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Phonics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters (e.g., that the sound /k/ can be represented by c, k, ck or ch spellings) and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations of unknown words. Phonics is a widely used method of teaching 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 students 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.
Reading
GENERAL INFORMATION Literacy Functional illiteracy Braille Family literacy TYPES Close reading Proofreading Slow reading Speed reading Subvocalization LEARNING TO READ Comprehension Reading disability Dyslexia Spelling Vocabulary English orthography READING INSTRUCTION Phonics Alphabetic principle Whole language LISTS Assessments Publications Topics Languages by writing system Management of Dyslexia
Contents
1 Basic rules 1.1 Alphabetic principle 1.2 Vowel phonics patterns 1.3 Consonant phonics patterns 2 Sight words and high frequency words 3 History and controversy 3.1 Whole language 3.2 Research reports 4 Different phonics approaches 5 See also 6 References 7 External links
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.
Basic rules
Alphabetic principle
From a linguistics perspective, English spelling is based on the alphabetic principle. In an alphabetic
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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/, //, and /t/.[1] 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 it attempts to represent the 40+ phonemes of the spoken language with an alphabet composed of only 26 letters (and no accents). As a result, two letters are often fused together into groups that represent distinct sounds, referred to as digraphs. For example "t" and "h" placed side by side are used to represent either // or //. English has absorbed many words from other languages throughout its history, usually without changing the spelling of those words. As a result, the written form of English includes the spelling patterns of five languages (Old English, Old Norse, Norman, Classical Latin and Greek) superimposed upon one another.[2] These overlapping spelling patterns mean that 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.[3] 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 /i/, but the sound can also be represented by the letter y. Similarly, the letter cluster ough represents /f/ as in enough, /o/ as in though, /u/ as in through, /f/ as in cough, /a/ as in bough, // as in bought, and /p/ as in hiccough, while in slough and lough, the pronunciation varies. 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.[4] A selection of phonics patterns is shown below.
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common diphthongs. The commonly recognized diphthongs are /a/ as in cow and // as in boil. Four of the long vowels are also technically diphthongs, /e/, /a/, /o/, and /ju/, 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 // sound and the oo spelling of the /u/ and // 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.)
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whether English phonics should or should not be used in teaching beginning reading. Despite the work of 19th century proponents such as Rebecca Smith Pollard, 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, inspired by a landmark study by Dr. Harry E. Houtz, 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.
Whole language
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 led to a series of Congressionally-commissioned panels and governmentfunded reviews of the state of reading instruction in the U.S.
Research reports
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. [6] 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. [7] 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. 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. [8] The National Research Council's findings largely matched those
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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"). ..[9] 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. [10] 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 metaanalysis 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. [11] 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.
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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 [12] 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. [13] 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.
See also
Allography Alphabetic principle Dyslexia English orthography Initial Teaching Alphabet List of phonics programs Phonemic awareness Reading recovery Synthetic phonics Whole language Balanced Literacy
References
1. ^ Phonemes are represented by characters placed between slash marks. Wikipedia uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (see Help:IPA for English) to represent phonemes, accounting for the use of the character to represent the sound of the letter a in pat. This system is used because it is standardized and precise. 2. ^ McGuinness, Diane. (2004). Early Reading Instruction Cambridge: MIT Press 41. 3. ^ Wren, Sebastian. Exception Words, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Retrieved from http://www.sedl.org/reading/topics/exception.html, September 30, 2007. 4. ^ Abbott, M. (2000). Identifying reliable generalizations for spelling words: The importance of multilevel analysis. The Elementary School Journal 101(2), 233-245. 5. ^ Jeremy Smith, Introduction to Linguistic Theory and English Historical Linguistics 6. ^ Becoming a Nation of Readers, National Academy of Education, Center for the Study of Reading, 1984 7. ^ Adams, Marilyn J. Beginning to read:thinking and learning about print. MIT Press, February 1994; ISBN . 8. ^ Snow, Catherine E., Susan Burns, Peg Griffin, eds. Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, National Research Council,
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1998 ISBN 0-309-06418-X 9. ^ Ziegler & Goswami (2005), Reading Acquisition, Developmental Dyslexia, and Skilled Reading Across Languages: A Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory, Psychological Bulletin; 131:3-29}} 10. ^ National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 11. ^ Findings and Determinations of the National Reading Panel by Topic Areas 12. ^ Adams, Marilyn Jager (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-51076-6. 13. ^ Moats, Louisa. Whole language high hinks: How to tell when scientifically-based reading instruction isn't, January 2007. Retrieved Feb 12, 2008.
External links
Phonemic Awareness: An Important Early Step in Learning To Read. ERIC Digest. Phonics in Whole Language Classrooms. ERIC Digest. Using Phonics Extensive phonics information for parents and educators. 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. Children of the Code Includes transcripts and videos of interviews with key researchers. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics" Categories: Phonics | Learning | Early childhood education This page was last modified on 6 November 2009 at 21:04. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
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