Korean Job Discussion Forums

tfunk · Joined: 12 Aug 2006 Location: Dublin, Ireland

I've just purchased a phonics flashcard set. There are 86 cards in the set and they are labelled as being suitable for children of 6 years old and up.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of teaching children phonics? What is the ideal age or level to teach them phonics?

I thought that teaching phonics would be one of our primary functions as a native speaker, given that it is focused on pronunciation.

Yu_Bum_suk · Joined: 25 Dec 2004

The best age to teach phonics is anytime before age 16, though even after that it can be useful - if students know how certain sounds are made it will improve their listening.

Reasons to teach it?

- The KTs can't.
- It's easy.
- There are so many ways you can teach it that it's good for variety.
- You can also teach vocab and listening skills at the same time.
- It's easy to integrate into the rest of the lesson.

tfunk · Joined: 12 Aug 2006 Location: Dublin, Ireland

How is it that children that have never been formally taught phonics know how to read and the older students usually guess the pronunciation of a word correctly without having any formal method to apply to a word?

How is it that a native speaker knows the difference between a 'long a' and a 'short a' without knowing the rules? Memorization?

spyro25 · Joined: 23 Nov 2004

Yu_Bum_suk · Joined: 25 Dec 2004

meangradin · Joined: 10 Mar 2006

I agree that it is a good thing to teach phonics from as young an age as possible. Every kindie class I teach we spend at least a few minutes on the liquid sounds(R/L) and other sounds Koreans easily confuse.

ddeubel · Joined: 20 Jul 2005

I agree students need to learn to read at an earlier age. Korean English education has a failing mark in this (I am talking about public schooling). But that does not always mean teaching "phonetics".

there is a big misconception that phonetics is teaching reading. It is only one way to teach reading and works with students behind in the normal learning curve and for other types of individuated learners.

Like so much in English which is an art, there are many ways to draw or kill a cat. I don't believe we should compartmentalize English and teach "phonics" seperately from whole language. Only if as stated above. Really what you want to do is complement your teaching with lots and lots of script. Kids learn through exposure and in the EFL context, they don't learn to read early because of the failure to encounter script with speech enough. If you can create that rich environment, you don't need to formally go through the teaching of "phonics". But I do think at times it is good to isolate parts of difficult speech and allow practice and differentiation activities.

But I think teachers would be best to try and compliment lessons with a richness of script and allow the discovery of the sound script connection. next best is the remedial phonetics approach.

DD