Phonics. English has 100 phonemes

The literacy pages

English has 100 phonemes: Some errors and confusions in contemporary commercial phonics schemes. The conclusions and recommendations of a research project By Greg Brookes, Roger Beard and Jaz Ampaw-Farr

About half the commercially published phonics schemes available in England in 2007-2013 exhibited one or a number of errors. The present authors were startled to discover the number and range of errors (some quite bizarre). Comparable findings of besetting flaws in teaching materials would not, we suspect, be tolerated elsewhere in education where the knowledge base is more established and the pool of expertise is greater. Many of the errors could be attributed to inadequate knowledge of phonetics, or lack of phonic accuracy. These two categories of errors included: stating wrong numbers of phonemes; not covering various phonemes; misstating the relationships between /kw/ and >qu> and between /ks/ and >x>; misanalysing the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes; confusing diphthongs, digraphs and consonant clusters; and misstating the frequency of some correspondences.

PrimaryFirst The third major category of errors was misapplied teaching approaches. These included: expecting children to know or infer things they had not yet been taught; not focusing consistently on phonemes; confusions over ‘irregular’ words and word parts; unhelpful mnemonics; and a gallimaufry of misguided pedagogical practices such as (e.g.) ‘pointing at phonemes’. Some of the schemes reviewed may no longer be available, and others may have been revised in recent years; but we nevertheless recommend tht all publishers of currently available phonics schemes scrutinise their offerings carefully to ensure tht errors of the kinds we have highlighted are removed.

Checklist

The following list of criteria for judging that a scheme is phonetically and phonically accurate can and should be used by professionals in the field to ensure that only reliably accurate materials are used. ° the number of phonemes in English is stated to be 44 or thereabouts ° phonemes (including short and long pure vowel and diphthongs) are carefully distinguished

° all the phonemes are exemplified in manuals for teachers, together with a rational and justified sequence for introducing them ° as that implies, initial teaching should work from phonemes to graphemes and not vice versa: ‘... it makes more sense to talk about how sounds are represented by symbols in the writing system than to say how letters are pronounced because the latter approach is sure to create endless confusion.’ (Wardhaugh 1969, 105) ° the principal graphemes (including not only single letters but also digraphs, split digraphs, trigraphs and 4-letter graphemes) are exemplified

° the principal phoneme-grapheme and graphemephoneme correspondences are listed. A plethora of information about the frequencies of phoneme - grapheme correspondences in particular has been available since the publication of Carney (1994) and should have ensured that errors about such frequencies should not occur

° the main graphemes representing 2-phoneme sequences are identified and they are accurately described as representing two sounds, even though teachers may well need to describe them to children as (single) ‘sounds’. Teachers of literacy would be much better equipped to follow these technicalities and therefore to spot errors, in our opinion, if they were to become familiar with the International Alphabetic Alphabet (IPA) and a modicum of associated technical terminology. Literacy is based on phonetics and linguistics, and teachers therefore need the necessary specialist knowledge.

The article from which the above extract is taken is published by Routledge, Research Papers in Education. To link to the article: https://doi.org/10.1 080/02671522.2019.1646795