Phonics

Background

Once upon a time, actually, around the mid 1960's, within the wall of many North American classrooms, a majority of state-funded public school primary teachers taught students how to read using the phonemic awareness philosophy, or, for short, using phonics to teach very young children how to read. In its most simplest of form, phonemic awareness stipulates that youngsters attend to sounds in words by mentally manipulating them. This systematic teaching of phonics included stories that reinforced taught letters and demanded that students apply what they has learned immediately. One such reading series that I particularly enjoyed when I was a novice teacher was called Language Patterns.  The philosophy behind this series was echoed by hundreds of other studies on grade one reading; students were making bigger gains in word recognition, word decoding, vocabulary, comprehension, and spelling than students using other more visual based reading programs.  By grade two, many students in this "old language" reading program were already independent readers.

Then, around 1982, the "how-best-to-teach-reading" pendulum took a severe swing to the left.   A new educational broom swept across many Canadian and American grade one classrooms.   Out went the conventional "bat-cat-fat-hat-mat-pat-rat-sat-vat" way of teaching reading. Simply stated, the old language of reading via phonics was out and the whole language of reading experiences was in.

This new Gestalt therapy approach supposedly was needed to make language 'whole' again, as previous reading ways only dealt with bits and chunks of language. Unlike reading packages such as Language Patters, perceived as boring and less creative, whole language theorists, including the American linguist, Ken Goodman, and the Canadian Harvard-educated cognitive psychologist, Frank Smith, surmized that good readers use a combination of meaning cues or context, controlled vocabularies, and a bit of sound knowledge to make common sense of what they read.

Teaching simply the sound of letters prevented a language from being whole but old. There was no need to teach the alphabet as the alphabet was now (supposedly) learned by experiencing and modeling. To sum, this new meaning-is-all message consumed the minds of numerous primary reading teachers throughout the Western world. Out was the sounding of words by their letter combinations and in was language through experimentation and experiences ... also commonly referred to as simply guessing. Some teachers even used a checklist to remind themselves to focus on the meaning of words and not on word accuracy.

Restated slightly differently, whole language was reading for meaning, telling young children to make good guesses based on contextual clues. In its most simplest form, whole language suggested that stories were easier to read than pages, pages were easier to read than paragraphs, paragraphs easier than sentences, sentences easier than words, and worst still, words easier than letters. Unlike the old language reading approach, whole language did not have so many rules. Whole language reading programs such as the Impression series assumed that students did not need to know the reason behind things.

Whole language often consisted of reading a story so often to a group of children that they were able to memorize it and pretend to read it back. Phonics, that reading technique of recognizing words by the sounds of their letters and then matching spelling patterns, was now dead. Gone was that reading approach in which systematic code instruction, or phonics, was included with the reading of meaningful connected text.

Home Tutoring Program

My home tutoring program includes a phonic-based system for teaching children how to read. Children learn all of the 40+ sounds of the English language, not just the alphabet. They are taken through the stages of blending sounds to form words and then onward into reading. This structured step-by-step letter sound approach uses reproducible worksheets. My system enables students to identify and blend all of the sounds in words before they begin reading words in books. This ground work brings fluency to their reading and writing much earlier than a reading approach using a visual, whole word approach. As well, my home tutoring reading package includes the following steps.

1. Sound Sheets:
There is a sound sheet for each of the 42 sounds we use in English. Five (5) of the 42 sounds are:

a       ant, sand, caravan

ai       aim, aid, drain

b       bat, bend, crab

c       cat, cot, duck

d       dog, dip, sudden

2. Auditory Training:
2a. Auditory skills for reading
2b. Blending sounds
2c. Identifying the sounds in words:
        2c1. Five of the 25 initial consonant blends are: bl, cl, dw, sc, and str
        2c2. Five of the 15 final consonant blends are: lb, ld, ct, nt, and mp
3. Reading Books
3a. Pre-reading skills
3a1. Some of the most commonly used irregular words are:
        of, to, was, you, one, said
        they, some, come, once, to, could
        should, would, other, mother, brother, there
        where, who, what, their, two, want
4. Writing
4a. Homework writing sheets
4b. Classroom worksheets
4c. Independent writing
4c1. Vowel sounds:
4c1a. Some examples are:
long a ... ai, a-e, ay (chain, late, day)
long e ... ee, ea (sleep, dream)
long i ... ie, i-e,igh, y (pie, ride, light, fry)
long o .... oa, o-e, ow (coat, bone, snow)
long u ... ue, u-e, ew (Tuesday, cute, few)
short oo ... oo, u (book, put)
5. Spelling
Some high frequency words are:
he, came, our, gave, saw, egg
she, come, over, girl, say, hill
me, some, other, give, school, horse
we, could, mother, going, take, letter
be, would, brother, green, tell, milk
To sum, this approach to teaching reading, writing, and spelling is based on the young child hearing all the sounds of English, not just the sounds of the letters of the alphabet. Each sound is related to a letter or letters, for example, 'm', 'ch', and 'ai'.
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Clifford Morris
November 04, 2004.