Tuesday, March 31, 2026
You may see the term phonics and immediately think of little children that are learning to read and write for the first time. However, this systematic way of learning is something that is not exclusive to kids and can be used to work with older learners, too. In this blog post, we will review what phonics is and then how you can work on the same concepts with your teenage and adult students.
So, what exactly is phonics? Phonics is a systematic way of learning how the patterns of letters in English words relate to their corresponding phonemes. It teaches students how to break down (segment) words into their component sounds and use these sounds to write (encode) and read (decode) correctly. It works on a more-often-than-not basis, so students start with the most frequent patterns seen at word level and then they work their way through ‘alternative’ letter sounds which are less frequent, but still common in language that students will come across at higher levels. You then have ‘tricky’ words and sounds, which don’t follow any of the patterns, and are sometimes referred to as ‘sight words’ as they just have to be learnt. One of the most frequently used words in English ‘I’ is a tricky word, as it is pronounced using the diphthong [aɪ] as opposed to the short vowel [ɪ] that this letter represents in synthetic phonics.
When we use phonics as a way to teach letter patterns and sounds systematically, students learn how to deal with reading and writing more independently and are able to overcome unknown language without the need for too much teacher intervention. They work on the sounds of English from a young age, and this consistent practice helps develop their muscles so that they are able to articulate and hear sounds more accurately. Students who work on phonics regularly are usually more confident and proficient readers and have better reading fluency.
Phonics is generally used with younger learners as a way of introducing language for the first time and teaching them how to read and write in English at the same time as they are learning how to master these academic skills in their first language. However, we forget that it can also be a very useful way to work on reading, writing, listening and speaking skills with older learners. Below, you will find information about how you can practise phonics with both your teenage and adult students.
Lower-level adults struggle with the basic sounds of the language as, for many, this is the first time that they have had to produce and identify these sounds. As phonics works as basic sound level, it works extremely well with these low-level adults as they start with simple sounds and patterns and gradually work their way through them in a systematic way that is easy to understand.
Did you know that more than 80% of words in English contain regular patterns of letters than can be learnt? Whilst some students might struggle and think that there are so many irregularities in English, you can help them out by giving them the knowledge they need to identify these patterns for themselves. For teens and adults, this might be a pattern that they haven’t considered before and so explicit teaching will help them overcome their previously perceived difficulties.
When it comes to unknown language, a student only has their prior knowledge to fall back on when it comes to working out how to pronounce a word. In many cases, this prior knowledge comes from words that they already know, and they try to apply the same rules to the unknown language. Having a wider bank of sound knowledge, through the learning of phonics, means that students will be better able to deal with new language and will feel more confident in doing so.
Whilst we LOVE the IPA, there is a time and a place for it. When we use the phonemic transcription, we are just describing what the word sounds like, so we know how it is pronounced. Phonics, however, works on sounds that come from the orthographic transcription of the word, meaning that real letters are associated with phonemes. Using real letters means that your teenage and adult learners can be taught how to interpret the words they see on the page and translate this into the correct phoneme.
There are letter sounds and combinations in English that are very similar (think ‘a’ and ‘u’, for example) and these can cause students problems, even at higher levels. When considering what to focus on with teens and adults, these similar sounds can be a great place to start. You can work on these in class by focussing on minimal pairs, rhyming words and the odd one out. This is a great activity to do at the beginning or the end of every lesson.
Teenage students make lots of spelling mistakes when they write and many of these can be avoided by telling students exactly why the spelling is wrong, rather than just correcting it. Think of commonly misspelt words such as ‘whit’, ‘writting’ or ‘strenght’- the mistake comes from not identifying the letter patterns and how they relate to the sounds: The ‘th’ at the end of ‘with’, the ‘magic e + ing’ pattern at the end of ‘writing’ and the ‘th’ at the end of ‘strength’ are all common patterns that can be learnt and will hopefully go some way to preventing spelling errors in the future.
The material that you might find online for phonics is principally aimed at children, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t used the principles of phonics for older learners. You can adapt the material you come across and make it more teenage-friendly, or you can simply take the principles of the material and incorporate them into your lesson without having to use any physical material.
A common issue that teen and adult students might have when it comes to knowing how to say or write a word, is that they can’t break it down (segment) it into its component parts. Working on segmenting in class is a great way to get students to focus on separate sounds and make them aware of the individual parts that make up a complete word or sentence. This is something you can practise easily in class, especially when it comes to the target language of the lesson.
There are many sounds which are articulated incorrectly due to negative L1 transfer. Teachers can anticipate this by considering the sounds that are often mispronounced by students of the same L1 and explicitly working on these in class. For example, if students have issues with the sound ‘th’ [θ] or [ð], then you can take common words with this sound and work on articulating it correctly in class as a group.
Error correction should be something that is present in all your classes, and teenagers and adults should be no exception to this. One of the easiest ways you can correct in class is with pronunciation or spelling errors, and you can use what you know about phonics to review what the error is and how to correct it. If there is a common error amongst various members of the group, then you can perhaps work on this more explicitly in subsequent classes.
Phonics is not just for kids. You can use the principles you know about phonics with older learners, and it can be just as effective a teaching tool. If you’d like to find out more about phonics activities you can do with your students, then check out our other blog post on the topic: https://london-school-online.com/en/article/synthetic-phonics-activities.
