Details
Author: Henrietta Dombey, Margaret Moustafa and the staff of CLPE
ISBN: 1-872267-13-0
A widespread view of learning to read sees it, in its early stages at least, as a straightforward process of matching speech sounds to the sounds of letters and running the sounds together to make words. But this view of how children best learn to tackle print does not take into account interesting recent work on the importance of phonological awareness in learning to read, the role of analogy in that learning, the value of onset-rime approaches in considering how children analyse written words and the place of learning to write and spell in learning to read.
This book summarises evidence about how children learn to use grapho-phonic cues in reading. It suggests a range of practical teaching approaches which will promote this learning and support “word level” work in the classroom.
“From chunks to letters
I am wholly in sympathy with the theoretical proposition of this book. Central is the brief chapter by Margaret Moustafa which argues that children should be taught the way they learn most naturally - in familiar contexts, analysing spoken words into onsets and rimes and making analogies between familiar and unfamiliar printed words.
Children organise their phonetic understanding of spellings in terms of phonological word-chunks - onsets and rimes, prefixes and suffixes, for example. The natural way to learn phonics is not upward from letter sounds to words, but downwards from spontaneous phonological chunks towards individual letter sounds. Half the book is devoted to arguing this position. The second half aims to show that this will mean in classroom practice…"
Nicholas Bielby, Times Educational Supplement
“…Work in the late eighties and nineties by PE Bryant and Usha Goswami suggested that children found it easier to understand the division of words into “onset” and “rime” than into individual phonemes…Whole-to-Part Phonics… sets out these ideas in a clear, easy -to-read way that all teachers will find helpful.
Whole-to-part Phonics has certainly proved for me to be a method of teaching phonics in a meaningful manner which starts with literature. Maybe it can resolve the arguments that have for so long raged over reading - in particular over the value of phonics, and over real books versus reading books. It certainly looks as though it might.
Janet Evans, Literacy consultant, City of Liverpool
The Primary English Magazine
It is always exciting to come across another publication from the team at the Centre for Language in Primary Education. You know you are getting a quality production, one based on careful consideration of relevant research, thoughtfully tried and tested, then translated into effective classroom practice. This latest book is no exception: it will rescue teachers from the limbo they been in for some time, not knowing what to put in the place of ineffective traditional “sounding out” approaches to phonics teaching that failed so many children in the past. It will be an absolute godsend for teachers who are on the brink of putting the new requirements for the Literacy Hour into practice for the first time… As always the ideas are imaginative and stimulating. Children with literacy difficulties are accorded a special section to themselves, and at the end of the book, there is a very useful summary of recommendations for classroom activities, with the learning potential of each highlighted.
Angela Redfern, School Librarian, Volume 46, Number 4
“The message that seems to be sweeping the world on how to teach reading is phonics, phonics, phonics”. Many teachers will be concerned that this approach has been in vogue before and that such an approach produced children who failed to seek for the meaning contained in the text…This is a useful publication which manages to unit academic research and classroom practice in forty four pages. It present a clear overview of contemporary thinking and research evidence about the relationship between letters and sounds, in a very readable, practical and accessible form.”
Diana Bentley, Oxford Brookes University
Journal of Research in Reading, Vol 22 No 2