An Investigation to Establish the Impact of Synthetic Phonics on Teaching Children with English as an Additional Language to Read

Anne Hardy, UK

Anne Hardy has recently completed an MA in TESOL at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent, Great Britain and has extensive experience both as a primary teacher and English language teacher. E-mail: annejhardy@hotmail.com

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Introduction
Background to miscue analysis
Examples
Discussion of key findings from the miscue analyses
Conclusions
References

Introduction

During 2013, I conducted research into the impact of synthetic phonics on teaching learners with English as an Additional Language (EAL) to read. Synthetic phonics involves children learning phoneme-grapheme correspondences and then blending phonemes to decode words when reading. The aim of the study was to evaluate how effective this strategy is in teaching these children to learn to read and whether it has application for other learners of English.

Existing literature (Department of Education 2011) indicates that synthetic phonics is the mandatory approach to teaching reading in English primary schools where the first language of learners is normally English. There has been a wealth of research on the favourable impact of this approach on learners with English as a first language (National Reading Panel 2000, Johnston and Watson, 2005). However, studies of how this approach helps EAL learners seem to be rare (Torgerson et al, 2006, Purewal, 2008). It was this research deficit that created the rationale for my research which I undertook in a primary school in a town in the south-east of England in which 30% of the children speak English as an additional language.

This research into synthetic phonics and EAL learners took the form of a qualitative case study. The case studies involved four EAL children aged between six and ten years old who attended a primary school in the south-east of England. The children were from the Czech and Slovak Roma community who resided in the area. The study also involved adult participants who worked as teachers or teaching assistants in the school.

The research methods used included semi-structured interviews with the adults, structured interviews with the children, lesson observation and miscue analyses to identify the children’s reading strategies. In this article, I focus on the results of the final two methods because the data provided me with the most interesting findings.

The results appeared to indicate that synthetic phonics was useful in teaching children to decode and provided them with a useful strategy when they already understood the meaning of the decoded word. However, the evidence also suggested that the children’s limited lexical knowledge impeded their comprehension. Furthermore, it demonstrated that recalling the correspondence between phonemes and graphemes could be challenging.

Background to miscue analysis

Goodman et al (1987) assert that valuable information can be gained from listening to someone read because it reveals what the reader understands about language. This is because ‘miscues are never random’ (Goodman, 1996: vi). Language cue systems involve the use of graphophonic cues as well as semantic and syntactic cues (ibid). Graphophonic cues involve the reader using the relationship between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) to decode text. Semantic cues relate to meaning, and syntactic cues concern the way language is structured. Miscue analysis ‘evaluates why miscues are made and assumes that they derive from the language and thought that the reader brings to the written material in the attempt to construct meaning from reading’ (ibid.: 4).

I expected that the children would decode words because this was the strategy that they had been taught in synthetic phonics lessons. I used a miscue analysis system based on approaches recommended by Goodman et al (1987) and Wilde (2000). This involved copying the text before reading sessions so that I could annotate miscues and note any comments they made. I deviated in one area as I used phonemic transcription to illustrate how the children pronounced each phoneme when they decoded out loud. By using phonemic script to code the sounds the children produced when segmenting, I could identify which phoneme the child had used. If they provided an alternative phoneme to the one that should correspond to the grapheme, I analysed why they may have made that choice. Where the child decoded syllables in words, I wrote this as it appears in the word. This qualitative analysis allowed me to evaluate the reading process as experienced by the children (Goodman et al, 1987).

In the following examples, I include an extract from a synthetic phonics lesson with Anna aged 6, and then some excerpts from miscue analyses that I conducted with Anna and Ivan aged 9.

Examples

1. Findings from an observation of a synthetic phonics lesson

In the following excerpt, a group of eight children aged between five and six, including Anna, are working with a teaching assistant on the grapheme ‘ow’ and the sound it represents which in this case is /əʊ/. Anna and Child 4 are the only EAL children in this group. They are now generating words.

Key:
TA (teaching assistant)
/ / sound spoken by children written in phonemic script

1. The TA shows a large picture of a bear with snow blowing around it.
2. Child 1 It’s a bear with blow the snow!
3. The TA writes ‘ow’ in the centre of the white board.
4. Child 1 Ice pole!
5. Child 2 Blow
6. TA Sometimes you have these stickers above your bed at night and when you turn off the light they…
7. Children Glow!
8. Child 3 I have a spiderman glow in the dark sticker.
9. TA You know a snail, Anna, it goes really…
10. Anna Slow.
11. TA Let’s look at our other o-e (pointing to o-e on another large flashcard).
12. What sound is this?
13. Children /əʊ/!
14. Anna There’s an alien! (pointing to the picture of the alien on the reverse of the flashcard). (The picture is of an alien holding a mobile phone and the caption reads ‘phone home’).
15. TA What does this line mean here? (pointing to the line in the middle of the o and the e in ‘o-e’)
16. Anna It means they’re special friends and they must always stay together.

Commentary and discussion

In this observation I noticed that the teaching assistant familiarises the children with the graphemes on the flashcards focusing on the grapheme ‘ow’ and its corresponding sound /əʊ/. The children are familiar with the picture and the rhyme associated with the phoneme as a child recalls ‘it’s a bear with blow the snow’ in line 2. This is because the scheme has been designed to teach children phonemes and the corresponding graphemes or groups of graphemes using picture prompts (Miskin, 2005). Through the course of the lesson they learn that the sound can be graphically represented in at least two different ways. The teaching assistant helps the children generate words by describing something and encouraging the children to say what it is (lines 6 and 9). The children learn that the letters in the digraph o-e in ‘phone’ are connected to make one phoneme through the idea that ‘they’re best friends and they must always stay together’ as Anna says in line 16. Developing children’s metalanguage or knowledge about language is thus a principle of the scheme and Anna’s explanation demonstrates that she has understood this phoneme-grapheme relationship.

During my lesson observations, I noticed that children with similar reading abilities, including those with EAL, worked daily with an adult on synthetic phonics in groups of about six to eight. Lesson content therefore was matched to the children’s reading levels. Moreover, all staff used the detailed lesson plans provided and there were sufficient resources for the children. This ensured the quality of lessons was consistent throughout the school.

2. Findings from the miscue analyses

Anna (1)

Anna was particularly fond of a set of stories about a mouse and in the following example she was able to read and understand the vast majority of the text.

The original text was as follows:

Brown mouse plays a trick.

Grey Mouse said to Brown Mouse ‘I liked your party but I have to go home’.

‘I have to go home too’ said White Mouse.

Brown Mouse went to the door and looked out.

‘You can’t go home’ he said.

‘The cat is outside the door’. (Excerpt from: ‘Brown Mouse plays a trick’ by J. Giles, 2001)

Key:

R = the researcher
/ / sound the child produces in phonemic script

1. Anna Brown mouse plays a trick.
2. Grey Mouse said to Brown Mouse
3. ‘I liked you? (self corrects) your party
4. /b/ʌ/t/ but I have to go home’.
5. ‘I have to go home too’ said with uh White Mouse.
6. Brown Mouse went to the do? What’s that mean?
7. R Look at the picture.
8. Anna door and looked out.
9. ‘You cat? (self corrects) Can’t go home’ he said.
10. ‘The cat is outsit? Inside, no! (Anna says this word with emphasis then self corrects) Outside! (Emphasised) the door.

In order to check Anna’s comprehension of the whole story, I asked the following question:

R Why was Brown Mouse clever?

Anna Because he was clever because he put the toy after the cat. He was run after the Brown Mouse not the real mouse, the toy.

Commentary and discussion

Anna self-corrects in lines 3, 5, 9 and 10. In line 3, she initially says ‘you’, changing it to ‘your’ to create a syntactically correct sentence, possibly by noticing that the ensuing word reads ‘party’. In synthetic phonics lessons, Anna has learned ‘you’ and ‘your’ as words she needs to recognise by sight. An example of decoding occurs when Anna says each phoneme to read the word ‘but’ (line 4). In line 5, Anna initially says ‘with’ and then corrects herself and says ‘white’. She says ‘with’ as the word is graphically similar to ‘white’ but then realises it is not syntactically plausible. In addition, she notices that ‘W’ is capitalised thus is a name and is followed by the word ‘Mouse’ which is also capitalised at the start. All the mice in the story have been named in this way and Anna demonstrates here that she recognises the purpose of capitalization. Anna requires support in line 6 when she encounters the word ‘door’. She does not use the picture which shows Brown Mouse by the door so I remind her to do so. However, in line 9, when Anna says ‘you cat’ she is referring to the illustration of the cat outside the door. The intonation of her voice rises in the form of a question as she ponders whether the word indeed reads ‘cat’. When she notices the letter ‘n’, which precedes the apostrophe, she says ‘can’t’. However, her initial utterance which would have read ‘You cat go home’ would have shown semantic understanding, because in the story the mice wanted the cat to go away. In line 10, Anna decodes ‘outside’ as ‘outsit’. At this point, she has not decoded the split digraph ‘i-e’. She then realizes that ‘outsit’ is not a word that she recognises so says ‘inside’ possibly recalling the antonyms ‘inside and outside’ and then emphasises ‘outside’ as she knows she has read the word correctly and shows obvious delight in doing so.

I discover from this observation that Anna can use a range of strategies when she reads and is not over-reliant on decoding. Her knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondence learned in synthetic phonics lessons supports her reading but it is her knowledge of the lexis and syntax in the story that ultimately enables her to read successfully with understanding. It is Anna’s lexical knowledge that enables her to comprehend the story as can be observed in her response to my comprehension question. In Anna’s response, she correctly identifies what Brown Mouse did, which was to use a toy mouse as a decoy so he could escape. When Anna says ‘He was run after the Brown Mouse’, ‘he’ is used anaphorically to refer to the cat. Anna uses the past continuous to describe the cat’s action, though omits the ‘ing’ in ‘running’. She reinforces her explanation by saying the mouse the cat was running after was ‘not the real mouse’ but ‘the toy’. Although Anna’s response is not entirely syntactically accurate, she demonstrates that she has understood what she has read. As Goodman et al (1987: 63) opine ‘[b]ilingual students … may have greater understanding of what they read than is evident in their ability to produce syntactically acceptable sentences’.

Anna (2)

In this example, Anna chooses to read a simplified version of ‘The ugly duckling’ as she knows the story and says she has read this book before.

The text is as follows:

The ugly duckling

Once upon a time mother duck had some ducklings.

The ducklings grew and grew.

But one duckling grew too big. (Excerpt from: ‘The ugly duckling’ by M. Hughes 2004)

1. Anna The /ʌ/g/l/i:/ ugly d-uckling
2. /ɒ/n/k/e/ I dunno
3. R Once.
4. Anna u-pon a t-ime
5. Mother duck had some ducklings.
6. The duck-lings /g/r/e/eɪ/
7. R grew
8. Anna grew and grew
9. But one duckling grew too big. What’s that mean grew?

Commentary and discussion

Anna decodes ‘ugly’ and her familiarity with the title enables her to read ‘duckling’ without needing to decode. Anna is unsure of the word ‘once’. She decodes it, segmenting each grapheme, but realises this does not help as she cannot make sense of the word. Once I have told her the word, she recalls the phrase ‘upon a time’ as she has heard this in fairy tales. When she encounters the word ‘grew’ (line 6), her choice of phonemes resemble the word ‘grey’. It could be that in her search for meaning, she was referring to the picture which showed the grey coloured ugly duckling on the page and had interpreted this to be the subject of the sentence. If this was the case, Anna would need some explanation of how plurals are created in English as ‘ducklings’ refers to more than one. Indeed, Wallace (1988) posits that letters provide more information than sounds and knowledge of the plural –s on nouns rule would help Anna. Lack of morphological awareness thus impedes her comprehension. Syntactically, colour adjectives precede nouns in English too therefore ‘grey’ could not be the correct word. Decoding words in this instance does not support Anna because her knowledge of the lexis in the story is insufficient.

Ivan

In this example, Ivan is reading a non-fiction book entitled ‘Bug Hunt’ (Llewellyn, 2009). There is a photograph of a ladybird on the front cover and a small illustration of a boy with a magnifying glass in the background.

1. R What’s this? (pointing to the ladybird)
2. Ivan I (pronounces this as /eɪ/) dunno. I (/eɪ/) forget.
3. R It’s a ladybird.
4. Ivan Ah!
5. R OK. Can you read this? (pointing to the title)
6. Ivan /b/u:/g/ /h/u:/n/t/
7. R This makes an /ʌ/ sound (pointing to the letter ‘u’ in bug and hunt).
8. Ivan Ah. /b/ ʌ /g/ bug /h/u:/n/t/?
9. R Do you know what a bug hunt is?
10. Ivan I (/eɪ/) dunno.

Commentary and discussion

This example illustrates the difficulties Ivan has when decoding words he does not understand. Ivan decodes the consonants correctly in the words. He identifies the initial and final consonants in the words ‘bug’ and ‘hunt’ but as he does not know what a ‘bug’ or ‘hunt’ is, his awareness of the consonants does not help him to read the words. When decoding in line 6, Ivan pronounces ‘u’ in ‘bug’ and ‘hunt’ as /u:/. Ivan has been taught the phoneme-grapheme relationship of ‘u’ in his synthetic phonics classes where ‘u’ makes the sound /ʌ/ and also in words such as ‘put’ where ‘u’ makes the sound /ʊ/. My explanation does not support him because when he repeats the words in line 8, he reverts to pronouncing the ‘u’ in ‘hunt’ as /u:/. Ivan has become confused with the possible alternative phonemes that correspond to this vowel.

A further explanation I surmised is that some second language learners may not be able to discriminate between certain sounds in their own spoken English and this view is supported by Wallace (1992). This may be the case for Ivan with the sounds /ʌ/, /ʊ/, and /u:/. Ivan’s pronunciation of the word ‘I’ as /eɪ/ is a further example where he does not recognise that the phoneme he produces differs from conventional English pronunciation of the word ‘I’. However, in this instance, Ivan understands the meaning of ‘I’ as he uses it in line 2 for example, to explain that he does not know the answer to my question.

The text in fact was a poor choice on my part as the task of decoding in conjunction with learning new vocabulary was too challenging for Ivan.

Discussion of key findings from the miscue analyses

The children demonstrate knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondence and they can use this to decode words when reading. They generally identify the phonemes for consonants in words. This is helpful to the children when they already know the name of the word in English as they can decode it quickly and derive its meaning, because as Wilde (2000: 8) states: ‘consonants carry the bulk of the meaning load in a written language’. Decoding phonemes which have two or more corresponding graphemes cause more difficulties. Identifying split digraphs and correctly recalling vowel sounds can also be challenging. This is unsurprising given the more complex relationship between vowel sounds and grapheme correspondence (Wilde, 2000). Moreover, unlike monolingual children, EAL children have the additional task of trying to grasp meaning of new vocabulary. On these occasions, they may decode correctly, but they are unable to make sense of the text due to lack of lexical knowledge. In terms of decoding, Anna is working at a similar level to the monolingual children in her class. However, her vocabulary knowledge is not equivalent to L1 learners. Furthermore, Anna has not fully developed her understanding of English morphology. At times, these factors limit her ability to comprehend text. Ivan has a more limited vocabulary therefore reading is even more challenging for him and ability to decode alone does not enable him to understand text.

Conclusions

From my work with the children, I discovered that they used the decoding strategy when they encountered unknown words and I observed that the strategy was certainly beneficial when they already understood the lexis. Indeed, Menyuk and Brisk (2005: 110) assert that when ‘learners know the words they are more likely to sound it out accurately and thus get the appropriate meaning’. However, the major issue for these children and other EAL learners is that they often lack knowledge of lexis in the text therefore this means that they may read without understanding. This has implications for all elements of their education. Indeed, as NALDIC (2006) caution, decoding without comprehending will not enable EAL learners to be successful at school. This means that teachers and teaching assistants have a crucial and long-term role in supporting the language development of these children, so that they can fully access the curriculum and achieve success at school. As Cummins (2000) opines, EAL children living in an English speaking country need many years of additional adult support if they are to reach a similar standard of literacy as their monolingual peers.

In my findings, I discovered how a learner’s limited morphological knowledge affected comprehension. In addition, the inability of another learner to discriminate between sounds in his spoken English was a hindrance both to his decoding and comprehension. Limited lexical knowledge was a feature identified in both the children. Practitioners therefore need to be aware of issues such as these and also the most appropriate strategies on how to assist the children. One area for training should be on language as used by teachers or teaching assistants. Teacher language for example, needs to be unambiguous. Phrasal verbs for instance, which are common in English and widely understood by children with English as a first language, can confuse EAL children. On the other hand, strategies that practitioners could use to clarify new language for EAL children include using visual aids and realia. The employment of trained professionals who speak the child’s home language would also be beneficial.

There are implications too for using synthetic phonics as a method to teach reading to young learners of English in other countries. The young learners’ market has increased rapidly in recent years and led to increased demands for appropriate resources to teach this age group. The growth of this market hence has seen the promotion of the use of synthetic phonics as a strategy to teach young learners to read in English. An example of this is can be found on the British Council website which offers resources based on the United Kingdom phonics programme Letters and Sounds (britishcouncil.org). Assuming that teachers in this sector are properly trained, this strategy may be useful in developing the reading skills of young learners. By learning phoneme-grapheme relationships, learners gain a useful resource on how to pronounce, read and spell English words. For example, as discussed in my observation of a synthetic phonics lesson, the children learned two different ways of graphically representing the sound /əʊ/ and Anna was able to explain the rule for the pronunciation of ‘o-e’. Moreover, the explicit teaching of rules such as this would support learners who write in non-alphabetic languages because as Goswami and Bryant (1990) explain, research indicates that these learners have less awareness of phonemes than learners with an alphabetic script in their first language.

To conclude, the needs of EAL children learning to read are complex and the development of their lexical knowledge is paramount if they are to be enabled to become successful readers. However, if taught in conjunction with a language rich curriculum, this systematic strategy could be useful in developing reading skills for the growing number of young learners of English attending language schools around the world.

References

British Council (2013) Learn English Kids: English sounds. Available: http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/sounds [Accessed 20.9.13]

Cummins, J. (2000) Language, power and pedagogy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Giles, J. (2001) Brown Mouse plays a trick Melbourne: Nelson Cengage Learning.

Goodman, K (1996) “Introduction” in: Goodman, K. Brown, J. & Marek, A. (1996) Studies in miscue analysis: An annotated bibliography. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Goodman, Y., Watson, D., & Burke, C. (1987) Reading miscue inventory: alternative procedures. New York: Richard Owen Publishers Inc.

Goswami, U. & Bryant, P. (1990) Phonological skills and learning to read. Hove: Psychology Press.

Great Britain. Department for Education (2011) Response to public consultation on the Year 1 phonics screening check. Available: www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/pedagogy/teachingstyles/phonics [Accessed 13.2.13]

Hughes, M. (2004) The ugly duckling Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.

Johnston, R. & Watson, J. (2005) [PDF] The effects of synthetic phonics teaching on reading and spelling attainment. Available: www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/36496/0023582.pdf [Accessed: 26.2.13]

Llewellyn, C. (2009) Project X: Bug hunt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Menyuk, P. & Brisk, M. (2005) Language development and education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Miskin, R. (2005) “Memorandum submitted by Ruth Miskin”. In: Great Britain. House of Commons Education and Skills Committee (2005) Teaching children to read. 8th Report of session 2004-2005. London: The Stationery Office Limited.

NALDIC (2006) NALDIC response to the Rose review of the teaching of reading and the NLS. Available: www.naldic.org.uk/.../NALDIC/.../NALDICresponsetotheRosereview.pdf‎ [Accessed: 25.7.13]

National Reading Panel (2000) Teaching children to read: an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Available: www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/smallbook.htm. [Accessed 24.8.13]

Purewal, S. (2008) Synthetic phonics and the literacy development of second language young learners. Unpublished Masters dissertation: University of Leeds.

Torgerson, C., Brooks, G. & Hall, J. (2006) A systematic review of the research literature of the use of phonics in the teaching of reading and spelling. Research report No. 711. University of Sheffield.

Wallace, C. (1988) Learning to read in a multicultural society. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall International Ltd.

Wallace, C. (1992) Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilde, S. (2000) Miscue analysis made easy. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

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