Blog Entry#14 Research article: Ants, apples and the ABCs: the use of commercial phonics programmes in prior-to-school children’s services

Campbell, S., Torr, J., & Cologon, K. (2012) Ants, apples and the ABCs: The use of commercial phonics programmes in prior-to-school children's services. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2012 12: 367

This article researched on the use of commercial phonics programs (CPP) in prior-to-school children’s services (serve children under five years old) in Sydney area, Australia. The research found that about 36% of the early childhood settings surveys were using commercial phonics programs. Additionally, the CPP are more likely to be used in long-day care, for-profit centers with less qualified and less experienced staff.

I became very interested in this topic because the uses of commercial phonics programs are very hot and very controversial these days, especially when being with emergent English language learners. I learned that generally, the CPP have to different approaches: systematic explicit approach and synthetic phonics approach. Systematic Explicit Approach includes teaching how to make grapheme-phoneme correspondences, phonemic awareness, phonics rules, and spelling &sound relationships (for older children). These methods are commonly used in US preschool classrooms, but no evidence shows the percentage that the CPP is used in US schools. The other approach is Synthetic Phonics Approach, which includes isolated phonemic, phonological skills, and alphabetic skills.  From the above information we can see the reason why the CPPs are widely used in Australia: the approaches includes teaching methods, materials and everything a new teachers need to know about teaching emergent literacy; additionally, the CPPs are likely to prvide a “uniform” one-fits-all approach, which make teacher training and practice easier and more effective for teachers and the children service center.

I sense the authors of this article are object to the wide use of CPPs, because, again, most of them provide a one-fits-all approach, instead of the traditional teaching which stress the individual differences while teaching. But we have to admit that the CPPs is a good resource for the inexperienced teachers start with, because of the consistency of the curriculum make it much easier to follow than to teach without CPPs. Last year, when I attend the NAEYC’s annual conference and exhibition, I received dozens of the flyers of the commercial literacy programs (including commercial Phonics Programs), and some curriculum about emergent reading and writing looks really good and systemized, and the demonstrations clearly shows how the programs work to build on the school and parent’s confidence. This also reminds me of the situation of English language education in China: a lot of early childhood education institutions are now adopting the “imported” commercial phonic programs and use it as advanced teaching method. I think that the qualified educators should closely examine the appropriateness of the programs when use in China (or any other countries) and decide whether the programs fit second language learners in a foreign context. Also, if have to adopt the CPPs, teachers should probably select only the parts that would fit the learner’s needs and personalized the other parts, which would make the whole literacy program more individualized and effective.