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Dept for Education and Skills

Answer

Mr. Gibb: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills if she will describe the synthetic phonics programme in the National Literacy Strategy. [224328] Derek Twigg: The National Literacy Strategy, now the Primary National Strategy, places a clear and early emphasis on synthetic phonics instruction, reinforced by complementary reading strategies such as context, grammatical knowledge and word recognition. This is in line with the best available international research. We have produced structured teaching materials for teachers on synthetic phonics entitled "Progression in Phonics" published in 1999, and "Playing with Sounds": a supplement to "Progression in Phonics" published in 2004. Copies of these have been placed in the House of Commons Library. The approach to the teaching of synthetic phonics advocated by the Primary National Strategy is that children should be taught as quickly as possible to identify, segment and blend phonemes in speech and writing, and that this should be taught directly, and not left to inference or invention. We recommend that synthetic phonics should be taught as a separate set of skills and knowledge within the broader structure of the literacy hour. The Playing with Sounds programme is designed to support the learning and teaching of synthetic phonics for children from the ages of three to six. It begins with developing children's awareness and discrimination of sounds and supports their progression through segmentation and blending, to an ability to read and spell regular polysyllabic words. The pace at which children are introduced to phonic knowledge through the Playing with Sounds programme is quicker than that set out in the original National Literacy Strategy framework and supports the achievement of the foundation stage early learning goals.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

432 c1343W;432 c1339W; 224328

Session

2004-05

Related items

Deposited Paper DEP 05/619
Thursday, 7 April 2005
Deposited papers
House of Commons

Subjects

Reading Literacy Teaching methods

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk