LEGENDARY Teacher's Guide - Book - Page 12
b. Phonics
Pupils are first taught and exposed to the spoken language through the target vocabulary. Exposure
to spoken language and familiarity with the language helps create a solid foundation on which to
then build reading ability. Pupils who have this type of linguistic knowledge use it to help them
develop reading skills (Kahn-Horowitz, Shimron, and Sparks 2005). Phonemic awareness facilitates
growth in phonological representation recognition (Kahn-Horowitz, Shimron, and Sparks 2005;
Good, Simmons, and Kame'enui, 2001; Torgesen 2004). Learners who can differentiate the individual
sounds of a word, recognize their identity, and put the word together again, have the foundation
skills for using the alphabetic principle on which English is based (Troia 2004). Through both oral and
written practice, pupils become familiar with the sounds of the language, creating a smooth gateway
to fluency in reading (Russak 2019).
Phonics and phonemic awareness are co-dependent skills (Buckingham, Wheldall and Wheldall
2019; State of New South Wales 2009). Therefore, throughout the process of teaching phonics,
teachers are instructed to encourage pupils to use their developing awareness to identify the
letter/s and patterns that make up the sounds of the language.
Legendary teaches and practices phonics explicitly and systematically, as these skills are vital to
creating strong, fluent English readers. Phonics instruction and practice is integrated throughout the
program in a defined structured sequence. Teaching phonics begins at the word level. Pupils are
taught to first identifying the word, then analyzing its phonics patterns, ultimately allowing pupils to
develop the skills to decode the sounds accurately (Buckingham, Wheldall and Wheldall 2019; State
of New South Wales 2009). Finally, phonics patterns are embedded in a variety of texts to support
and reinforce authentic practice in context. As pupils progress through the phonics learning
sequence, they will draw on their prior knowledge to learn and acquire new sounds.
c. Writing
Alongside the development of reading, Legendary is carefully designed to support pupils as they are
acquiring their basic writing skills in English. Writing is a complex process, one which evolves from
being exposed to linguistic and textual features from a variety texts types. The text types included in
the program allow for the evolution from reading fluency to writing. Pupils are provided with a
myriad of text types, exposing them to a variety of linguistic structures that eventually translate to
the development of writing skills.
As pupils progress in their acquired knowledge of phonics, they develop encoding skills that bring
them closer to mastery of spelling patterns. The program gradually guides pupils from writing words,
to simple sentences (aided by word banks), more complex sentence structures (aided by substitution
tables), and finally writing short, scaffolded texts.
d. Sight Words
Sight words are words that we frequently encounter that should be recognized globally
rather than decoded letter by letter. For these particular words, “sight of the word
activates its pronunciation and meaning immediately in memory and allows readers to
focus their attention on comprehension rather than word recognition.” (Ehri 2014: 5). It
is important for pupils to recognize sight words quickly to ensure fluency in reading. When combined
with strong grapheme-phoneme knowledge, phonemic awareness, and decoding skills, acquiring
these sight words allows pupils to employ multiple essential reading strategies for reading both
familiar and novel words in English.
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