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. SSP focuses almost exclusively on the relation between ‘letter sounds’ and the sounds of the letters in speech. It assumes that words consist entirely of sequences of elements known by a characteristic sound, giving each letter a name from what is taken to be its sound. A, B, C-type names for letters are effectively banned. SSP contrasts the realisation of  letters as sounds and what it calls the ‘blending’ of these in more complex structures, in words such as say, stay, stray. Incorporating letters into words is called ‘coding’. Breaking down words into their sounds is called ‘decoding’. The learning process begins by establishing the idea that for every sound there is one appropriate exemplar. This allows “Cat on mat” or “Dog in bed” as the labels of pictures. But perfect exemplification breaks down with any use of a or the. This makes it hard to construe the simplest of sentences without at the very least stretching the most basic of SSP assumptions. Understating the various problems here, this sets aside the fact that the coding is highly inconsistent, as in the first sounds of Jim and George, the last sounds of such and hitch, and the fact that there are no singular exemplars of any of the long vowels of English, such as those in he, hay, high, hoe, who, and how. I clearly remember my own six year old problem with “The cat sat on the mat”. Neither the two letters for the TH sound nor the E for the short vowel fitted into any of the letter sound correspondences we were being given at the time. 

SSP is covertly a political slogan. To me, it does not qualify as a theory.

SSP has its zealous proponents like Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson (2005), and, more recently, Jennifer Buckingham (2020). There are many others. But the evidence that they cite in favour of SSP is not strong.

There are other approaches to phonics. Two alternative approaches are known as ‘Analytic’ and ‘Embedded Phonics’. Analytic Phonics seeks to allow children to discover for themselves alliteration, as I the ‘ragged rascal’, and the commonality between rhymes, as in how and now. Embedded phonics teaches these principles as they come up in stories. But both approaches are random in terms of which alliterations and which rhymes are encountered. These, like other approaches to the teaching of phonics in any way other than by SSP, are systematically rubbished by SSP proponents.

Giving up all hope of extracting any logic from the English spelling system, a technique known as Look and say just pairs words and pronunciations. Every word has to be learned as an item, with no relation to any other word beginning or ending with the same consonant or the same vowel, to be recognised as a whole without any regard to the basic principles of the alphabet. The notion of phonics is abandoned altogether.  Look and Say is defeatist. It throws out the baby with the bathwater. It misses the obvious generalisations by rhyme and alliteration, both principles extensively applied in poetry. It offers no way to compute the sound of an unfamiliar new word. It has been unceremoniously abandoned. But disingenuously, it is often used as a whipping boy by SSP proponents.

Increasingly, as noted by Dominic Wyse and Alice Bradbury (2022), the belief is growing that nothing other than SSP techniques are allowed in British schools. Wyse and Bradbury’s article has aroused vigorous and lively discussion involving members of the government and others.

By some mysterious mechanism, publishers in this area are ‘approved’.

My criticism of SSP here does not seek to undermine the principle of phonics. The principle here is very clever. In its modern form it goes back to the ancient Greek alphabet. I am not seeking to disinter Look and Say. But the problem here is complex. English uses the alphabet in a highly degraded way. SSP pretends to solve it bureaucratically. It seems to me that the problem here can only be solved by educational honesty and imagination, and, yes, thoroughness. But pretending that there is a simple bureaucratic solution seems to me like a non-solution.

Epic poetry like Beowulf from over a thousand years ago and the first known text in formal grammar, Panini’s Ashtadhyayi, from a thousand years earlier, were first written to be recited aloud by memory. The recitalists would have assumed that what they were reciting was far more important than any of the letters that might be used to write it down. Shakespeare would have been shocked at the disingenuity of SSP. George Bernard Shaw would probably have written a play about it, like he wrote Pygmalion to poke fun at the way the early proponents of phonetics sought to bury their most notable predecessor, Alexander Melville Bell. Panini, Shakespeare, Bell and Shaw would all have thought it bizarre to suggest that the entire text of world literature, theatre, science, poetry, philosophy was somehow reducible to sequences of letters.

Blind spots

In no particular order, in more detail, SSP ignores

• The difference between the ‘content’ or ‘lexical’ words in cat, dog, big, get, and the functors in a, the and the n’t in couldn’t. The functors can’t be used on their own or shown with pictures, are standardly unstressed, have a simpler sound structure, mostly single consonants and vowels, no clusters of more than two elements, often contract, losing some of their sound structure, and ‘cliticise’ or get ‘glued’ on to other elements, as in “I’d rather not” or “I’ve got an idea”. The loss of sound structure is shown by the apostrophe. The content words and functors are spelt by by two sets of principles. They overlap. But they are not quite the same. Because of the contraction and cliticisation, functors are often said and written as something less than a complete syllable, as in don’t, can’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t, in a way that never happens with content words. TH at the beginning of the, this, these, though, then, is voiced. TH at the beginning of thin, think, through, three, is voiceless. The vowel written as E in the and as A in a is pronounced as ‘schwa’ so long as it is not followed by a vowel, the only such cases in the language. Of is a functor in a pint of milk, which was routinely pronouced A PINTA MILK with the V sound left unpronounced. There are close to 100 functors in English. Between words, in expressions like To be or not to be, where the only content word is be, the stress depends partly on the contrast between content and function. The doubling and special pronunciation of the T in little, the different pronunciations of TR in triangle and triangulate, all depend on the way stress defines the rhythm.
• A contradiction. The fact that the way that the letters are defined for classroom use by SSP proponents, as BUH, DUH, GUH, PUH, TUH, KUH, and so on, cannot be written as they are pronounced according to SSP definitions.
• Varieties, accents or dialects of English. SSP assumes a single ‘standard’ variety of the language when it is highly arguable whether there is any such thing. SSP is forced to treat the variation as a systematic imperfection. In some, nominally standard, varieties of the language, the G is not pronounced in sing and singer, but pronounced in longer and younger and not pronounced in longer and young, and pronounced in finger and hunger. The cases of non-pronunciation vary widely in complex ways, as do contrasts in the pronunciation of vowels in particular. These variations are quite unstable with some younger speakers not pronouncing the G in younger. The T in little is pronounced in at least three different ways, not released in standard varieties, pronounced as T in many varieties spoken in the Southeast, and with what is known as a ‘global stop’ or by closing the larynx in Cockney and many other varieties. The difference between the non-release in standard varieties and the other pronunciations can hardly be treated as ‘laziness’ by standard speakers, when they themselves routinely use the same disparaged glottal stop in any instance of T between N and M, as in huntsman, ointment, appointment, and other cases if these can be found. The denial by SSP that the dialectal variations are real, when these are obvious between different members of staff and different children in most schools, makes it impossible to exploit these variations in the classroom in a simple, natural, positive way.
• Over 500 relations between letters and sounds or ‘graphemes’ – a lot more than SSP proponents care to admit. 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 foot, and the long tense vowel in food and rude. One work around is to vary the boldness of the type, using OO in food, and OO in foot. But this is a publisher’s trick, never used other than in educational text focused on this point. The ‘homophones’ bury and berry both begin B and end with Y. But the relation between the Y in these words and the sound is lost by calling the letter a Yer (pronounced like the second syllable in sawyer or you as in Y’know). Just berry has the characteristic doubled letter between a short stressed vowel and a final unstressed syllable.
• The basis of rhythm both inside words and between them – the raw materials of poetry, along with meaning – from right to left, two syllables at a time, giving primary stress the first time, and then secondary stresses. This is reflected not just in English poetry, but in the poetry of many languages. Consider the sort of rhyme common in poetry between two structures, both with stressed and unstressed syllables with only one  consonant sound sandwiched in between, as in “Hey diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle“, and doubled accordingly. But this cannot be captured in principle by the notion of a continuous sequence of speech sounds, as espoused by SSP. There are many other such cases.
• The original logic of using non-words in assessment. When in 1958 Jean Berko developed an experimental methodology using non-words, her motivation was to see if children understood the phonetic differences in English word-structure, as in plurals – S in pats, Z in pads IZ in patches. She decided to see if this extended to non-words – like bicks, wugs and gutches.
  

  

  Berko emphasised the importance of making sure that the children all understood what they were being asked to do. This is obviously not practical in a whole class test where it is not clear how children will interpret the task against any background knowledge they may have of the sound structure. Approaching the same issue from a different direction, in 1976 Carol Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s wife, argued that that EXPERIMENTING with writing helps the development of reading. She discussed the case of children spelling buried as berried. She suggested that such ‘creative spelling’ provided “valuable practice in phonetics, in dealing with phonological abstractions and in the principles of alphabetic writing.”

• The fact that there is no non-arbitrary way of determining which graphemes should be treated as exemplary and which should be treated as exceptions. Conventional spellings mostly show diphthongs and other long vowels by two characters, either adjacent or separated by a consonant where the rightmost vowel of the root is the so-called ‘silent’ E, as in take, complete, like, rope, puke. But this principle has exceptions in one direction in might, fight, night, and in another direction in data, quota and metre.
• The negative effect of whole class teaching on what is essentially an approximation, making it hard to  differentiate between children and to ensure that the limitations of the approximation (in the large number of exceptions) are correctly understood. On average, each letter is involved in 20 or so graphemes. The first and last sounds in agenda can be spelt in at least 36 different ways. SSP proponents are coy about the size of these numbers. Only the vowel in am has just just one spelling. The problem is magnified by the fact that English disdains accents, other than in some spellings of French façade and café.
• The early history of the alphabet in ancient Greece, where there is every reason to assume there was one character for every sound. But as the system was pressed into service for languages for which it was not designed, the fit got less and less exact, in all probability first for Etruscan and Latin in Italy and much later, with even less of a natural fit, for English. Without some of the sounds of Greek and with other sounds not part of Greek, more and more of the original logic was lost. But not completely.

Moving forward

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.

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 SSP canons are followed, the less likely it is that children will learn to enjoy the treasure trove of existing literature. 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.