Accelerating Reading and Spelling with Synthetic Phonics: A Five Year Follow Up. Insight.

Introduction Interchange 57 (Watson and Johnston, 1998) reported on a study of around 300 Scottish Primary 1 children (Reception in England) in which we examined the effectiveness of a synthetic phonics teaching programme. Performance on the synthetic phonics programme was compared with performance on a typical analytic phonics programme, and also with a similar programme that included a substantial element of phonological awareness training. The synthetic phonics programme was by far the most effective. After a training period of 16 weeks, in March of the first year at school, the synthetic phonics taught children were reading and spelling seven months above chronological age, and were a similar amount ahead of the children taught by the two analytic phonics programmes. In this article we describe the progress the children have made from Primary 1 (Reception) through to the end of Primary 5 (Year 4), focusing on comparing the attainment of boys with that of girls. We have also examined the extent to which children underachieve when taught by a synthetic phonics compared with an analytic phonics programme.