Phonics #2

Summary: It began with an introduction of the history of the English language and lead into the importance of understanding basic concepts in order to understand the language. This section introduced a lot of new, yet basic terminology that will lay the foundation for phonics.  There was a big emphasis comparing and contrasting: phonics and phonemic awareness, phoneme and grapheme, and other terms that might be similar. After giving several examples of terms and how they are used, it ended with a review to test if we remembered any of it.

Phonemic awareness vs. phonics - PA has to do with understanding the language through sound and phonics uses visuals and print to understand sounds

phoneme and graphemes can consist of more than one letter but represent just one unit of sound; even though keep, come and quit all have different letters, they have the same phoneme

Cues:
-graphophonic cues refer to letter and sound relatinship (ex. graphophonic cues indicate that the o in rod represents the same sound as the o in cot.)
-syntactic cues are used to determine the order of words (ex. In the English language we use the formula: Subject/Noun  Verb  Prep Phrase  of sentence structure to help us determine how to say something)
-semantic cues give us insight on the meaning of a passage (ex. knowing certain verbs go with certain subjects - background knowledge)

I had a question on #41A. It asks us to say flat without the /f/ and it says the new word is at. Where did the /l/ sound go?

While some of these activities seemed very trivial, they were great examples of what an early childhood teacher could use when helping students understand English.


My favorite part of learning phonics has been how I can relate it back to my passion for teaching English in Thailand. As I begin to understand the English language better, I know that I will be able to teach it much better! There are a lot of things I have already learned I wished I would have known a year ago.

Fox, B. (2010). Phonics and structural analysis for the teacher of reading. (10 ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.