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THRASS a gift for language learning
The Star, Johannesburg, South Africa
June 12, 2006 Edition 1
Staff Reporter
An English lesson for the Grade 1F class at St Peter's Preparatory
school is fun.
The boys cannot wait to ask questions, give clues and have their
mates find answers from a book.
"It is something that you can wear on your arm and it has a
triagraph," shouts one boy across the room.
"It's a watch," comes a reply.
St Peter's Preparatory in Paulshof, is one of the few schools in
South Africa that is using Thrass (Teaching Handwriting Reading and
Spelling Skills) to teach English to primary school learners.
Last week, delegates from across the continent and the UK gathered
at the school to see how Thrass was being applied. The five-day
workshop - Time for a New Phonics Approach for Teaching English in
Africa - which ended on Friday, was hosted by Wits University.
St Peter's implemented Thrass last year and boasts of a 60%
improvement in the pupils' spelling grades.
Thrass is a phonics programme for teaching learners about the
building blocks of reading and spelling using the International
Phonetic Alphabet Pronunciation System, giving them a good
understanding of 44 speech sounds (phenomes) and 120 spelling
choices (graphemes) of English.
Mark Hayter, St Peter's deputy headmaster, said children used charts
with pictures and words and CDs.
He said that Thrass had increased, among other things, the pupils'
memory, sequencing skills and higher order thinking skills (metea-cognition).
Linked to Thrass, St Peter's has introduced paired learning using
pupils with a three-year age difference to read together until the
younger one gains confidence. The older pupil corrects the
pronunciation.
In Grade 1, paired learning is being done between parents and
children.
"The strength of Thrass in South Africa is that one teaches the
correct phonetics and pronunciation. It is also more OBE oriented,"
Hayter said.
Some of the workshop delegates, Ijeoma Argu and Timi Hyacinth from
the English Language Teachers Association of Nigeria, said Thrass's
advantage was that it was a mix of using the whole word and phonics.
"In our country, only our private schools do phonics and public
schools use the whole-word method.
"Lack of phonics is a disadvantage. We think mixing the two is good
as it makes pupils more independent in word construction,
pronunciation and spelling," said Hyacinth.
The Thrass programme was created by Alan Davies, a chartered
educational psychologist from Britain and has been running courses
since 1987.
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