The Advantages of Learning Phonics Prior to Reading

Phonics instruction increases reading performance.

Teachers and parents continue to search for appropriate methods to teach children to read. With educators often disagreeing on the effectiveness of teaching strategies and theoretical approaches, it is important to review the methods researchers claim to be more effective. The introduction of phonics prepares children to acquire reading skills.

The ABCs of Phonics

Phonics instruction focuses on putting sounds with letters. When learning phonics, students recognize that different letters (graphemes) have different sounds (phonemes). Through practice exercises, repetition of sounds and writing letters, they begin to associate sounds with letters through repeated pairings. With enough practice, they are then able to recall the sounds associated with letters when they see them in printed text. When students sound out the letters they see in print, they are decoding information. Students decode text into sound to interpret written messages. Since the English language has so many words, learning to read relying on simple memorization techniques (reading by sight) alone is not as effective.

The Importance of Phoneme Awareness

Phonemic awareness describes a student's ability to recognize that words are made up of sounds. This awareness also includes recognizing whether word pairs rhyme. Students with phonemic awareness will be able to correctly detect rhymes in spoken words. Children who have developed phonemic awareness also have the ability to identify what word is left when one of the component sounds of that word is taken away. Children who exhibit phonemic awareness show a greater tendency toward success in beginning reading. Students with phonemic awareness can blend separate sounds into words, and inversely, dissect words into their separate sounds.

The Effects of Phonemic Awareness

Students who receive phonemic awareness training exhibit better performance with reading skills and decoding words and letters. In addition, these students show improved spelling performance after receiving phonemic awareness training.

The Role of Explicit Phonics Instruction

In a comparison of popular educational programs for students performing below average in reading, practicing teacher Crystal Kelly, MA., Ed., and Linda Campbell, Ph.D., professor of graduate education at Antioch University in Seattle, recognized explicit phonics instruction as a key component in all of the programs they studied in their collaborative research. In their interviews with successful reading educators, all 10 asserted that explicit phonics instruction is crucial to better reading performance.

The Debate of Effectiveness

Teaching phonics has come in and out of favor with the educational community several times in the last 70 years. Yet because of its apparent effectiveness in improving student reading, spelling and writing skills, it remains an integral part of school curriculums.

References

• Johns Hopkins University: Helping Struggling Readers
• University of Oregon: Alphabetic Principle
• University of Oregon: Literacy Acquisition in Early Primary: A Traditional Phonics or Whole-Language Approach?
• Wake Forest University: Research on the Components of a Comprehensive Reading and Writing Instructional Program