Written by Paul Richards, Limpopo, South Africa, mindful that “TalkTogether is about sharing ideas and experiences” - THRASS Accredited Certificate 2008, THRASS Follow-Up Course 2009 and THRASS Absa TalkTogether Conference 2009
 
• Phonics helps learners to read and spell.  Learners are taught to make a connection between the sounds we make in speech and the letters we use to represent these sounds. 

• When a student learns that the letter ‘b’ in the word ‘bus’ makes a /b/ sound, or that the letters ‘e’ ‘a’ in the word ‘bread’ make the /e/ sound, they are learning phonics.

• When we speak we are combining sounds to make words – these sounds are called ‘phonemes’.  These are the smallest parts of speech a person can hear e.g. the word ‘tap’ contains 3 phonemes /t/ /a/ /p/. The word ‘sunny’ contains 4 phonemes /s/ /u/ /n/ /ee/.

• When we write words we make spelling choices.  These spelling choices are called ‘graphemes’ e.g. Through practice, we learn that in the word ‘sun’ the /s/ sound is represented by the letter ‘s’ (and not one of the other spelling choices for this sound such as ‘c’ as in ‘city’) that the /u/ sound is represented by the letter ‘u’ (and not by one of the other spelling choices for this sound such as ‘o’ as in ‘glove’), and that the /n/ sound is represented by the letter ‘n’ (and not one of the other spelling choices such as ‘kn’ as in ‘knee’).

• We learn which spelling choice to make through practice and asking ourselves “Does this look right?”

• Letters of the alphabet obviously have a name ‘Ay’ ‘Bee’ ‘See’ etc, but they do not have a sound.  Letters only have sounds when they are used in words on their own or in combination with other letters.  So we should not teach learners that the letter ‘a’ is pronounced /a/ as in ‘hat’.  The letter ‘a’ can also make the /a-e/ sound as in ‘baby’.  So letters have different jobs to do depending on which word they are being used in.  In the word ‘watch’, for example, the letters ‘t’ ‘c’ and ‘h’ combine to represent the /ch/ sound.

• When we read we change graphemes (spelling choices) into phonemes (sounds) to get meaning (e.g. We see the word ‘love’ which is made of the graphemes ‘l’ ‘o’ ‘ve’ and get the sounds /l/ /u/ /v/ and we understand what that word means in English).  When we spell we change phonemes into graphemes (e.g. We want to write the word ‘tea’.  Through practice we know that the /t/ sound in this word is
represented by the letter ‘t’, and that the /ee/ sound is represented by the letters ‘e’ ‘a’ .

• There are 26 letters in the English alphabet and 44 phonemes.  These phonemes are represented by around 120 common spellings. e.g. one of the 44 sounds is /j/ - it has 4 common spellings: ‘j’ as in jump, ‘g’ as in gentle, ‘ge’ as in page and ‘dge’ as in ‘badge’.

• So why is it important to teach phonics?There are too many words in English for us to memorise each one as a ‘whole word’ as if it were a picture.  Instead we learn new words by breaking them down (segmenting them) into phonemes, and then putting them back together (blending them) to get meaning.

Some characteristics of English phonics:

1. Sounds (phonemes) may be represented by:
one letter (a graph): c-a-t, d-o-g, s-w-i-m
two letters (a digraph): h-i-ll, sh-i-p,
three letters (a trigraph): th-ere; w-a-tch,
four letters (a quadgraph): eigh-t; s-t-r-aigh-t

2. A sound (phoneme) may be spelt in more than one way, e.g. /a-e/: d-ay, t-r-ai-n, l-a-k-e, b-a-b-y, eigh-t

3. The same spelling (grapheme) may represent more than one sound (phoneme): e.g. h-o-t, o-p-e-n, t-o, w-o-n
 
 
THRASS (Teaching Handwriting Reading And Spelling Skills)
 
• After reading some of the above, you may think ‘eish!’ this is hard.  Well, some aspects of English can be a challenge, but that is one of the reasons why we need an effective, structured, multi-sensory, fun way of teaching learners the alphabet and reading and spelling skills – and that is where THRASS comes in.

• THRASS is an effective method of teaching the basic ‘building blocks’ of English: the alphabet (capitals and lower case), the 44 sounds in English, and the 120 common spellings of these sounds so that learners can become good readers and spellers.

• This is done through students learning keywords (such as ‘bird’ and ‘rabbit’ on the picturechart) chosen because they contain the common  spellings of an English phoneme (‘bird’ and ‘rabbit’ contain the common spellings of the /b/ sound, ‘b’ and ‘bb’).

• How do keywords help?  They act as reference point for a learner and help them to be ‘good guessers’.  Let’s imagine the learner has learnt the two keywords for the /ow/ sound on the chart, ‘cow’ and ‘house’.  Let’s imagine they then come across the word ‘out’ whilst reading.  They know the meaning of ‘out’, but they’ve never read it.  With the knowledge they have about the keywords and the key spellings (‘keygraphemes’) they might be able to have a good guess that the ‘ou’ in ‘out’ is a grapheme for the /ow/ sound. They know that the letter ‘t’ in ‘out’ is almost certainly making the /t/ sound. They can therefore read ‘out’ and get the meaning of the word (reading without understanding is just ‘barking at the page’!).
• The fact that THRASS resources encourage learners to use different senses helps the learning process.  They are asked to listen, speak, see, touch, move, sing, write, and read.  All of this makes it more likely that they will learn and have fun.

• THRASS uses different stages to teach the children: what the pictures represent on the chart; the alphabet; how to write the alphabet; awareness of graphs and digraphs etc; that words give us meaning; the 44 phonemes; to blend, read and spell the keywords; the keygraphemes (spelling choices) on the chart; to analyse the keywords (segment them).  All of this with a view to also helping learners read, understand, and spell words that are not on the chart.

• THRASS is a very effective tool, but needs to be used as part of the school’s wider English curriculum.  For example, whilst the learners might pick up English grammar through the Sing-A-Long songs, grammar still needs to be explicitly taught.  Whilst THRASS encourages thinking skills, analysis of text still needs to be taught.  And probably most importantly, learners need to be given lots of reading practice.  THRASS helps the learners to put the basic ‘building blocks’ of English in place – this includes helping them to learn to read so that they can read to learn and read for enjoyment.
 

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