Frequently asked questions

Written by Sue Lloyd

Should the letter names be taught at the same time as the letter sounds?

The recommendation in Jolly Phonics is to avoid teaching letter names until after the first few weeks of
teaching the letter sounds. This advice was recommended after seeing many children saying the letter
names while trying to blend a word and failing to read it. It only seemed to happen in classes where the
letter names and letter sounds were taught at the same time. However, it is known that some teachers get
excellent results with Jolly Phonics and do introduce the letter names and letter sounds at the same time.
Perhaps it depends on how much emphasis is placed on the letter names. If in doubt, it seems wise to err on
the side of caution and wait for a few weeks before starting the letter names.

Is it important to teach phonemic awareness before introducing letters?

The simple answer is no. The children develop phonemic awareness extremely well when taught synthetic
phonics, which is with letters.

Is it advisable to teach Jolly Phonics to children who cannot speak
English?

Jolly Phonics works whether the children can speak English or not. The research carried out in Tower
Hamlets, London and Toronto, Canada found that the children who did not have English as their mother
tongue were just as able to learn to read and write with Jolly Phonics as the children who did have English,
as explained in Module 1. The children were just as good at learning the letter sounds, blending and
segmenting. The only difference was in the level of comprehension, and that mainly only applied to the early
stages.
Young children naturally pick up languages and develop an understanding through speaking, listening, saying
letter sounds and reading. There will be some children who need extra support, as there are with the


Englishspeaking children, and the reasons for their difficulties will be similar, namely a poor visual memory
and auditory problems. Some of these children will be slower at picking up spoken language, especially if
they are a bit older. These problems tend to diminish with time.

Imagine what it must feel like being in a class of Englishspeaking children and not able to understand what
is being spoken. These children will sit and listen to the first Jolly story and it means very little to them,
which would be the same for all other teaching that is spoken. Then the teacher holds up a letter and says
/ssss/ and all the other children say /sss/ as well. Now this is something that the nonEnglish speaking
children can do. They can say the letter sound when shown the letter and also form the letter in the air, and
write it on the board or on paper. This is empowering and encouraging for these children. In fact they can
join in all the activities that are linked to the 5 basic skills. While this is happening they are simultaneously
picking up spoken English in the usual natural way. The phonic skills and the language skills go together and
enhance the learning.

What does tweaking mean?

This is a new word that is gradually coming into our everexpanding English language. It refers to the way
many words in English, which do not give an accurate pronunciation when blended, can be tweaked and
read accurately. The pronunciation is close enough for the children to make a sensible deduction. For
example, the children would blend the word doctor with an /or/ sound on the end. Any child who has the
word doctor in their vocabulary will then easily be able to tweak it and pronounce it in the usual way, with
an /er/ sound on the end. A slightly more complex example is The old woman went into the forest. The <o>
in woman is irregular but many Englishspeaking children will be able to tweak it and read the sentence
accurately. There is enough regular letter sound information in the word, and with attention to context, the
word may be accurately read. This happens very often with English words. It is also why it is easier to read
words than to spell them

What is an irregular word?

This means many things to different people! At one extreme any spelling that appears in less than three
words is an irregular word. This would make the word woman irregular (the letter <o> has an/oo/ sound and
only comes in the one word).


At the other extreme any word that is not made from the single alphabet letters is irregular. Most people
have an understanding that is somewhere between these two extremes. To some extent any word that has
phonic knowledge that is not known by the children could be considered irregular for those children. There
is not an accepted right or wrong, which is why in Jolly Phonics we call the words tricky. Our tricky words are
awkward for the children because they have a letter sound that has not been taught yet or they are irregular
by our understanding. The important thing is to keep the tricky words down to a minimum in the early
stages.

Are there silent letters?

There are many different views about silent letters. Some programme writers say that there is no such thing
as silent letters. Each phoneme is represented by a single letter, a digraph, a trigraph or 4 letters (sometimes
known as a quadgraph), as in leg, cheap, night, eight. This can be awkward when there are conflicting ideas
linked to this. Take the following words:

guy ....... does the <gu> have a /g/ sound, the <uy> have an /ie/ sound or is the <u>
silent?
island ....does the <is> have an /ie/ sound, the <sl> have an /l/ sound or is the <s>
silent?
castle ... does the <st> have a /s/ sound, the <tle> have an /l/ sound or is the <t>
silent?

This is another issue where there is no right or wrong. They are the different ways that people interpret the
soundsymbol relationships in the English alphabetic code. Fortunately few ambiguous words are needed in
the early readers and, once the decoding is fluent, the children have no problems with reading them. It is
only the spelling that creates the real problems. The best thing is to follow the guidance linked to the
programme you are using and not get too bogged down in the linguistics of the language.

In the Jolly way of teaching we use the term silent letters. In the past many letters were actually
pronounced but are not anymore, hence the term silent letters. In the word knight the <k> and the <gh>


were pronounced. Our reason for preferring silent letters is that the children learn to spell words more
easily when they use the Say it as it sounds. When they are learning the spelling of the silent <k> words,
such as knife, knock, knee, knit, know etc. they pronounce the <k> and this helps to remind them when they
want to write one of these words.

Is it advisable to teach Jolly Phonics to nursery or kindergarten
children?

Jolly Phonics uses a multisensory style that is particularly suitable for young children. It is active and good
fun, which makes it easy to keep the attention of the children. It is known, from the research in Toronto,
Canada, that it is just as effective for 34 yearold children to learn the letter sounds, to blend and to identify
the sounds in words, as it is for 45 yearolds. There will be some poor visual memory children who struggle,
in the same way that they would struggle at 46 years old. Reading and writing will always be that bit harder
for these children. By starting earlier they have longer to master the skills before the curriculum becomes
too wide.

Now whether this is the right thing to do will depend on the nursery like style of the teaching, the
contentedness of the children receiving Jolly Phonics and the wishes of the parents. There is a tendency to
think that the children from deprived areas should not receive this early instruction. This, in my view, is the
wrong way round. They are precisely the children who need more teaching, not less

What is dyslexia?

There are many myths about dyslexia but none of them stand up to scientific testing. I prefer to think of
dyslexia as having problems learning to read and write. By giving a special name to this problem it reflects
the severity of it. In education there is nothing worse than not being able to read.

What is wrong is when some children are diagnosed as dyslexic and others are just considered poor at
reading, especially as one group gets extra attention and the other does not. According to the top
researchers there are no reliable tests that can make this distinction. All children who have reading and
writing difficulties tend to have the same problems and require the same extra support, whether they are
called dyslexic or not. Basically they have a weak working memory and poor phonemic awareness. When


these children are taught with rigorous synthetic phonics and decodable readers it smoothes their path and
they go on to succeed. Any other type of teaching that uses whole words, or mixed methods, usually ends
up causing their problems.


What is the difference between high-frequency words and tricky words?

High frequency words are the common words that we use most frequently in our speech. Lists of these
words, such as the Dolch Word List and Frys 300 Instant Sight Words, were written when look and say
methods of teaching started. The purpose was to teach the high frequency words by sight. Most of these
words are easy for the children to decode. It makes no sense to teach them as sight words.

Tricky words are frequently used words that are difficult for the children to read by blending them. Some of
them are irregular (see previous question) and others have letter sound knowledge that has not been taught
yet.


Does it matter if our school uses a different style of handwriting?

It is not of great importance if the style of handwriting in a school is different to the one used in Jolly
Phonics. The main aim is that the handwriting should be neat and legible, whatever style is used. The really
important aspect is that everyone in the school follows the same style.

Children are very adaptable. They easily understand that the Jolly style is one way that the letters can be
written and quickly adjust to being told that in this school we write it like this.




Does synthetic phonics help children with speech and language
problems?

During the early stages, when Jolly Phonics was being developed, the speech therapists were always very
supportive of the school I was teaching in. They recognised that all the early letter sound work we did made
a big difference to the children with speech problems. We were told that if a young child was referred to the
speech therapists , before starting school, they would ask which school the child was going to attend. If it
was the school I was teaching in, they would say that they do not need to see the child until he or she had
been at school for six months. They knew that most speech problems were sorted out by the method of
teaching in those first months.

Some children learnt how to pronounce the letter sounds and did not need specialist help. It was the
children who still could not pronounce some of the letter sounds who needed the expertise of the speech
therapists. Frequently these children could read and write because they had the ability to hear the sounds,
even if they could not say them. A strange anomaly sometimes occurred. Occasionally a child could read a
word but when it was spoken in normal conversation it came out all wrong! Somehow the decoding must
have made it possible. This type of child usually went on to have no problems later on.

Severe language problems, not linked to pronunciation, usually needed extra attention from the speech
therapists, although being able to read helped these children a great deal

What should I do with a child who blends every word in the reading
books he/she is given?

Occasionally a child thinks that the teacher wants to hear the blending out aloud for every word in a book!
This is something that should be prevented. It usually is a sign that the teacher has not encouraged the
children to say the word straight away, if they know it, or that reading books have been given before the
child is ready for them. When children are encouraged to blend silently in their head it usually prevents this
type of thing happening. If a child blends several words on a page in his or her book, he or she should be
asked to read that page again until it is read without any blending. Nip this type of thing in the bud before
any bad habits develop. Fortunately it rarely happens and, to a large extent, it is a teaching fault.




What should I do if decodable readers are not available for my class?

Sometimes the best of a bad job has to be done. The school cannot afford to abandon the books they have
bought and replace them all with decodable readers. We know the children who easily learn to blend letter
sounds will manage with whatever books they are provided with. They can be given the books that are
available. These books, however, will be very damaging to the children who struggle to learn the letter
sounds and find blending difficult. Try and explain to the head teacher why decodable readers are needed
for this group of children and encourage him or her to invest in a few decodable books for this specific
group. Hopefully, in time, decodables can be initially available to all the children.


Why are boys poorer at reading than girls?

When boys are poorer than girls at reading and writing it is a sign that the wrong method of teaching has
been used. Boys taught with synthetic phonics are just as good as the girls, if not better.

So why do different methods of teaching affect boys more than girls? I used to think our synthetic phonics
teaching was particularly good for the boys because it showed them from the beginning that it was a code
and that this logic appealed to them. Now it seems that science tells us that it is due to boys having different
brains to girls. Boys brains, during the early years, favour right hemisphere development over the left. They
are more likely to memorise whole words visually, rather than link the letters to sounds. Memorised words
are then stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Unfortunately only about 5,000 words can be stored in
this part of the brain before the memory runs out. This usually means that the children who learn to read
this way remain poor readers for life, unless someone can break the habit of guessing unknown words and
teach them to blend the words with good synthetic phonics teaching. Good readers are able to fluently read
50,000 words and have unlimited access to thousands more. These words are stored in the left hemisphere
of the brain.

Girls tend to develop language skills earlier and are more likely to process the words to the left side of the
brain, which is where sounds are dealt with. Once words have been blended a few times they are stored in


the left hemisphere of the brain. Unlimited numbers of words can be stored here because the words are
processed and not memorised by their shape.

Whole word methods of teaching encourage the memorising of whole words, especially in the boys.
Whereas synthetic phonics teaches the boys and girls, from the beginning, to always blend the words. This
develops the neural connections from the right side to the left side of the brain and the words are then
stored in the correct place. Teachers need to understand that if they use a whole word method of teaching,
or even a mixed method, they maybe causing the reading and writing failure of several children in their class