Why Teach Phonics?
Educational practice is the result of educational research filtered through educational philosophy. The prevailing educational philosophy for much of the last century and the beginning of the 21st has been child-centered. This philosophy has had some tremendously beneficial effects, but with every pendulum swing comes some negative side effects. One such side effect of child-centered education has been our movement away from phonics instruction in favor of whole language, or whole word learning rather than phoneme learning. “Whole word” reading instruction has been given a number of different titles, but the result is the same: phonics has been given a back seat position. The reasons for this shift are too many to address on one page, but I will provide a brief explanation of my own experience as a child development major and credentialed teacher.
I attended a private university in the early nineties where I received my preparation to teach elementary aged children. The philosophy of reading instruction at the time was “balanced literacy.” By balanced, we were taught that phonemic awareness should be balanced with a whole language or whole word reading approach. The problem was that phonics instruction was never taught in any of my classes. I was expected to just know how to teach it. In subsequent years I taught reading through an almost entirely whole language approach since that was the only way I knew, not recalling my own phonics instruction from childhood. Yes, I did know long and short vowel sounds, but I surely didn’t know that there are five jobs of the silent E at the end of words. I also had no clue why English has so many variations of sounds. It wasn’t until I taught kindergarten at Providence Classical School that I learned about phonics and how easy it is to learn reading through an intensive phonics approach coupled with great children’s literature. In my twenty years of teaching young children, I continue to see the replication of what I received in my learning regarding the teaching of reading in those who have come behind me into the profession. We now have two generations of teachers who don’t really know how the English language works.
The Difference Between Whole Language and Phonics
When a child learns to read through a whole language approach, she is asked to learn words as they come to her through the books she reads. Usually this approach includes lots of picture clues and simple language in order to support the acquisition of a basic reading vocabulary. Most children will learn to read this way and a fair number will become fluent. The problem comes for those children whose capacity for memorization might be limited. There are thousands of words in the English language, many of which students will only come across when they reach middle school or high school. When I taught 5th grade I noticed that when I asked students to “sound out” the words, they lacked the skill to do so. When the word to be read on the page was an unfamiliar one, those students began guessing based on their limited phonics understanding. “Bleacher” became “black,” “bleed,” and “blink.” Without a solid grounding in phonics, whole word instruction leaves the child with no strategy for decoding complex words.
The Unveiling Phonics
As when Dorothy learned the truth about the Wizard of Oz, the mysterious nature of phonics should be unveiled. The English language began as a spoken language that was not coded, meaning there were no letters to symbolize the sounds. Rather than make up their own alphabet, when literate Englishmen began writing, they borrowed the Latin alphabet. The problem is that the English used more sounds than did the Romans, therefore, double-letter or triple letter phonograms had to be used to make sounds such as OI or AY. In fact there are 16 vowel sounds in English whereas Latin only has five (what we know as short A, E, I, O, and U) with some slight variations. In total English has 70 phonograms, give or take a couple, depending on the phonics program you follow. Some of those phonograms have multiple sounds, but all of those sounds are easily memorized by nearly all children. Once the first 26 phonograms (the alphabet) are learned, a child is able to decode and read, independently, many of the simple books written by the masterful doctor of children’s literature, the great Dr. Seuss. I have witnessed that magical moment of independent reading hundreds of times, and I have observed the brightening of children’s eyes as they realize that they have cracked the code.
Does this process take time? Absolutely. But the long-term benefits of the acquired skill far outweigh the investment at the front end. The curve of accessible literature is very steep for the child who learns to decode and approach reading with independence. Lastly, I have come to learn that we have bought into a myth regarding phonics. As adults we view phonics as boring or obtuse. However, a child’s mind is very different from that of an adult. The memorizing of symbols is what the young child does best. We adults are the ones who struggle with memorization because our neural pathways have become more rigid. With very few exceptions, I have found that the children with whom I have taught phonics have enjoyed the process and have thrived from the effect.