Phonics an Intro

Phonics is the new buzz word in Schools  of Tamil Nadu. Very lengthy training sessions have been given to the language teachers of the state.

Phonics is a methodology, through which pupils  are trained to get phonemic awareness. It is a customary practice to introduce the English alphabet as ABC, but it is not fruitful practice in the long run.

Phonics propounds a theory of introducing the sounds of the letters, in another word phonographs. The days of teaching ABC are over! Teach sounds instead.



According to the IPA English has 44 speech sounds, but only has 26 letters to produce them. This leads to all kinds  of chaos. Young  learners are often baffled at the various sound combinations of the same letter. Phonics tries to bridge this gap and propounds a 42 sounds system.

42 or 45 or 44 ?

It is teachers those who are  most confused. For  most of them are trained by the IPA system, and they are very disturbed at the proclamation of phonics.

Instead of getting into very deep research about the missing sounds in the phonics system, it is easy to remember that unlearning is also a pillar of learning. Yes, teachers need to forget IPA when they are dealing with phonics.

It will be more helpful to tell the pupils that phonics have 42 sounds. It is better not to tell them about the differences between IPA and Phonics.

Though most of the private schools  have already familiar with this term, most of the teachers in the state run schools are unaware of this system.

Phonics is a system which introduces phonographs to the pupils and help  them to glue the individual phonographs  into words and unglue the words into phonographs. Through these practices the pupils are able to read English avidly. This helps them to be autonomous readers and combine this  with dictionary practice they become avid readers.

It sounds wow! Is in't it?

Lets see more about phonics in the following posts.


Regards
KRS

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