INTRODUCTION TO PHONICS: This course is designed for people interested in literacy teaching and
learning, including people who may wish to join education as a profession, practicing teachers
interested in exploring future directions for a vocation that is currently undergoing transformation,
and community and workplace leaders who regard their mission to be in part "educative."
PHONICS(MULTIMODAL LITERACIES)
Module 1: Course Orientation + Multimodal Meaning and Synesthesia
This module introduces the key ideas of the course: communication, representation (or making
meanings for oneself as an aid to thinking), and the design of meaning. Today, our tools for
communication and representation have been widely expanded by digital tools. For these reasons,
we need to extend our literacy pedagogy to encompass literacies in the plural, including a wider
range of modes of meaning than alphabetic text alone.
Module 2: Making Meaning by Reading + Making Meaning by Writing + Making Visual Meaning
This module begins with an overview of the conventional focus of literacy pedagogy – reading and
writing. In its second half, the module applies a parallel set of tools to analysis of visual meanings.
Module 3: Making Spatial, Tactile, and Gestural Meanings + Making Audio and Oral Meanings +
Literacies to Think and to Learn. In this third module of the course, we examine spatial, tactile,
gestural, audio, and oral meanings – all today part of a wider repertoire of teaching and learning that
we call "literacies" in the plural, or "multiliteracies."
Module 4: The final module of the course examines the question of learner differences –
including literacies learning at different age levels and second language learning.
We also explore strategies for differentiated instruction. Finally, we investigate the range of
assessment strategies that can be used to diagnose learner needs, offer feedback during the learning
process, and evaluate learning outcomes.
STARTING
Now what we mostly think that literacy's about, it's about communication.
So it's about learning to read and write so that we can communicate and
be communicated to.
It's about the kind of cultural communication that happens in high
literary works.
And what we often forget,
is that literacy is also about what we define as representation.
Now, these two words, in fact, are often blurred.
You know, the meaning of representation is often
not as clear as the meaning of the word, communication
another example of representation using written language is taking notes.
I mean we're taking notes.
You don't actually write them for anybody else to read by and large.
And in fact if you would look at the notes that I take,
they make no sense to anybody else.
They just kind of mental reminders.
So what we often do In this realm of representation
is we use language as something that I call a cognitive prosthesis.
Typically, when may talk about literacy we tend to use the word grammar
as the means by which understanding how meaning is made in any particular
sequence, sentence, paragraph, essay, piece of writing and discussion.
THE MEANING
Making meaning by speaking and listening is a natural ability, but it is difficult to learn in any
language or symbolic system. And as we've seen, it takes a lot of effort for the individual and the
group that they are part of, both informally as well as part of formal education. Reading and writing
on the other hand, are human artifacts and even more complex. These forms came into being much
more recently in human history, roughly about 6 to 8,000 years. There's some debate about it, but
certainly in recent human time. They have however a powerful influence for success in the modern
world, both in and out of school. And because of this there's a lot of pressure to learn to read and
write, and many theories and debates about how best to do it. For example, we've discussed a little
bit so far and we will again now, the way in which traditional grammar tries to help us understand
the way reading and writing makes meaning. Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar
introduced more deeper understandings. And then of course Michael Halliday's systemic functional
linguistics. Some of the approaches, the theoretical approaches to understanding reading and
writing, and to this we have added our own multiliteracies approach which we've called design
analysis of ticks. But what I need to say to you, is that there is no simple answer to learning to read
and write. And reading in particular. It is important to know the whole field, all the theories and
debates, and to have a repertoire of approaches in order to meet the needs of your individual
learners. >> In this section of your videos about literacy, we're going to look at one aspect of what
we call the written mode, and that is the reading aspect. In the next section we're going to look at
the writing aspect, but here we're thinking specifically about learning to read. So, and what I'm going
to do is, I'm going to start off with what was characteristically the approach of didactic literacy
pedagogy and actually still is its main approach, which is an approach which is called phonics.
Sometimes it's called phonemic awareness, which is a bit of a gentler version of the same idea. And
what the basic idea behind phonics is, look, there are 26 letters in the English language, and there
are probably 47 sounds. In fact the number of sounds, it's a bit hard to work out. I'm going to get to
that in a moment. But they're probably something like 47 different sounds. So between several,
some letters have several different sounds that go with them like e can be a long e or eh, for
example. Or a can be a long a or depending on how the word's spelt. So that's how you get 47
sounds out of 26 letters, and also there are diphthongs which are combinations of letters which form
words. So here we are here looking at a page from an old reading textbook, beginning reading, r e d
becomes red, h e n becomes hen. So in the words, what we do is we take the constituent parts of
language, we learn the sound to later correspondences, and we sound things out. So in other words
it's like a jigsaw puzzle where we put the pieces back together again. Here if you'd like, is a little kind
of conceptual snapshot of what is going on in phonics. So what we do is, our basic unit in phonics,
we have these things called phonemes. Which the letters, the alphabet but also groups, diphthongs
for example that represent sounds. So that's the basic thing that we were dealing within that
textbook a minute ago. We also have vowel consonant combinations which make particular sounds.
And we have these units called syllables, which are sound units. So in a word, we can break a word
up into sound units, and in a way they form very, the letters don't get sounded out separately, they
form these very cohesive units. And then we have words which consist a number of syllables where
those words closely tied together, which often represent an idea, sometimes several ideas.
Sometimes several ideas encapsulated in one word. And in writing you can recognize words by,
visually, the spaces that are around them. The first point and the main point I want to repeat in this
unit, is that written language is very different from spoken language in significant ways. And we're
going to explore these ways together. We are interested in the ways in which meaning is designed
across different modes. So we will introduce you to some metalanguage. The conceptual tools for
understanding these differences. At the most basic level, with reading, we are dealing with
phonemes. That is the sounds of letters of alphabets or in fact, any symbolic system which are made
by the mouth. They are utterances. And the second basic item is the grapheme. These are the
symbols in writing, the letters of the alphabet, punctuation. The smallest unit of meaning making in
writing and reading. These are marks on any surface, paper, screens and walls, any kind of surface.
And from this of course, we go on to understand vowels, and consonants, and syllables, and spelling,
and words, and vocabulary. >> The whole problem with phonics, which we're going to get to in a
moment is, it's just far too simple. Language is just much more complicated, and here I've got some
examples, just a few examples, of the ways in which it is very, very, very complicated. So in other
words, particular sounds can be represented in letters in a large variety of ways. For example, the A
sounds in ate, in steak, in veal, bay. That's the A sound, and it's spelled in these very different kinds
of ways. We also have blends, vowels and consonants which stick together in peculiar kinds of ways.
We have silent letters. But also across different dialects, we have quite significant differences in the
way in which a word, which is written the same way, is sounded out in a different dialogue. And, of
course, from one person to another, we have different ways of speaking, which are subtly different.
So, it's very, very complicated. And when we come to syllables, it gets even more complicated. In
fact, sound units are syllables, and the letters get really knocked together in quite distinctive kinds of
ways. And in English, there are five, roughly 5,000 different syllables or sound clusters, which are in a
way peculiar to each other. But the other thing is, when we get to the level of words in speech,
words run into each other, the beginnings and endings are often hard to hear, and they don't
correspond with meanings directly a lot of the time. So sometimes, as I mentioned before, a
meaning cross a several words, or one word has several meaning units in it. We also have
homophones, words which sound the same but have different meanings. We have homographs
which are words which look the same but have different meanings. And some of these, like the word
sit for example, if I use the the word sit, which happens by the way, just as a piece of triviality and
whatever, to be the hardest word in the English language, because, and I define it this way. It's the
hardest word in the English language because it has the longest Oxford English Dictionary definition.
It can be used in so many different ways. So in other words the meaning of the word, and the sound
of the word don't at all correspond. So, if you like, okay, there are phonics rules, but the rules
become incredibly complicated and incredibly hard to deal with.