Page 50 - SEN116 January-February 2022

Phonics
Phonics tailored
for pupils with SEN
Katrina Cochrane discusses key techniques when teaching literacy skills to SEN pupils.
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Phonics are at the heart of literacy teaching in schools and the government’s recently published list of validated systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programmes is designed to help teachers find effective schemes to
support their pupils’ reading progress.
However, the British Dyslexia Association has suggested that 25% of children cannot learn to read by learning phonics alone, including most children with dyslexia and other specific learning difficulties.
So, how can teachers and SENCOs help ensure every child gets the support they need to access and make progress in phonics-based programmes to develop literacy skills?
Flexible approach
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to shaping accessible phonics programmes for pupils with SEN. Some children have auditory processing issues which can interfere with their ability to detect different letter sounds. In contrast, I have seen children with dyslexia score highly in a phonics assessment.
Flexibility is key to ensuring phonics-based teaching helps every child get the best possible grounding to develop their reading ability.
“Children cannot learn to read by learning phonics alone”
Foundations for literacy
A successful whole-school literacy strategy needs to include activities that support children with SEN in developing reading, spelling, fluency and comprehension.
The foundations for this include:
• Speech sound awareness – the ability to split spoken words into their individual sounds ie breaking the word cat into its individual letter sounds c-a-t
• Knowledge of the letters in the alphabet
• The ability to map the sound of a letter or letters to their written form.
Research has shown that knowledge of orthography (how words are written) and morphemes (the smallest grammatical unit of speech) should be taught alongside phonics from an early age too. This helps children learn to simultaneously process phonemic, morphemic and orthographic units in words.
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