Dictionary Definition
phonics n : teaching reading by training
beginners to associate letters with their sound values
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Etymology
Noun
Extensive Definition
Phonics refers to an instructional method for
teaching children to read English. Phonics involves teaching
children to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters (e.g.,
that the sound /k/ can be represented by
c, k, or ck spellings) and teaching them to blend the sounds of
letters together to produce approximate pronunciations of unknown
words.
Phonics in English
Phonics is a widely used method of teaching
children to read and
decode words, although it is not without controversy (see "History
and controversy" below). Children begin learning to read using
phonics usually around the age of 5 or 6. Teaching English reading
using phonics requires children to learn the connections between
letter patterns and the sounds they represent. Phonics instruction
requires the teacher to provide students with a core body of
information about phonics rules, or patterns.
- Note: This article uses General American pronunciation.
Basic rules
Alphabetic principle
From a linguistics perspective, 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/, /æ/, and /t/.The spelling systems for some alphabetic
languages, such as Spanish, are relatively simple because there is
nearly a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter
patterns that represent them. English spelling is more complex,
because in many cases the same sound can be spelled differently and
the same spelling can represent different sounds. However, the
spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions. The result is
that English spelling patterns vary considerably in the degree to
which they follow the stated pattern. For example, the letters ee
almost always represent /iː/, but the
sound can also be represented by the letter y. Similarly, the
letter cluster ough represents /ʌf/ as in
enough, /oʊ/ as in though, /uː/ as in through, /ɔːf/
as in cough, and /aʊ/ as in bough.
Although the patterns are inconsistent, when
English spelling rules take into account syllable structure,
phonetics, and accents, there are dozens of rules that are 75% or
more reliable.
A selection of phonics patterns is shown
below.
Vowel phonics patterns
- Short vowels are the five single letter vowels, a, e, i, o, and u when they produce the sounds /æ/ as in cat, /ɛ/ as in bet, /ɪ/ as in sit, /ɒ/ as in hot, and /ʌ/ as in cup. The term "short vowel" does not really mean that these vowels are pronounced for a particularly short period of time, but they are not diphthongs like the long vowels.
- Long vowels are synonymous with the names of the single letter vowels, such as /eɪ/ in baby, /iː/ in meter, /aɪ/ in tiny, /oʊ/ in broken, and /juː/ in humor. 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 being "the same as the names of the letters."
- Schwa is the third sound that most of the single vowel spellings can produce. The schwa is an indistinct sound of a vowel in an unstressed syllable, represented by the linguistic symbol ə. /ə/ is the sound made by the o in lesson. Schwa is a vowel pattern that is not always taught to elementary school students because it is difficult to understand. However, some educators make the argument that schwa should be included in primary reading programs because of its importance in reading English words.
- Closed syllables are syllables in which a single vowel letter is followed by a consonant. In the word button, both syllables are closed syllables because they contain single vowels followed by consonants. Therefore, the letter u represents the short sound /ʌ/. (The o in the second syllable makes the /ə/ sound because it is an unstressed syllable.)
- 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 /beɪ/.
- Diphthongs are linguistic elements that fuse two adjacent vowel sounds. English has four common diphthongs. The commonly recognized diphthongs are /aʊ/ as in cow and /ɔɪ/ as in boil. Four of the long vowels are also technically diphthongs, /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /oʊ/, and /juː/, which partly accounts for the reason they are considered "long."
- Vowel digraphs are those spelling patterns wherein two letters are used to represent the vowel sound. The ai in sail is a vowel digraph. Because the first letter in a vowel digraph sometimes says its long vowel sound, as in sail, some phonics programs once taught that "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." This convention has been almost universally discarded, owing to the many non-examples. The au spelling of the /ɔː/ sound and the oo spelling of the /uː/ and /ʊ/ sounds do not follow this pattern.
- Vowel-consonant-E spellings are those wherein a single vowel letter, followed by a consonant and the letter e makes the long vowel sound. Examples of this include bake, theme, hike, cone, and cute. (The ee spelling, as in meet is sometimes considered part of this pattern.)
Consonant phonics patterns
- Consonant digraphs are those spellings wherein two letters are used to represent a consonant phoneme. The most common consonant digraphs are ch for /tʃ/, ng for /ŋ/, ph for /f/, sh for /ʃ/, th for /θ/ and /ð/, and wh for /ʍ/ (often pronounced /w/ in American English). Letter combinations like wr for /r/ and kn for /n/ are also consonant digraphs, although these are sometimes considered patterns with "silent letters."
- Short vowel+consonant patterns involve the spelling of the sounds /k/ as in peek, /dʒ/ as in stage, and /tʃ/ as in speech. These sounds each have two possible spellings at the end of a word, ck and k for /k/, dge and ge for /dʒ/, and tch and ch for /tʃ/. The spelling is determined by the type of vowel that precedes the sound. If a short vowel precedes the sound, the former spelling is used, as in pick, judge, and match. If a short vowel does not precede the sound, the latter spelling is used, as in took, barge, and launch.
The final "short vowel+consonant pattern" is just
one example of dozens that can be used to help children unpack the
challenging English alphabetic code. This example illustrates that,
while complex, English spelling retains order and reason.
Sight words and high frequency words
- There are words that do not follow these phonics rules, such as were, who, and you. They are often called "sight words" because they must be memorized by sight.
- Teachers who use phonics also often teach students to memorize the most high frequency words in English, such as it, he, them, and when, even though these words are fully decodable. The argument for teaching these "high frequency words" is that knowing them will improve students' reading fluency.
History and controversy
Because of the complexity of written English,
more than a century of debate has occurred over whether English
phonics should or should not be used in teaching beginning reading.
Beginning in the mid 19th century, some American educators,
prominently Horace Mann,
argued that phonics should not be taught at all. This led to the
commonly used "look-say" approach ensconced in the "Dick and
Jane" readers popular in the mid-20th century. Beginning in the
1950s, however, phonics resurfaced as a method of teaching reading.
Spurred by Rudolf
Flesch's criticism of the absence of phonics instruction
(particularly in his popular book, Why
Johnny Can't Read) phonics resurfaced, but—owing to Flesch's
polemical approach—the term "phonics" became associated with
political ideology.
In the 1980s, the "whole
language" approach to reading further polarized the debate in
the United States. Whole language instruction was predicated on the
principle that children could learn to read given (a) proper
motivation, (b)
access to good literature, (c) many reading
opportunities, (d) focus on meaning, and (e) instruction to help
students use meaning clues to determine the pronunciation of
unknown words. For some advocates of whole language, phonics was
antithetical to helping new readers to get the meaning; they
asserted that parsing words into small chunks and reassembling them
had no connection to the ideas the author wanted to convey.
The whole language emphasis on identifying words
using context and focusing only a little on the sounds (usually the
alphabet consonants and the short vowels) could not be reconciled
with the phonics emphasis on individual sound-symbol
correspondences. Thus, a dichotomy between the whole language
approach and phonics emerged in the United States causing intense
debate. Ultimately, this debate lead to a series of a Congressionally-commissioned
panels and government-funded reviews of the state of reading
instruction in the U.S.
In 1984, the National Academy of Education
commissioned a report on the status of research and instructional
practices in reading education, Becoming a Nation of Readers. Among
other results, the report includes the finding that phonics
instruction improves children's ability to identify words. It
reports that useful phonics strategies include teaching children
the sounds of letters in isolation and in words, and teaching them
to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate
pronunciations of words. It also states that phonics instruction
should occur in conjunction with opportunities to identify words in
meaningful sentences and stories.
In 1990, Congress asked the U.S. Department of
Education to compile a list of available programs on beginning
reading instruction, evaluating each in terms of the effectiveness
of its phonics component. As part of this requirement, the US DOE
asked Dr. Marilyn J. Adams to produce a report on the role of
phonics instruction in beginning reading, which resulted in her
1994 book Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. In
the book, Adams asserted that existing scientific research
supported that phonics is an effective method for teaching students
to read at the word level. Adams argued strongly that the phonics
and the whole language advocates are both right. Phonics is an
effective way to teach students the alphabetic code, building their
skills in decoding unknown words. By learning the alphabetic code
early, she argued, students can quickly free up mental energy they
had used for word analysis and devote this mental effort to
meaning, leading to stronger comprehension earlier in elementary
school. Thus, she concluded, phonics instruction is a necessary
component of reading instruction, but not sufficient by itself to
teach children to read. This result matched the overall goal of
whole language instruction and supported the use of phonics for a
particular subset of reading skills, especially in the earliest
stages of reading instruction.
Similar results, based on a wide-ranging
historical study of teaching how to read in other languages in
addition to English, were published by Dina Feitelson in her book
Facts and Fads in Beginning Reading: A Cross-Language Perspective .
Yet the argument about how to teach reading, eventually known as
"the Great Debate," continued unabated.
The
National Research Council re-examined the question of how best
to teach reading to children (among other questions in education)
and in 1998 published the results in the Prevention of Reading
Difficulties in Young Children. The National Research Council's
findings largely matched those of Adams. They concluded that
phonics is a very effective way to teach children to read at the
word level, more effective than what is known as the "embedded
phonics" approach of whole language (where phonics was taught
opportunistically in the context of literature). They found that
phonics instruction must be systematic (following a sequence of
increasingly challenging phonics patterns) and explicit (teaching
students precisely how the patterns worked, e.g., "this is b, it
stands for the /b/ sound").
In 1997, Congress asked the Director of the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at
the National Institutes of Health, in consultation with the
Secretary of Education, to convene a national panel to assess the
effectiveness of different approaches used to teach children to
read. The National
Reading Panel examined quantitative research studies on many
areas of reading instruction, including phonics and whole language.
The resulting report Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-based
Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its
Implications for Reading Instruction was published in 2000 and
provides a comprehensive review of what is known about best
practices in reading instruction in the U.S. The panel reported
that several reading skills are critical to becoming good readers:
phonics for word identification, fluency, vocabulary and text
comprehension. With regard to phonics, their meta-analysis of
hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research
Council: teaching phonics (and related phonics skills, such as
phonemic awareness) is a more effective way to teach children early
reading skills than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction.
The panel found that phonics instruction is an effective method of
teaching reading for students from kindergarten through 6th grade,
and for all children who are having difficulty learning to read.
They also found that phonics instruction benefits all ages in
learning to spell. They also reported that teachers need more
education about effective reading instruction, both pre-service and
in-service.
Different phonics approaches
Synthetic phonics is a method employed to teach phonics to children when learning to read. This method involves examining every spelling within the word individually as an individual sound and then blending those sounds together. For example, shrouds would be read by pronouncing the sounds for each spelling "/ʃ, r, aʊ, d, z/" and then blending those sounds orally to produce a spoken word, "/ʃraʊdz/." The goal of synthetic phonics instruction is that students identify the sound-symbol correspondences and blend their phonemes automatically. (see synthetic phonics)Analytical
phonics has children analyze sound-symbol correspondences, such
as the ou spelling of /aʊ/ in shrouds but
students do not blend those elements as they do in synthetic
phonics lessons. Furthermore, consonant blends (separate, adjacent
consonant phonemes) are taught as units (e.g., in shrouds the shr
would be taught as a unit).
Analogy phonics is a particular type of analytic
phonics in which the teacher has students 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. Teachers
using the analogy method assist students in memorizing a bank of
phonograms, such as -at or -am. Students then use these phonograms
to analogize to unknown words.
Embedded phonics is the type of phonics
instruction used in whole language programs. Although phonics
skills are de-emphasized in whole language programs, some teachers
include phonics "mini-lessons" in the context of literature. Short
lessons are included based on phonics elements that students are
having trouble with, or on a new or difficult phonics pattern that
appears in a class reading assignment. The focus on meaning is
generally maintained, but the mini-lesson provides some time for
focus on individual sounds and the symbols that represent them.
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.
Owing to the shifting debate over time (see
"History and Controversy" above), many school systems, such as
California's,
have made major changes in the method they have used to teach early
reading. Today, most teachers combine phonics with the elements of
whole language that focus on reading comprehension. Adams and the
National
Reading Panel advocate for a comprehensive reading program that
includes several different subskills, based on scientific research.
This combined approach is sometimes called balanced literacy, although some
researchers assert that balanced literacy is merely whole language
called by another name. Proponents of various approaches generally
agree that a combined approach is important. A few stalwarts favor
isolated instruction in synthetic phonics and introduction to
reading comprehension only after children have mastered
sound-symbol correspondences. On the other side, some whole
language supporters are unyielding in arguing that phonics should
be taught little, if at all.
There has been a resurgence in interest in
synthetic phonics in recent years, particularly in the United
Kingdom. The subject has been promoted by a cross-party group
of Parliamentarians, particularly Nick Gibb MP. A
recent report by the House
of Commons
Education and Skills Committee called for a review of the
phonics content in the National
Curriculum. The
Department for Education and Skills have since announced a
review into early years reading, headed by Jim Rose.
Jim Rose's group has now reported and the UK
Government has decreed that synthetic phonics should be the method
of choice for teaching reading in primary schools in England.
References
Structured, Systematic Phonics Instruction- is
the type of phonics instruction that is most effective with at-risk
or learning disabled children. This approach teaches letters and
corresponding phonemes in a very deliberate order with a great deal
of review (as needed). Children are able to retain this information
as it is carefully taught. Phonics taught in an "as needed"
approach is more characteristic of whole language.
See also
External links
wikibooks Systematic Phonics- Children of the Code Project
- Phonemic Awareness: An Important Early Step in Learning To Read. ERIC Digest.
- More information about phonemic awareness
- Phonics in Whole Language Classrooms. ERIC Digest.
- Phonics on the Web — Phonics rules including letter sounds, digraphs, r-controlled vowels, and more.
- The Sounds of English — Comprehensive lists of English words grouped by sound and spelling.
- Lets Start Smart — Video clips for learning phonics patterns.
- "Single Sound Per Symbol" simple phonetic alphabet, a bridge between phonics and phonetics
- Rigby Star Phonics - The first phonics teaching resource to be linked to Letters and Sounds
phonics in Japanese: フォニックス