Teaching phonics
- Learning how letters link with the units of sounds that
build words helps to develop children's phonological awareness. Teaching that
helps to make the sound system of a language more explicit helps children to
recognise, produce and monitor the sounds that they say and write.
- All young children and many older children with Down syndrome benefit
from practising saying the sounds that make up speech and joining the
sounds together to build syllables and words. This is particularly useful way
of teaching children with speech motor difficulties, who may be considered as
having speech dyspraxia.
- Linking sounds with letters or groups of letters (graphemes)
may help speech perception, phonological awareness, reading, spelling and writing,
and speech production. It is also likely to help their higher order language
processing, by increasing their perception of grammatical words and promoting
the development of grammar comprehension.
Children should learn about phonics from an early age,
beginning with learning about letters, their names, and the sounds they make.
Figure 18. Choosing
sounds with magnetic letters
Children with Down syndrome will bring different degrees
of phonological awareness (the ability to hear the sounds that make up words) to
the reading task. They will have differing abilities to produce or say sounds even
when they can perceive them, different abilities to recognise sounds in words, even
when they know them as isolated sounds, and different abilities to say single words,
words of different length and complexity, and sentences. Individual starting points
and rates of progress will vary, as will the stage at which the learner will begin
to use phonic skills for reading and writing and the extent to which their skills
will develop. There is no accepted pattern in the way that children with Down syndrome
will hear, perceive, identify, recall or produce sounds, although learning to read,
write and spell, practising speaking and developing clear speech will all affect
this system of learning.
Skilled readers with Down syndrome, who began early (in
preschool years) and have continued to develop literacy skills with their peers,
may be very good at reading using their phoneme and grapheme knowledge. It is not
unusual for such readers to be able to read and pronounce, and sometimes spell,
words that are considered to be years ahead of their chronological age, for example,
word reading similar to typically developing 16 year olds when they are 10 or 11.
There is an accepted order for teaching phonics that is
used in most phonic teaching schemes. The authors' advice is to teach phonics from
the typical age - many preschool children with Down syndrome know letter sounds
and names, even if they cannot clearly say all of them. Learning to finger spell
letters of the alphabet will help children to learn letter names and sounds. For
most children a phonic teaching system used for teaching typically developing children
in school is usually adequate. Later starters may need more age appropriate materials
than the typical infant resources.
Children will learn how to hear and see the letters in
words, beginning with short phonically regular words of two and three letters. They
will practice seeing and hearing where the sounds are in the positions of the word,
written and spoken. Working with rhyming sets of words helps to simplify the task.
Figure 19. Tracing over
and saying blends (pupil aged 9 years)
Children with Down syndrome will be enabled to participate
in this type of work by showing their choices manually, rather than verbally. They
will also be helped by having a smaller selection of choices, even two, to choose
between. Letter cards, letters that can be handled, or pointing to select letters
from a short list, will all make this easier for them (Figure
18).
Children who develop handwriting skills early may be able
to write letters as they participate in phonic teaching games and activities. However,
most young children in the infant age range (4-7 years) will need to use letters
on card, made of sponge or plastic, letter magnets, and suitable computer software
until they have learned to write the letters of the alphabet. Children with Down
syndrome can be explicitly taught to read, write and say sounds together to develop
their speech production alongside reading and writing skills (Figure
19, Figure 20 and Figure 21).
Figure 20. Pictures,
words and sounds (pupil aged 6 years)
Many infant programmes or activities are suitable for
teaching these skills - they are skills that all children learn in school. There
are also junior and secondary programmes designed for older children with reading
difficulties that present typical infant targets in more age appropriate ways.
Some
programmes suit children of any age, although young children with Down syndrome
may not understand some of the vocabulary used in all age programmes, and the suitability
of the vocabulary content should be checked. Children with Down syndrome are likely
to be learning phonic skills more slowly than the majority of pupils, but there
are many other children in schools that have difficulties in this area of learning
and development. The same resources are likely to suit all of these children, for
example, children with dyslexia, Down syndrome, hearing impairments, language impairments,
developmental delay and children learning English as a second language.
Figure 21. A poem spoken
and clapped for rhythm and rhyme (pupil aged 7 years)
Children with Down syndrome vary greatly in the development
of their phonic skills. They need the same variety of teaching methods for learning
to read and write as other children, with some additional methods to compensate
for language, memory and handwriting developmental delays.
They do not need phonic
skills to make progress with learning to read, as they will learn using their good
visual memories, but they benefit from learning phonics to build their speech, language,
reading, writing and spelling skills. Many children and young people with Down syndrome
will be able to use phonic skills to read novel words and to write and spell, and
some will accelerate in their reading and writing development once they have mastered
these skills. All children should continue to learn phonics throughout their education.