Phonics

In a way that is at least unusual in world education, there is a technique known as ‘Systematic Synthetic Phonics’ or SSP, which is now prescribed by law in Britain for the teaching of reading and writing.

For those learning to read and write a language written by an alphabet, three things have to be linked in the mind:

The phonemes;
The geometry of the characters;
The way the characters are conventionally formed by hand.

The last two are different from each other. The geometry is an idealisation, as sometimes drawn in the air in teaching or with children’s arms or their bodies lying on the floor or with cooked spaghetti. The formation of the letters is by a sequence, starting at one point, ending at another, in every case starting somewhere near the top with the initial rotation counter-clockwise except where the direction of travel forces the opposite rotation in n, m, r, u, w, and y. These things have to be taught. Children left to copy shapes sometimes make wrong choices, with odd effects on their handwriting.

In relation to the phonemes, there is a problem in the fact that modern Western languages all have more phonemes than the Latin which provided the letters. English has more than twice as many, including seven short vowels whereas Latin had five. For children learning to read and write English there is thus a severe quart in a pint pot problem. Other languages using the same alphabet, French, Spanish, German, Danish, Polish, Icelandic, Turkish use special characters or accents to try and squeeze the quart into the pot. But not English, other than in some spellings of French façade and café. For English children, the quart in a pint pot problem is especially severe. To make things worse, English has a complex prosody and a complex phonotactics, both crosslinguistically uncommon. Without accents to differentiate the phonemes the orthography is not just complex, but perversely so.

In the term SSP, synthetic is taken to mean that phonics is about the relation between individual letters and phonemes, and nothing else. No account is taken of the fact that in poetry, the onset orf the beginning of the syllable is treated separately in alliteration, while the coda, the consonant or consonants after the vowel, is part of the rime, itself part of the rhyme, often the stress domain of the foot, as in rabbit and habit, or that TR had different pronunciations in triangle and triangulate depending  on the way stress defines the relation between the T and the R – greatly in triangle, hardly at all in triangulate.

Being simple, consonants are never doubled in the onset, whereas they are in the coda. The case of digraphs is often misunderstood. There are phonemes like the onsets of thin and shin. And there are affricates as in the onsets of chew and Jew, two phonemic gestures, a stop and a fricative, in one phonemic space. Both voiced and unvoiced cognates are represented differently in the coda in age, edge, witch, and rich.

As SSP is taught by its most zealous and devoted advocates, from the Reading Reform Foundation, for instance, it focuses almost exclusively on the relation between letters and phonemes, giving each letter a name from what is taken to be its sound as an initial phoneme, and forbidding A, B, C-type names for letters. By this canon, there is no way of representing X, restricted to the coda other than in some first names from Greek.

According to this canon, the learning process begins by establishing the idea that for every phoneme there is one arbitrarily-selected, characteristic exemplar. But especially in Britsh writing on the topic, the complexities of the system are grossly underplayed. With only five single letters for six short vowels, in hit, red, hat, hut, hot, and hood, there is no logically possible way of consistently representing the short vowel in put and hood, and the long tense vowel in food and rude. There are no singular, exclusive exemplars of any of the long vowels of English. The vowel in me, he, she, we, has at least twelve other  representations, six in bee, eat, field, key, people, these, and less commonly in six others, in conceive, quay, ski, esprit, amoeba, paediatrian.  The first and last vowel in agenda, known as schwa, is represented differently in letter, actor, vicar, Saturday, measure, martyr, vigour, metre, mitten, button, little, model, gerbil, pilot, pirate, awful, villain, borough, catechism. These cases are typical. On average a letter can be used in twenty different ways. Only one phoneme in English, the A in am, is represented in only one way.

English has at least nine long vowels, both monopthongs and diphthongs, the equivalent of a long version of schwa in earn and pert. seven cases of what Wells calls ‘triphthongs’ in air, ear. Ire, coir, our, lower, tour, all written with an R, pronounced in ‘rhotic’ varieties, ‘schwi’, as this is sometimes known, in the word the, short and tense before a high front vowel, and, for speakers like me, different vowels in tune and moon.

British understandings of SSP take no account of the difference between the onset of a syllable and its coda, of the fact that fricatives (phonemes with the vocal tract narrowed) in the coda are commonly shown with a doubling, as in buzz and miss, or of the fact that consonants between a short stressed vowel and an unstressed final syllable, represented by a single segment, are commonly doubled, as in little and letter. In a similar way no account is taken of the difference between ‘content’ words and functors (words whose only role is in relation to some other word) in a, the, N’T in couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t, the /lvz/ structure in ourselves, yourselves, themselves, and other such cases.

Counting each relation between a letter and a sound as a grapheme, there are about 500 in English, including about 100 functional elements. On average, each letter is involved in 20 or so graphemes. The total is undercounted by SSP proponents by a factor of about 4, most estimating a count in the low 100s. Some of the total, like amoeba and pine marten, are rare and unlikely to occur to most primary school children. Others like the U in bury, the EIGH in eight, the DD, GG, BB, in add, egg, ebb, the functors in a, the, and bury, have only these exemplifications. But the true scale of the task here should not be underestimated for the sake of selling an idea or a cartload of books.

Paying little attention to the warning that there is more to literacy than phonics, SSP sometimes is trumpeted as a a simple solution to the many problems caused by English orthography. But it is systematic only in a very limited way, applying only to a small, arbitrary set of maximally simple cases defined by the 26 letters of the alphabet, skating over the fact that there are six short vowels in lexical words, different vowels in put and cut, and not including the vowel in the determiners, a and the, the two commonest words in the language.

SSP contrasts the realisation of letters as phonemes and what it calls the ‘blending’ of these into clusters and long vowels. Incorporating letters into words is called ‘coding’. Breaking down words into their sounds is called ‘decoding’. This is sometimes dressed up into a theory to be explained to whoever cares to listen.

SSP has a substantial literature. Amongst the most partial are Samual Blumenfeld (1983, 1988,1997), Ruth Miskin (1997), Rhoana Johnston and Joyce Watson (2004, 2005, 2012),  Diane McGuinness (2004, 2005, 2012). In part, as in the work of Blumenfeld in particular, the promotion of phonics is mixed with a critique of child-centred or discovery-based education or what Blumenfeld calls ‘Outcome based education’. In the literature it is not always clear whether the criticism of techniques other than SSP is because of some appeal to discovery by children, or whether it is focused entirely on the real weaknesses of systems which do not seek to teach phonics systematically. But also, particularly in the American literature, as in the work of Blumenfeld, there is strong emphasis on the idea that there is more to learning literacy than just phonics.

Phonics can, and should, be taught systematically, but that is a different thing from saying that there is such a thing as systematic phonics. Phonics represents the profound insight of those who made the inscriptions in the turquoise mines at Serabit el_Khadim in the Sinai, almost 4,000 years ago. But English uses the principle with a quite perverse inconsistency. So the exemplification of SSP breaks down in any sentence with a determiner, in other words, in almost every sentence. And the choice of characteristic exemplars is necessarily arbitrary. Between the systematic teaching of phonics and systematic phonics there is a profound confusion.

There has been extensive testing of the systematic teaching of phonics with the clear result that it works better than loosely structured attempts to let children discover phonics inductively. But as made clear in the thoughtful review by the US National Reading Panel (2000), it is hard to control all the relevant variables experimentally. It is not clear how teachers manage the complexities of dialect, as complex and divisive an issue in the US, as in Britain. In one classroom more than one variety may be spoken. Are they all equally valued? The differences may be quite subtle, like the pronunciation of G as an oral stop in sing and singer, varying from one part of Northern England to another, with some younger speakers in Southern Britain not pronouncing the G in younger. Are all of these equally ‘standard’. It is hardly surprising that the complex and subtle principles of syllable structure and how this affects spelling are not reliably induced by unguided discovery. Some of these principles have only been discovered in the past 50 years. Scholars still argue about them. Even the number of phonemes in English is disputed.

But when the term SSP is used it is never clear if it is a slogan for authority and dogmatism in education or as a marketing slogan by publishers or whether it means just that phonics have to be taught. The evidence cited in its favour is not as strong as its proponents claim. By some mysterious mechanism, publishers in this area are said to be ‘approved’. Increasingly, as noted by Dominic Wyse and Alice Bradbury (2022), the belief is growing that nothing other than SSP techniques defined on the strictest and narrowest criteria are allowed in British schools.

Criticism of SSP does not need to query the principle of phonics. The principle was always clever, going back to the original ancient Greek alphabet and its semitic precursor, where there is every reason to suppose that the relation between phonemes and characters was one to one. Without seeking to disinter the ultimately defeatist ‘Look and Say’, the problem here is complex. English uses the alphabet in a highly degraded way. SSP pretends to solve it bureaucratically. But the problem can only be solved by educational honesty, imagination, and, thoroughness. Pretending that there is a simple bureaucratic solution is a non-solution.

Shakespeare would have been shocked at the disingenuity of SSP. George Bernard Shaw would probably have written a play about it, just as he wrote Pygmalion to poke fun at the way the early proponents of phonetics sought to bury their most notable predecessor, Alexander Melville Bell.

Abandoning letter names in favour of what is taken to be their sounds is a step back from logic rather than an advance. The greater the chaos in the system the greater the reason for the one bit of consistency, namely the letter names.

Moving forward

For the sake of teaching Russian-speaking children to read and write Russian (where there is much less of a problem because the spelling was updated in 1918), Lada Iosifovna Aidarova (1982) proposed to give each child a book of their own to in which to write and investigate, and not just practise. The book can be about anything, a favourite celebrity, sports star, team, the child’s own life, a story. But it is also a record of the child’s investigation of language. The writing can be in felt tips, crayon, ink or paint, or printed from a computer if there is one available and the resources to print the work out and stick it into the book, The book should look, and BE, important. As shown by Aidarova, allowing children to discover for themselves the effect of structures in language as spoken and spelt is a powerful way of helping with their reading and writing, as suggested about the same time by Carol Chomsky. The technical terminology is less important than the investigation and resulting understanding. Starting from her studies of Gottlieb Frege and Bertrand Russel, Aidarava sets out the basis of a child-friendly notation.

Aidarova’s proposal could be adopted in the English-speaking world as the basis of a way forward for the more complex problem of teaching literacy in English. Applying Aidarova’s insights to English, there are many principles to be discovered. In the case of the and a, the two commonest words in English, they don’t just ‘say’ the words, they also DO something which no other words in English do.  They change if the next word begins wih a vowel. This can open a discussion of the difference between vowels and consonants. The double B in hobby and the double M in hammer are there for a reason. They belong to both syllables – as the end of one and the beginning of the next. The second syllables could not be words on their own. There are many other such principles in English spelling. There are just more of them than SSP proponents care to admit.

There are striking parallels between Aidarova’s work and Carol Chomsky’s. Both were working on similar ideas at the same time. But with the USA the USSR on opposite sides of the Cold War, with contact energetically discouraged on both sides, there was no easy way for either of them to know of the other’s work.

School time

Time in school is limited and precious. For many it is the only time in life for contact with the whole range of human culture – science, art, history, music, literature, and more. It should not be wasted in ill-considered ways of which SSP is a prime example. There should be no underestimating of the scale of what English-speaking children have to learn in order to become become fully literate.

If SSP is maintained as a legally required canon for the teaching of literacy in England, the likely effects seem to me uniformly dire. The more strictly its canons are followed, the less likely it is that children will learn to enjoy any sort of literature from poetry to science. This contradicts many commitments in the National Curriculum. Rigid adherence to SSP risks a significant proportion of casualties, confused by the arbitrariness and inconsistency. Having been initially taught by an early version of SSP and failed to progress beyond the very first stages for over two years, I came very close to becoming such a casualty myself. I must confess to having a strong, partial interest here.