école : références: Jolly Phonics : Learning to Read at Age 4

6 mai 2012

Jolly Phonics : Learning to Read at Age 4

En même temps que Galactic Phonics et Starfall,

Bang nous conseille de nous intéresser à la méthode

Jolly Phonics

un site qui offre des ressources puissantes
pour l'apprentissage de la lecture
et de l'écriture de l'anglais.

Des recherches anglo-saxonnes étayant ces méthodes se trouvent ici : Teaching Kids to Read - Supporting research.

Pour les recherches et documents français, voir notre liste :
Théorie de la lecture et de l'apprentissage de la lecture.

Introduction to Jolly Phonics
http://jollylearning.co.uk/overview-about-jolly-phonics/

What is Jolly Phonics?

Jolly Phonics is a fun and child centred approach to teaching literacy. With actions for each of the 42 letter sounds, the multi-sensory method is very motivating for children and teachers, who can see their students achieve. The letter sounds are split into seven groups as shown below.

Letter Sound Order

The sounds are taught in a specific order (not alphabetically). This enables children to begin building words as early as possible.

How does Jolly Phonics work?

Using a synthetic phonics approach, Jolly Phonics teaches children the five key skills for reading and writing. Complemented by Jolly Readers and Jolly Grammar, it provides a thorough foundation for teaching literacy over three years in school.

The five skills taught in Jolly Phonics

1.Learning the letter sounds

Children are taught the 42 main letter sounds. This includes alphabet sounds as well as digraphs such as sh, th, ai and ue.

2.Learning letter formation

Using different multi-sensory methods, children learn how to form and write the letters.

3.Blending

Children are taught how to blend the sounds together to read and write new words.

4.Identifying the sounds in words (Segmenting)

Listening for the sounds in words gives children the best start for improving spelling.

5.Tricky words

Tricky words have irregular spellings and children learn these separately.
For more information on Jolly Phonics products visit our Products section.

Now, here's an extract divided into three parts from Professor Diane Mc Guinness' article : "A Prototype for Teaching the English Alphabet Code".

Jolly Phonics challenged popular myths about classroom reading instruction.

Jolly Phonics, developed by Sue Lloyd, [...] represents what can happen when popular myths about classroom instruction are challenged.

- the myth that reading is hard to teach.

- the notion that a linguistic-phonics program can’t be taught to the whole class at the same time.

- the age barrier. Jolly Phonics is taught to four-year olds.

- the belief that young children can’t ‘pay attention’ for more than about 10-15 minutes.

- the related belief that if young children are kept at a task for longer than about 15 minutes they become bored and frustrated, and are unable to learn.

- the idea that teachers need extensive training to teach the alphabet code properly.

Brief description of Jolly Phonics

Lloyd’s initial goal was to reduce the lessons to the essential elements and present them at an optimum rate - as quickly and as in-depth as possible. Undoubtedly, her greatest insight was in figuring out what these elements are. She discovered that young children forget when lessons are spaced too far apart, necessitating constant reteaching and review.

It transpired that very young children can be taught to read in a whole class format if three conditions obtain: 1) The lessons are fun and stimulating, and engage all the children. 2) There are sufficient backup materials for individual work to support what is taught in the lessons. 3) Parents are involved enough to understand the programme and know how to support their child at home. When lessons are enjoyable; when children see that they and their classmates are actually learning to read, they have no trouble paying attention for more than 15 minutes.

Lloyd found ingenious ways to engage the whole class and keep them on task. She invented simple action patterns to represent each phoneme. Children say each phoneme aloud accompanied by the appropriate action. Apart from being fun for the children, the action patterns fulfil a number of functions. They help anchor the speech sounds in memory. Because the actions are visible to everyone, including the teacher, they ensure that all children are engaged (no daydreamers allowed). In this sense, they function as gentle ‘peer support’ for everyone to get on board and learn quickly. Of course, it is possible that these actions aren’t essential to the success of the programme. Research is needed to sort this out.

Jolly Phonics proceeds rapidly. Children learn about one phoneme per day, along with the accompanying actions, and their letter symbols. They get handwriting training almost from the beginning, and are soon able to write simple words made up of the phonemes taught so far. The basic ‘transparent alphabet’ is taught in 11 to 12 weeks, about 60 hours of direct instruction. After this, children move on to simple ‘phonics’ books, and learn spelling alternatives (21 spellings alternatives are taught). Little teacher training is necessary. There is a handbook with brief, clear instructions, and an excellent video.

Studies demonstrate the great efficiency of this method

None of the JP studies were exactly alike (a problem with all this research). The study truest to Lloyd’s intentions was the study by Johnston and Watson (1997) which was carried out at Lloyd’s school. The children were matched on a wide range of skills (IQ, phoneme awareness, etc.) to a control group in Scotland who were taught ‘analytic phonics,’ the traditional Scottish method. The effect sizes for reading were strong in favour of JP: .90 on the British Ability Scales immediately after training, 1.0 at a one year follow up, and 1.10 a year after that, showing the lasting impact of the programme.

Stuart’s famous ‘Dockland’s study" was carried out in an impoverished area of London’s East End. The children arrive at school with little or no spoken English (53% of children in this study knew no English words). Stuart followed the JP format closely, and children had about 60 hours of instruction. The comparison group was from a similar school that was using real books. Despite the fact that these children had such poor English language skills, results were much the same as Johnston and Watson’s, and held up well over time.

At the first post-test, when the children were 5½ years old, the effect sizes were: BAS reading (1.2), Young reading (.63), nonword decoding (1.5), Willows spelling (1.4). At the second post-test, one year later, these values were respectively, .71, .62, .74, .86. These children scored well above national norms in reading and spelling, and made these outstanding gains despite the fact that their vocabulary scores lagged far behind British norms.