KOHIMA, JULY 4 : A three-day long training event on what is reported to be “phonetics” for government teachers began today at Zonal Council Hall, Kohima. The training is being organized by the department of School Education, Government of Nagaland, in collaboration with Jolly Phonics of United Kingdom.
The training, with Shainaz Jussa, principal and managing director Phonickids, Mumbai Jolly Phonics, UK, as the resource person, is aimed at educating the teachers on phonics so that they would be able to disseminate the right knowledge to the students.
As a pilot project, similar programmes were organized by the same department last year in the month of October and February this year.
The resource person, during the course of training, stressed the need for teachers to learn synthetic phonics.“Children need to know the alphabetic codes, and they should start learning at an early stage,” she said maintaining that, once the teachers learn phonetics, then it becomes easy to teach children.
She said Jolly Phonics is children friendly and it teaches children how to read and spell. She went on to say that the sound of the letters is (always) more important than the letters, adding that teachers should understand synthetic phonetics in order to teach children beginning from a tender age.
Earlier during the inaugural function, additional director, Wonthungoe Tsopoe also underscored the need to disseminate the right knowledge to the students at early age.
“Qualification alone is not enough. We need to disseminate the right knowledge to the students. Once the teachers are well trained, their services can go even beyond State,” he said adding that there is a high demand of English teachers all over the world.
Over 50 teachers from Kohima and Dimapur, mostly primary teachers, are attending the three-day training.
What is Phonics?
Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners’ phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes—in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them.
The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns. Since it focuses on the spoken and written units within words, phonics is a sublexical approach and, as a result, is often contrasted with whole language, a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading (see History and controversy below).
Since the turn of the 20th century phonics has been widely used in primary education and in teaching literacy throughout the English-speaking world. More specifically synthetic phonics is now the accepted method of teaching reading in the education systems in the UK and Australia. (Inputs on Phonics: Wikipedia)
