Everything You Need to Know About Phonics!
Teaching Reading is NOT Rocket Science!
Introduction
Teaching reading isn't difficult, and educators don't need years of training to become excellent reading teachers. For thousands of years, parents taught their children to read at home with nothing more than a book and a kitchen table.
This blog post has two main goals:
To provide a concise overview of the nature and process of reading and the most effective ways to teach it.
To demonstrate that teaching reading is a straightforward and logical process that almost anyone can master.
This post will be helpful to reading teachers, school administrators selecting reading curricula, and parents who may feel uncertain about how their children learn to read.
What is Reading?
Before we dive into what reading is, we must first consider what always comes before it: writing! After all, there is nothing to read if nothing has been written, and we can't fully grasp how we read without first understanding how we write.
Writing is the act of converting speech into visual symbols (letters) to convey thoughts to future readers. This process is also known as "encoding." Reading is essentially this process in reverse: it involves converting symbols (letters) back into speech to gain information. This process is also known as "decoding."
This explanation aligns with what is known as the Simple View of Reading (Footnote 1), which states that two abilities are necessary for reading:
The ability to convert letters into speech (decoding).
The knowledge of the meaning of words.
If either one is missing, whether the ability to convert letters into speech, or knowledge of the meaning of the words, reading for meaning is not possible.
Thus, readers must possess two key skills:
How to decode letters into speech.
Understanding the language they are reading.
While language comprehension develops over time through speaking, reading, and learning, the question remains: how do we learn to decode, or convert symbols into speech?
Phonics vs. Whole Word Methods
Since the invention of the alphabet over 5,000 years ago, one method has dominated reading instruction: phonics. Phonics, which we'll define shortly, has been extensively studied for decades and consistently proven to be the most effective approach to teaching reading, with strong scientific backing and validation. (Footnote 2)
In contrast, another method, the "Whole Word Method" (also known as the Look-Say Method, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, or the Three Cueing System), has been experimented with over the past two centuries. This method rejects the process of converting letters into sounds, and encourages children to memorize entire words as whole units.
The Whole Word Method is fundamentally flawed because it’s impossible for any human to memorize tens of thousands of individual words. This is why it is no longer widely used, except in the U.S., where it still has some advocates.
The National Reading Panel Report (2000). Click Here to read the report.
Around the world, phonics remains the only successful and widely used method for teaching reading.
Defining Phonics
Let's begin with a definition.
According to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, phonics is: "a method of teaching beginners to read and pronounce words by learning the phonetic value of letters, letter groups, and especially syllables."
I offer a broader definition:
Phonics is an approach to reading instruction that explicitly and systematically teaches students the correlation between the sounds in words and their corresponding written letters, starting with simple words and gradually progressing to more intricate spelling and advanced vocabulary. Through consistent practice in reading, spelling, and writing, students achieve automatic word recognition and reading fluency, enabling them to read more challenging texts with comprehension as they transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." Phonics is incompatible with whole word methods, whole language, balanced literacy, and 3-cueing!
The English language has over 40 distinct sounds, each of which can be represented by different letters or combinations of letters. For example:
The /a/ sound in "apple" is represented differently in "Antarctica."
The /k/ sound can be written in six different ways:
"Collin," "cat," "Kevin," "kid," "chemistry," and "unique."
The ultimate aim of phonics instruction is to teach all 40+ sounds in the English language and the 180+ ways they can be represented in writing.
What Does a Good Phonics Curriculum Look Like?
A strong phonics curriculum focuses on seven essential reading skills, which can be taught through seven structured steps:
Step 1: Begin by teaching the 26 letters of the alphabet, both lowercase and uppercase, and the 25 basic sounds they represent.
Step 2: Teach to combine these letters and sounds to create simple words, such as "at" and "cat." These are commonly known as VC (vowel-consonant) and CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words.
Step 3: Teach that some sounds can be represented by two letters. For example: "mess," "egg," "add," and "kick."
Step 4: Practice reading and spelling words with consecutive consonants, like "and," "milk," "swim," and "trust." These are known as Consonant Clusters. Although no new letters or sounds are introduced (still using the same letters and sounds from Step 1), these words require additional practice.
Step 5: Teach the remaining sounds of the English language. Examples include words like "song," "ship," "chick," "this," "bath," ""coin," "cloud," "saw," "moon," book," "hammer," "corn," "car," "airplane," and "table." The concept that some sounds are represented by more than one letter was already introduced in Step 3.
Step 6: Recognize that some sounds are written with two letters that are not adjacent to each other. For example: "bee" and "Pete," "pie" and "bike," "toe" and "bone," "rescue" and "cube," and "cake."
At this stage, students will have learned all 40+ sounds in the English language and the basic ways to spell those sounds using letters. This brings us to the final step:
Step 7: Teach additional spelling patterns for each sound. For example, the sound /th/ can be written as in "this" and "breathe," while the sound /or/ can be represented as in "corn," "store," and "skateboard."
During Step 7, students gradually progress to more complex spellings and advanced vocabulary, such as words like "constitution" and "chemistry." With time and practice, they develop automatic word recognition and reading fluency, allowing them to read more challenging texts with comprehension and smoothly transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn."
If every student in the U.S. learned to read using these steps, they would be reading at grade level. Unfortunately, approximately 60% of students do not achieve this, according to NAEP, because they receive little to no phonics instruction in school. Despite the billions spent on education, the reason so many U.S. students struggle with reading is that they are not taught to read using a phonics-based approach.
Reading Begins and (Pretty Much) Ends with Phonics!
The phonics approach is simple to teach and can be learned by any student, regardless of their background, literacy level, or English language proficiency. While English may have more sounds and spelling variations than most languages, it can still be read phonetically, just like any other European language.
Contrary to popular belief, effective reading instruction doesn’t require much beyond phonics. Yet, much classroom time is wasted on activities with little research support, such as phonological exercises, advanced phonemic awareness, memorizing sight words, and learning syllable rules. These unnecessary tasks have no basis in science and take valuable time away from teaching the one subject all students truly need: phonics!
There is no question that all students will benefit from additional fluency practice, comprehension tips, and a lot of practice tackling higher-level text (and some students will undoubtedly require additional language development). But, for the most part, a well-implemented phonics program taught with consistency for 60 minutes a day starting in kindergarten, could single-handedly solve the current reading crisis.
Phonics truly is the key!
Footnotes
Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990.
National Reading Panel Report, 2000.