How to Learn Phonics?
BEGINNER
In English, there are 100+ phonemes (sounds) and 300+ graphemes (spellings)! Yikes! How do we learn all of these?
Listening - Native Speakers
Well, the best way is probably to learn phonics like English-speaking babies do. Babies learn the sounds first by listening and watching, and then speaking. If young
children are surrounded by English at home and school (i.e. they have English-speaking parents or teachers or classmates), they will naturally learn to listen and speak good English, and don't really need to be taught!
Children's brains are amazing things, especially before the age of 5, as they can remember and organize new information with superhuman efficiency!
Listening - ESL Learners
But, what if the children are NOT surrounded by English (i.e. they live in a foreign country where their parents, teachers and classmates do not regularly speak English)? Well, then this will be a bit harder! Watching English videos (songs and stories) when young can help greatly with improving the children's listening and speaking as it gives them some of this English input that they are not getting from their environment. This
is why we include lots of songs and stories in this Truphonics course - it's great for listening skills and building vocabulary! Videos are particularly good because they have pictures that help with understanding (like pictures in children's
books). But this won't help so much for speaking...
Speaking
Children surrounded by an English environment will learn to speak naturally, but ESL (English as a Second Language) children will need to practise with an adult, a parent, teacher or classmates in class. Again, it is best if this happens
early, before age 5, as children's brains are much more flexible at this age (my own daughter learned English at home as a baby, but learned Chinese at school from age 2, and she is now bilingual and fluent in both). But, don't
worry, students can still learn a new language later than 5! Learning can start at any age, it just gets a little harder as we get older!
This course includes games and activities that will help you start to speak in class, and you can also test your pronunciation using our speech recognition activities in Google Chrome (I will say that again - yes, it MUST be Google Chrome!
- so please download it if you don't have it!). You can click the Chrome icon below or here to download it!
Reading
INTERMEDIATE
Listening and speaking can happen naturally in children, provided they have an English-speaking environment. However, reading is different, and will not be learned well naturally. Reading does need to be taught,
and phonics for reading is taught even in native speaking countries (whereas listening and speaking will not). Children usually learn the shapes of the alphabet letters first, and are later taught the graphemes (spellings) in class and at home from reading letters, words and, finally, of course, books. They are taught to blend letters together to make new sounds (like b + l makes a bl sound). This is sometimes called synthetic phonics or blended phonics.
Students also learn that different spellings can make the same sound. For example, they learn that y can make a sound like an e (baby)
or an i (cry). But most children in England or America are NEVER really taught ALL of these 100+ phonemes and 300+ graphemes - many they
just learn from real life, from experience! Or the words are taught as exceptions.
The Great Vowel Shift
ADVANCED
A little history lesson. English spelling was standardized during the 15th and 16th centuries. However, pronunciation changes between the 14th and 17th centuries changed many of the sound of English long vowels and even some consonants, a process called The Great Vowel Shift. This may have been caused by migrations of different dialectic groups of people, perhaps due to epidemics like the Black Death. Loanwords from
Europe also played a role. But the result is clear - today, English spelling is a bit of a nightmare. Many English words are not pronounced the way their letters suggest they should be. English vowels are
particularly messy. This makes English spelling quite frustrating! Watch this video by Bobby Finn - he shows the problem well!
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)
So, it's not surprising that some teachers have tried to make a better way to write down all the phonemes in English - one system is called the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and some dictionaries use
it to show you how to read the words. It uses a new set of symbols to represent these sounds. This can be useful as if you know the IPA, as a dictionary using the IPA can show you exactly how
to say the word - no more guessing! The problem is... it is kind of complicated. Take a look at the International Phonetic Association's IPA chart.
Pretty scary right? Really, the IPA is a second alphabet you need to know just to use our first, rather broken and insufficient, alphabet. Countries like Taiwan
may teach students their own version of the IPA, such as the KK (Kenyon and Knott) system. The problem is that teaching students these systems requires a LOT of time and effort, which is time and effort
that perhaps could be better spent. After all, native speaking students will not waste time learning these systems. And when students go out into the 'real world', and see written signs and read real books, there will be no IPA symbols
to help them, which means, in the end, they will have to use the original, first alphabet anyway, making the usefulness of learning IPA rather questionable (in our opinion). And now, with modern technology
and mobile phones, we don't even need the IPA in dictionaries, since it is easier to just listen to an audio file example to know how to say a word. The IPA is a precise tool and probably useful
for academic study of the language, but we here at Oxford English Masters don't think it's so useful for the majority of learners. Many many learners have learned English very well without knowing it (including this author), and I believe there are
better ways to deal with the problems with the English alphabet...
The Truphonics System
Enter the Truphonics System to the rescue! Rather than wasting a lot of time learning a second IPA alphabet, it would be better to use your time to just to learn the first alphabet and how to use it correctly. Our Truphonics System does just this: it systematically teaches you ALL the phonemes and graphemes in English using
ONLY the alphabet you already know. Like native speaker babies do, you will learn the different ways words can be pronounced from listening to REAL videos and songs that use the sounds in the REAL world, and then practice your reading and speaking skills in targeted activities. Babies are brilliant speakers of their native language - they speak it perfectly,
and you can too!
But even native speakers need a little help learning how to spell difficult words! And that's where the Truphonics System really excels, since it is far more comprehensive than any other phonics system on the market, and can
take you all the way up to Spelling Bee competition level with its inclusion of digraphs, trigraphs, loanwords, silent letters and more! Here are just some of the words you will be
able to spell at the ADVANCED level!
Dinosaur names - Pterodactyl
French loanwords - Bourgeois
Scientific words - Pneumatic
Now, to manage expectations, we had to draw the line somewhere. While we have included many common (and less common loanwords) in the Truphonics System, some foreign words that have no English translation are so incredibly rare or specialised that you
would essentially never see hear or see them, and to teach you them would really mean teaching you French, German, Dutch and so on. The fish stew bouillibaise, for example, has a pronunciation that really requires a full knowledge
of French phonetics. I saw a word come up in the Scripps National Spelling Bee: nachschläge. As well as being a specialised musical term, this is a German word, with some sounds we just don't find in English. So if you do want
to enter the top level Spelling Bees in the world, this Truphonics Course is a great starting point, but you will need to go even further if you want to be truly competitive. For the 99.9% of the rest of us humans, however,
this course has everything you will ever possibly need!
Now watch the youngest ever Scripps National Spelling Bee participant, Akosh Vukoti, showing off his skills on the Little Big Shots show! This is absolutely hilarious!