What is the difference between synthetic and analytic phonics?
Synthetic phonics starts with phonemic awareness and the mapping of phonemes to letters. Then it shows how the sounds of letters can be ‘blended’ to produce different words. (The word ‘synthetic’ refers to the synthesis of the sound of a word from its component sounds, i.e. the blending process.) It concentrates initially on a simple mapping, selecting text where words are spelt regularly. On the other hand analytic phonics teaches the sounds of letters in the context of words, considering onset (initial phoneme) and rime (rest of the word). Conventionally, analytic phonics is taught in a mixture with the whole language approach. Thus irregular words are brought in at an early stage for ‘sight recognition’. The phonics is used as a clue to guess a word, or to check the initial letter of a word already predicted. The other clues are context and pictures.
