What Comes Before Phonics? - Guest Article by Dr. Sally Neaum

Guest post by Dr Sally Neaum

It is great to be able to share this special guest article from the brilliant Dr Sally Neaum, author of What Comes Before Phonics.

Sally’s career spans roles as an early years and primary teacher, inclusion advisor, OFSTED inspector, and academic supervisor at masters and doctoral levels. She’s also an author and researcher in early literacy, pedagogy, and child development.

In her article, Sally explores the vital skills and experiences children need before formal phonics teaching begins, drawing on the key messages from her book. It’s practical, insightful, and grounded in her vast expertise. Happy reading!

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We all share the aim of enabling children to become literate with ease and success, and the importance of phonics as one aspect of this process is well established. However, there remains significant disquiet about what this means for early years, in particular, how the strong focus on phonics has led to increased schoolification of both content and pedagogy practices in the early years.

Like many in early years, I am concerned about the increasing pressure for early, explicit,formalised teaching; a trickle-down of pedagogical practices that are too-much-too-soon for many young children. This, I would argue, is based on the misunderstanding that ‘earlier is better’; an argument that runs counter to what we know about children’s development and how young children learn. My book, What Comes Before Phonics?, is a response to these concerns, written at a time when, I think, we need remain firm and clear about what we do in early years and how this leads into literacy.

So what should we be doing in early years that is developmentally appropriate for very young children? What do we know about what comes before phonics that will enable children to come to phonics teaching with a good chance of success?

Imagine an iceberg. The visible tip represents reading and writing: the visible products of becoming literate. This is supported by a huge body of knowledge, skills, understandings and attitudes that are not visible in the same way, but the robustness of what is visible depends upon them. Becoming literate with ease and success depends upon a range of knowledge, skills, understandings and attitudes that are developed before, and underpin, explicit, formal, literacy teaching. This includes:

Spoken language. Spoken language, and the ability to listen carefully and respond, underpins all teaching and learning, including phonics.  Children learn language.  To achieve this they need rich language experiences that include adults who say more than is necessary, opportunities for silence and careful listening, and play and interaction that enables them to engage in talk.

Physical activity that supports sensory awareness and integration. Physical development is integral to learning. Children need to develop a range of physical skills to be able to engage effectively in learning, including being able to sit still and focus. This includes balance and proprioception, sensory awareness and integration, and crossing their midline. These skills are not developed by sitting still. Young children be active; to move and have opportunities for vigorous activity to develop these physical/spatial foundations for learning.

Meta-linguistic awareness. To access phonics teaching with success children need to be able to think and talk about language. They need to become aware of language as an object that is composed of words and meanings that can be examined, discussed and manipulated. This can be achieved in specific ways in which we interact with children, through language-play, and through reading storybooks in ways that draw children’s attention to language.

An understanding of the functions and forms of print. Becoming literate needs a context. Children need to develop an understanding of why, where and how print (including digital print) is used, so that learning phonics and to read and write are meaningful activities. Children are surrounded by literacy and come to know about the functions and forms of print through engagement with print in everyday meaningful situations, and in their play.  Adults need to mediate this engagement to support children’s emerging understanding, and use, of print.

The ability to symbolise. The ability to use one thing to represent another is fundamental to literacy. Writing is the symbolic representation of speech, and reading is the decoding of symbols. Phonics is the symbolic basis of our system of reading and writing. Learning to symbolise requires that children make the cognitive shift from first to second-order symbolism. This is achieved through children’s use of gesture and language, through symbolic use of resources in their play, and in mark marking.  

Phonological awareness. The acquisition of phonological awareness marks a child’s earliest move into more formal aspects of learning phonics. Phonological awareness begins and flows from the ability to hear, recognise and label environmental sounds. It becomes the ability to identify and orally manipulate units of language, such as identifying oral rhymes, and an awareness of aspects of language such as words, syllables and onset-rime. The final stage of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness. This is the ability to hear, identify and orally manipulate phonemes. This requires adults to weave learning into activities, experiences and routines by being aware of, and exploiting, opportunities to develop these skills within meaningful contexts.

Brought together this knowledge, skill and understanding creates a framework for what comes before phonics.  It is not another set of prescribed outcomes, but a way of foregrounding the knowledge and skills that enable children to come to formal phonics teaching with a high chance of success.

Following publication of the book I was keen to find out how this worked in practice.  I developed a nursery programme that foregrounds and teaches the relevant knowledge and skills, and an intervention designed for children in reception who still need to develop theknowledge and skills that lead into phonics learning. The intervention teaches the same knowledge and skills as the nursery programme and is delivered alongside the school phonics scheme.

Then, in partnership with local schools, where children frequently find the formal teaching of phonics too-much-too-soon, we implemented both programmes.  As research studies wemonitored and tracked the children’s progress towards and into formal phonics learning using pre and post study tests, EYFS reading outcomes, the school phonics scheme tracking, and outcomes of the Phonics Screening Check at the end of year one. The outcomes in both studies have been extremely promising. By focusing on the knowledge and skills that lead into phonics, in nursery and alongside formal teaching of phonics, we have shown that we can enable children to access formal phonics teaching with a high level of success.