Talk:Systematic Phonics/Dividing syllables

Children can pronounce polysyllabic words long before they learn to read. Indeed, connected speech is itself polysyllabic. And do children really understand all this VCCV and jack-in-the-box stuff, even if it's true? Surely, if they're trying to read a word like "kit", they pronounce the three elements one by one and see if it makes sense. If the word is "kitbag" they do the same. It would be a waste of time and effort to split "kitbag" into syllables if one can decode the six elements sequentially and come up with a plausible word. Sure, it gets more difficult with words containing less predictable letters (such as "c" and "s") but then one is learning the letters' roles in context. At an impressionistic level, this distracting search for syllables might make a learner expect that "through" had more syllables than, say, "title".

BTW, in looking for syllables in "title", where is the second talking vowel? It's not the "e" which is silent. "Title" is actually di-syllabic because the "l" is syllabic. Are we really going to burden children with this concept, which even the inventors of phonics don't seem to have grasped?


 * The comments above may have some validity, but surely the purpose of this book is to tell people what Systematic Phonics is, whatever reservations some people may have about it. If the authors can reference sources which support their description of conventional practice then that is sufficient justification for the book. Recent Runes (talk) 00:39, 26 November 2008 (UTC)