All parents are obsessed with doing the best that they can for their children. Be it feeding, clothing, nurturing or teaching a child to correctly pronounce alphabets and words, all parents want it to be just right. Some parents are hooked on phonics when it comes to teaching their children how to pronounce the English alphabets and how to pronounce them correctly when used in different words.
Parents and teachers used to depend on their own abilities to teach children the alphabets and their correct pronunciation. If a parent or teacher did not know the correct pronunciation, it used to get passed on to the children. Many children have been through the embarrassment of being ridiculed for pronouncing a word incorrectly. But now with audio and visual aids so easily available, parents are leaning towards using phonics programs to help their children learn pronouncing alphabets. But, just learning how to pronounce the English alphabets correctly is not enough. Children need to learn words, sentences and the correct usage of alphabets.
Phonics learning is at times argued to be in competition with language teaching methods. While this debate was on in 1984, the United States government had a research conducted on phonics teaching method. The result of this report stated that by using phonics, teaching methods improved the ability of children to identify words. Associating sound with alphabets helped children improve their alphabet and word identification abilities and it also helped in improving their blending of alphabets together into words. After the results of this research were published, English language teaching methods went through a change in the United States and more and more schools started adapting the phonics method of teaching.
There are different ways of teaching phonics, which are, synthetic and analytical phonics. In synthetic phonics, children are taught to spell a word and then join the sounds together to form the word. In analytical phonics, children are taught to analyze the correspondence between an alphabet in a word and their grouped sound; like in "shriek", the syllable "shr" are joined to produce the sound.
With the ready availability of phonics teaching programs on the internet and in stores, a number of parents are opting to use them to teach their children English. The phonics method does not stop after a child starts speaking some sentences fluently, but continues even after that. In fact because of the vast complexity of the English language, some people learn the correct pronunciation of a word very late in life.
The attention span of a child is very short and to keep a child interested in learning phonics means that the child should be kept interested in it. For this modern day, phonics programs include drawings, games and animations to keep the children from getting bored.
There is now an extensive variety of hooked on phonics programs available for children on the internet. The parents can see demonstrations of the various programs on offer and then decide which one is the most suitable for their child. Teaching children new sounds and associating the sounds with objects and animals help a child to learn faster and be interested in learning.
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