'Jolly Phonics' teaches children to read English by using synthetic phonics

Chris Jolly likes travelling. Which is just as well, as the Briton often finds himself setting off to Africa, the Bahamas, and other far-flung destinations as the managing director of Jolly Learning. He travels all over the world with "Jolly Phonics", a system for teaching literacy through synthetic phonics, using the 42-letter sounds of the English language rather than the alphabet.

Jolly, 68, was recently in Hong Kong for a conference directed at trainers from around the region, and local teachers keen to get this system into their kindergartens and learning centres. Synthetic phonics are already used in some English Schools Foundation schools and provide an alternative to the more traditional "whole language approach".

"K2 [four and five year olds] is our core market in Hong Kong," says Jolly. "By then, they're beyond the nursemaid stage, and their education is becoming very structured."

The whole language approach uses thematic texts and stories, and some traditional phonics, to teach children to read and write. The aim is to learn the context of the sentences and stories to help master the nuts and bolts of literacy. Jolly Phonics pulls the words apart into sounds before blending them together into the whole word. The idea is that students will then begin to automatically blend their phonemes.

"With the whole language [approach] there's a sense that reading and writing are just like speaking - we pick them up naturally, especially if the children have a lovely story book. But the problem there is that reading and writing are actually skills; Jolly Phonics teaches those skills in small stages.

"We teach every letter sound. After that, we teach children how to use them, and to blend and segment. It's as effective for children who have English as a second language as for those who have it as a first."