Announcing the move last week, minister for education and young people Cathy Jamieson said, 'The report on synthetic phonics finds that excellent results have been achieved in raising the reading and language skills of our youngest citizens. The report will be sent to every primary school in Scotland for teachers to consider whether the approach would benefit their pupils.'
The report, Accelerating Reading and Spelling with Synthetic Phonics: A Five Year Follow Up, published as part of the Scottish Executive's Insight series, compares the progress made by children who have been taught synthetic or analytic phonics between Primary One and Five.
Analytic phonics involves showing whole words, pronouncing them and then segmenting them into letter sounds. This system has been widely used in Scotland for many years. Children are typically taught one letter sound per week and are shown a series of alliterative pictures and words which start with that sound, eg car, cat, cake, castle. When the 26 initial letter sounds have been taught, children are introduced to middle sounds and then to final sounds, usually by the end of Primary One.
However, according to the research, children make much faster progress using synthetic phonics, which is used in Germany and Austria and is generally taught before children are introduced to books or reading. This method involves teaching small groups of letters very rapidly and showing children how to blend the sounds together to create simple words. For example, children might listen to a spoken word, select magnetic letters to represent the sounds, then push the letters together, sounding and blending them to pronounce the word.
The researchers found that in Primary One, children who learned this way were seven months ahead of their chronological age in word reading; by Primary Five, they were 26 months ahead.
To their surprise, in the group taught by synthetic phonics, the boys were eight months ahead of the girls in word reading by Primary Three, and had a slight, but not statistically significant, advantage in spelling and reading comprehension. These boys were 9.6 months ahead of boys in the analytic group for reading comprehension.
Clackmannanshire Council has already introduced the synthetic phonics approach in all its primary schools, following a research programme that explored the effects of the Jolly Phonics system. The programme established that using synthetic phonics gave quicker and better results than analytic phonics, and led to a significant reduction in underachievement.
Ms Jamieson also announced that she was introducing a national literacy project involving authorities across Scotland. A national advisory group will be put in place next month and work will start in schools from August.
Schools will be selected to take part in consultation with local authorities and HM Inspectorate of Education and will be offered careful monitoring and support.
* Ms Jamieson launched a new website last week to show parents that it is easy to introduce their children to the world of books. The Read Together website, www.readtogether.co.uk, part of the home reading initiative, offers tips, advice and suggestions on how reading can be made easy and enjoyable.
