Common phonics teaching approaches

I would like to introduce you briefly to the two most common approaches to teaching phonics.

Synthetic Phonics

Our IPPAcademy 5-Step Phonics teaching programme mostly uses this approach. We recommend this as this is a "bottom-up" approach, focusing on breaking down words into smaller building units - identifying all consonants and vowels. After learning the phoneme-grapheme relationships of these units, we try to build words, from simple to difficult, and let students identify these patterns.

Analytic Phonics

This approach starts at the word level. Students are taught to analyze words with similar patterns and identify the phoneme-grapheme relationship. For example, a list of words starting with t is listed out for students, such as tap, tea, top, and teaches the relationship through analyzing these words.

We use synthetic phonics in our Phonics Instructor Certificate Course and also our IPPAcademy 5-step phonics teaching plan. We find it most effective and structured for children or speakers of other languages.