SYNTHETIC PHONICS IN SPAIN. A MYTH OR A ROAD TO LITERACY?
S. Antropova, F. Colt
C.U. Villanueva (SPAIN)
Synthetic Phonics is analysed in this article in relation to its implementation in the Spanish Primary classroom. According to the Rose Review from 2006, this method to teach reading has proven to be the most successful in English-speaking countries in comparison to others. The seeming unpredictability of the English orthography, as opposed to the Spanish one, presents a major problem for English language learners (ELL), which may lead to academic failure, and hence, EL teachers are in vital need of an efficient methodology to teach non-native children how to read in English. With the absence of a specific methodology for teaching reading in L2, Synthetic Phonics has been implemented in the Spanish schools, with Jolly Phonics being the most popular nowadays. Nevertheless, the direct implementation of this methodology has presented various difficulties, which may fall into two main areas of research. Firstly, this method was designed for native speakers and it does not take into account the mother tongue acquisition and the initiation into reading and writing in the Spanish language, therefore, it has not been adapted for the Spanish learner. Secondly, teachers of English encounter serious difficulties since they have not been trained in this method. Nowadays, the education degree offered in Spain with a specialty in teaching English contemplates only one subject, Reading and Writing Didactics, to train future teachers in how to teach reading, which is insufficient. Students studying for a degree in Education continually demonstrate a lack of knowledge of Phonetics and Phonology, and consequently, they overlook the importance of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs), which is vital to teach Synthetic Phonics. The field of research being so vast, the main objective of this paper is to tackle the problems encountered in the implementation of this method in Primary classrooms and propose possible lines for its adaptation to young Spanish learners.
keywords: systematic synthetic phonics instruction (sspi), grapheme-phoneme correspondences (gpc), phonological awareness, dual-language instruction, literacy, primary classroom, teacher training.