, in the UK, are considered to be 18+. Teaching children requires a different skill set than I have training (or patience) for, although young adults can be quite testing in that area as well Wink

.

Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 12:29 am

I've found that adults are more interested in phonics than children, especially those that haven't been exposed to it.

Even though somewhere deep down they've seen and undesrtood the patterns, just telling them there really are reading patterns/rules helps them a lot. Many of my adult students just eat phonics up. It's like the key they were never given.

Posted: Sat Oct 06, 2007 2:47 pm

Here, here! I've found that some of my motivation to keep teaching children Phonics has been because of the feedback from adults who have said they wished they had learned these tools when they were young.

Garrett, I was wondering about your students cuz I have some original worksheets to help my students starting out with Phonics. However, these worksheets are designed for Japanese students.

MES-Member Joined: 04 Oct 2007 Posts: 5 Location: London

Thanks for the offer Patrick, but I wouldn't be looking to include anything new in my lessons for some months. Perhaps in the future.

My original comment was about what, exactly, Phonics is as a methodology.