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Chapter No 1

Definitions and Meaning of Educational Psychology

To know the meaning and have a concept of Educational Psychology it is necessary to

understand two things that.

To generate the meaning of educational psychology firstly the definition of education that

is discussed below.

In the narrow sense

Education is limited to the instruction in school, college, university. Education of the

child as he enters the school where definite amount of knowledge is given.

In broader sense

Education is life long process which facilitates learning or acquisition of knowledge skills

values belief and habits. It is a process that goes on throughout life and is promoted by

very experience in life.

According to Drever :

Education is a process in which and by which the knowledge character and behavior of

the young are shaped and molded.

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What is psychology?

Psychology is the science of mind and behavior. The word psychology comes from the

Greek word psyche meaning breath spirit soul and the Greek word logia meaning the

study of something.

Meaning of educational psychology

Educational psychology involves the study of how people learn, including topics such as

student outcomes, the instructional process, individual differences in learning, gifted

learners, and learning disabilities. Psychologists who work in this field are interested in

how people learn and retain new information.

This branch of psychology involves not just the learning process of early childhood and

adolescence but includes the social, emotional, and cognitive processes that are involved

in learning throughout the entire lifespan.

The field of educational psychology incorporates a number of other disciplines, including

developmental psychology, behavioral psychology, and cognitive psychology.

Definition of educational psychology

• Educational psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific

study of human learning [skinner1958]

• Educational psychology is the field which involves the study of memory,

conceptual processes and individual differences in conceptualizing new strategies for

learning processes in human [slavin1991]

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Educational psychology is concerned with human maturation, school learning, teaching

methods guidance and evaluation of aptitude and progress by standardized test.

[peel1956]

Importance Of Educational Psychology:

Educational psychology is important because it trains teachers to watch for different

learning situations, and how to adapt to those situations accordingly. By studying the

ability, interests, intelligence and needs of students, teachers are able to adapt material to

improve the learning experience and process.

One of the most important functions a teacher has it to understand the primary learning

differences between individual students. Educational psychology can help teachers

recognize how to deliver content to students in a form that makes sense. For example,

teaching complex subjects to smaller children usually works best in the form of

storytelling because children like stories. It helps them relate to the concepts.

The contribution of educational psychology to the theory and practice of education is rich

and varied. The knowledge of educational psychology is important as it provides teachers

with some basic skills and guidelines to solve the problems of teaching-learning process.

According to John Adams, “Teacher should know John as well as Latin”. It means

teacher should know child and subject – matter. A teacher should know the nature,

capacities, likings and aptitudes and attitudes of the child. Child is like a book, teacher

should know each and every page of it.

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The benefit of educational psychology for the teachers has been emphasized in both

theory and practices of teaching and learning.

 Provide knowledge on theories and psychology principles to teachers to practice it

in classroom.

 Give knowledge on student behavior so that teachers can avoid discipline problem

in classroom effectively.

 Completing psychology knowledge on student attitude to help teachers create

their healthy personality and positive self-concept with better guidance.

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Introduction to Phonics

Approximately half way through your child’s year in nursery they will be introduced to

phonics. Children are taught the phonetic sounds first, then how to match them to letters,

and finally how to use the letter sounds for reading and spelling. In nursery we introduce

these sounds through a fun weekly sound game, in which you and your child are given 1

or 2 sounds each week, and then try to find objects or pictures at home to represent that

sound, which can be placed into the Sound Bag

The goal of phonics instruction is to help children learn the alphabetic principle-the idea

that letters represent the sounds of spoken language – and that there is an organized,

logical, and predictable relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.

Phonics is systematic teaching of the sounds conveyed by letters and groups of letters,

and includes teaching children to combine and blend these to read or write words. It is of

crucial importance, for the following reasons:

■ The majority of the information conveyed by letters concerns sounds.

■ Letters tell us more than any other source of information, even when we have to

interpret the information they provide.

■ We cannot read fluently until we read accurately, and this depends on accurate use of

the information conveyed letters. Skilled, fluent readers do not guess.

■ Once we have learned what the letters are telling us in a word, we can store it in our

memory and retrieve it more quickly than if we had to work it out.

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■ As English is not completely regular, most children are unlikely to be able to perceive

and use patterns in language for themselves

How is phonics taught?

Introducing young children to the joy and wonder of books requires a systematic teaching

of phonics.

Synthetic phonics

The most widely used approach associated with the teaching of reading in which

phonemes (sounds) associated with particular graphemes (letters) are pronounced in

isolation and blended together (synthesized). For example, children are taught to take a

single-syllable word such as cat apart into its three letters, pronounce a phoneme for each

letter in turn /k, æ, t/, and blend the phonemes together to form a word.

Analytical phonics

A popular approach in Scotland, this method is associated with the teaching of reading in

which the phonemes associated with particular graphemes are not pronounced in

isolation. Children identify (analyze) the common phoneme in a set of words in which

each word contains the phoneme under study. For example, teacher and pupils discuss

how the following words are alike: pat, park, push and pen.

Analogy phonics

A type of analytic phonics in which children analyze phonic elements according to the

phonograms in the word. A phonogram, known in linguistics as a rime, is composed of

the vowel and all the sounds that follow it, such as –ake in the word cake. Children use
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these phonograms to learn about “word families” for example cake, make, and bake,

fake.

Embedded phonics

An approach to the teaching of reading in which phonics forms one part of a whole

language program. Embedded phonics differs from other methods in that the instruction

is always in the context of literature rather than in separate lessons, and the skills to be

taught are identified opportunistically rather than systematically.

Programs of phonics instruction should be:

 Systematic : the letter – sound relationship is taught in as organized and logical

sequence

 Explicit : the instruction provides teachers with precise directions for teaching

letter-sound relationships

Systematic and explicit phonics instructions:

 Significantly improves children’s word recognition, spelling, and reading

comprehension

 Is most effective when it begins in kindergarten or first grade but should be used
as a part of a comprehensive reading program with students who do not have a

firm understanding of the letter-sound relationship, regardless of grade level

The four skills taught in jolly phonics:

 c, k, e, h, r, m, d
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 g, o, u, l, f, b

 ai, j, oa, ie, ee, or

 z, w, ng, v, o

Phonics Workshop:

Miss gave some really interesting tidbits to follow while teaching young ones:

 Arrange

 Consent

 Interest

 Fun

 Energy level

 Concentration

 Right amount of technique

 Curiosity`

Workshop was very helpful in broadening our view towards how learning can be

transformed into fun activities. It helped us to plan lesson by considering every

developing need of children. While planning activities for lesson a teacher should

consider, précised attention span of children nearly 8-10 minutes and activities should

also be very short and simple so children could perform those task without or minimum

adult interference. The tasks assigned to children in class should be very appealing and

attractive in order to hold children’s full attention and concentration. And all the learning

must take place by firsthand experience. Learning through Sensory receptors should be

given prime importance.

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Such activities should be planned in lesson which encourages child involvement in task at

maximum, so their level of concentration remains high throughout the learning process.

And learning should be associated with happy event and positive memories to encourage

the love of learning among children.

Basic rules of phonics:

 Cognitive skills:

Both the lexical and the sub lexical cognitive processes contribute to how we

learn to read.

 Lexical reading:

Lexical reading involves acquiring words or phrases without attention to the

characters or groups of characters that compose them or by using whole language

learning and teaching methods. Sometimes argued to be in competition with

phonics and synthetic methods.

 Alphabetic principle:

English spelling is based on the alphabetic principle. In an alphabetic writing

system, letters are used to represent speech sounds, or phonemes. For example,

the word pat is spelled with three letters, p, a and t, each representing a phoneme,

respectively, /p/, /a/, and /t/.

Vowel phonics patterns:

 Short vowels are the five single letters vowels, a, e, i, o, and u. The term “short
vowel” is historical, and meant that at one time these vowels were pronounces for
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a particularly short period of time; currently, it means just they are not diphthongs

like the long vowels.

 Long vowels have the same sound as the names of the vowels. The way that

educators use the term “long vowels” differs from the way in which linguists use

this term. In classrooms, long vowels sounds are taught as having “the same

sounds as the names of the letters”. Teachers teach the children that the long

vowels ”say” its name.

 Schwa is the third sound that most of the single vowel spellings can represent. It

is the indistinct sound of many a vowel in an unstressed syllable, and is

represented by the linguistic symbol; it is the sound in spoken English, schwa is

not always taught to elementary school student’s because some find it difficult to

understand.

 Closed syllables are syllable in which a single vowel letter is followed by a

constant. In the word button, both syllables are closed syllables because they

contain single vowels followed by constants. Therefore, the letter you represent

the short sound.

 Open syllables are syllables in which a vowel appears at the end of the syllable.

The vowel will say its long sound. In the word basin, ba is an open syllable and

therefore says /bee/.

 Diphthongs are linguistic elements that fuse two adjacent vowel sounds. English

has four common diphthongs. The commonly recognizes diphthongs are as in cow

and as in boil. Three of the long vowels are also technically diphthongs, and

which partly accounts for the reason they are considered “long”.
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 Vowels digraphs are those spellings patterns where in two letters are used to

represents a vowel sound. The si in sail is a vowel diagraph.

 Vowel-Consonant-E spellings are those where in a single vowel letter, followed

by a consonant and the letter a makes the long vowel sound. The tendency is often

referred to as the “Silent-e-Rule”, with examples such as bake, theme, hike, cone,

and cute.

 R-controlled syllables include those where in a vowel followed by an r has a

different sound from its regular pattern. For example, a word like car should have

a pattern of a “closed syllable” because it has one vowel and ends in consonant.

However, does not have its regular “short” sound because it is controlled by the r.

The r changes the sound of the vowel that precedes it. Other examples includes:

park, horn, her, bird, and burn.

 The Consonant-le syllable is a final syllable, located at the end of the base/root

word. It contains a consonant, followed by the letters le. The e is silent and is

present because it was pronounced in earlier English and the spellings are

historical.

Consonant phonics patterns:

 Consonant diagraphs are those spellings where in two letters are used to represent
a single consonant phoneme. Letter combinations like wr for /r/ and kn for /n/ are

technically also consonant diagraphs, although they are so rare that they are

sometimes considered patterns with “silent letters”.

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 Short vowels + consonant patterns involve the spellings of the sounds /k/ as in
peek as in speech. These sounds each have two possible spellings at the end of a

word, ck, and k for /k/. The spellings is determined by the type of vowel that

precedes the sound, the former spellings is used, as in used, as in pick, judge, and

match.

Importance of Phonics:

 Phonics is a branch of linguistic where the sounds and physical properties of

human speech sounds are studied.

 Phonics reading is highly essential in every child.

 Indeed, phonics reading is very important in the education of the children.

 In the first instance, phonics reading is very important in helping children to learn
how to spell words.

 It will be impossible for a person to spell any word correctly if the person is not
able to recognize the sounds of the letters used in forming the words.

 Children have problem in reading because they are not able to recognize the
sounds of the letters of the alphabet in the words they read.

 This will help them to improve in their learning skills and efficiencies. In other
words, it will be difficult for a child to improve in his reading skills if the teaching

of phonics is remove from their curriculum.

 Phonics reading helps also to increase a child’s fluency in reading.

 The child will not only read accurately but also quickly. Reading quick and
correctly is another benefit of phonics reading.
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 When a child learns how to pronounce a word very well, the child will be able to
comprehend what he or she reads.

 Phonics reading will also help a child in acquiring more vocabulary on daily
basis.

 When a child is able to pronounce a word correctly, the child will be able to
understand the word.

 Children have to develop more confidence in them before they can pronounce
words correctly like older people.

How to teach phonics:

Many teachers will be using supplemental phonics and word-recognition materials to

enhance reading instruction for their students. In this article, the authors provide

guidelines for determining the accessibility of these phonics and word recognition

programs.

Phonics instructions:

Phonics instruction is a way of teaching reading that stresses the acquisition of

letter-sound correspondences and their use in reading and spelling.

Main purpose of phonics:

“Phonics helps children understand the relationship between the letters and individual

sounds. Children need to understand that the letter m stands for the /m/ sound, for

example. Knowing these relationships helps children more accurately read familiar
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words, analyze new words, and write words. When children understand that bake is

spelled with an “e” rather than bak, they are better able to read, spell, and write words

like cake, lake, make, take, wake, and snake.

Why started English and Urdu phonics:

Phonics is the basic reading instruction that teaches children the relationship between

letters and sounds. Phonics teaches children to use these relationships to speak and write

words. According to a study by the partnership for reading, the objective of phonics

instruction is to help children learn and use the “alphabetic principle”-the systematic and

predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. Knowing these

relationships through phonics helps young readers to recognize familiar words accurately

and easily “decode” new words.

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