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11
Support Materials for Students with Special Education Needs
English K–6
R
eading
Letter–sound relationships (phonics)
Explicit teaching of letter–sound relationships (phonics) is important to the growth of early
word reading and the prevention of reading difficulties (CIERA 2002). Students’ acquisition
of and fluency in identifying and blending letter–sounds provides the basis for the development
of automatic word recognition through the
system.
Through letter–sound instruction, students develop an understanding that there is a predictable
relationship between sounds and print (ie the same letter or combination of letters usually
represent the same sound). Students learn to use their understanding of these relationships
(the alphabetic principle) to decode unfamiliar words.
Students learn that:
• a phoneme can be represented by one or more letters
• a phoneme can be represented or spelled in more than one way, eg the sound /k/ can
be represented by c, k and ck
• the same letter or letter-combination may represent more than one sound depending
on its context (ie placement in a word), eg the letter ‘o’ in the word ‘lot’ represents the
letter–sound, the letter ‘o’ in the word
rope
represents the letter name.
Over time, students are taught to apply increasingly complex and conditional rules. It should
be noted that even irregularly spelled words are likely to include some regular letter–sound
relationships.
Instruction commences with students learning to produce the sound represented by a letter.
After students are able to produce a small number of letter–sounds, they learn to ‘sound out’
words by producing each letter–sound and
together to make
a word. This is supported by students’ phonemic awareness (particularly
)
and their oral vocabulary knowledge.
IMPLEMENTATION