Massey University, Institute of Education
Schools are often required to make decisions about whether or not to purchase particular commercial resources and/or professional development initiatives to improve teaching and learning. Decisions need to be made about various aspects including the costs, the appropriateness and the purported effectiveness of such programmes and/or initiatives. As teachers become more aware of the importance of including phonicsbased teaching in their literacy programmes there has been a tendency to sign up for professional development courses and/or to purchase such resources. While such initiatives may result in improved literacy performances for many students, it is important that schools are also aware of some of the limitations of these programmes and initiatives. Phonics has a bad name mainly due to some misconceptions The main purpose of any phonics programme should be to help children become better readers and spellers. Phonics is a method of instruction that teaches students about the relationship between how the letters and spelling patterns of written English match up with the speech sounds they represent. In order to effectively instruct children about the letter-sound relationships requires that teachers have an understanding of the roles that ‘cipher’ knowledge, ‘lexical’ knowledge and knowledge of the ‘alphabetic principle’ (explained later) play in relation to helping students become fluent readers and spellers. The extent to which these understandings are promoted within any phonics programme or professional development course should also form the prime consideration regarding their likely effectiveness in any school.
Even the word ‘phonics’ connotes negative thinking among many teachers irrespective of their prior experiences with such programmes. Some see it as representative of ‘old ideas’ that have no place in 21st century classes. Some misconstrue phonics as an approach that teaches students to sound out every letter of every word. While phonics programmes do focus on the teaching of the relationships between the letters and how they (singly and collectively) can represent the sounds in words, this does not mean that every letter of every word should be taught as always representing a single sound. There are some very basic words that can be ‘sounded out’ letter-sound by letter-sound (e.g., c/a/t, p/e/g/, w/e/n/t) but most words (e.g., mother, house, penicillin, chlorophyll) require that the developing reader has more sophisticated word identification strategies beyond having basic letter-sound awareness before the word is recognised by sight. Phonemic awareness and phonics Before children are able to grasp any understanding of phonics instruction they must first have a reasonable level of phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness involves having a conscious awareness of how words are made up of separate units of sound. If children are not able to hear and identify the difference (and similarity) between the sounds in even simple CVC words such as cat and bat for example, then they are not likely to gain anything from being asked to ‘sound out’ these words in a reading situation. Most children require explicit instruction and experience to help them to understand the relationship between letters and how they map on to the sounds of English. Reading researchers refer to this as the ‘alphabetic principle’. Furthermore, some children
require more instruction (and for longer periods) than others before they are able to fully understand the alphabetic principle. The level of explicitness and duration of phonemic awareness instruction required depends on each child’s literacy-related knowledge and skills at school entry. We now know that children who come to school with high levels of literate cultural capital (e.g., alphabet knowledge, basic phonemic awareness, rhyme awareness, concepts about print) are more likely to learn to read quicker and with less difficulties than are those who enter school with limited levels of literate cultural capital. To ensure that instruction is relevant to individual needs also requires relevant assessment. Focussed assessments enable the teacher to ascertain which students require more or less phonemic awareness at the outset. Phonics programmes seldom include any focus on either the assessment or the teaching of phonemic awareness. Cipher and lexical knowledge, spelling rules and the limitations of phonics programmes There is no phonics programme that is able to teach every English letter-sound combination because there are hundreds of these. Juel and Minden-Cupp (2000) refer to this as the ‘orthographic avalanche of print’. However, what phonics instruction does do is introduce the reader to some of variable spelling-sound combinations that make up words. While there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet and approximately 42 sounds, most of the sounds can be represented (in written form) in more than one way. For example the vowel sound represented in even basic words such as the a/ in; cat, ate, was, saw, car are all different. Sounding out every letter in these words would clearly not be an
effective strategy without cipher and lexical knowledge. While basic cipher knowledge involves the understanding that many words are able to be decoded using direct lettersound relationships, this strategy soon becomes inefficient for irregularly spelled words. A higher level of knowledge is necessary and this is called lexical knowledge. An example of this is the sound that the a/ vowel represents in each of the following words: cat, skate, water, watch. The particular sound is determined by the letters surrounding the vowel. There are also a large group of words that have identical spellings (homographs) but are pronounced differently depending on the context in which they appear within sentences, (e.g., He wound the bandage around the wound). In this second example, the pronunciation of the word (wound) was determined by the surrounding context. To determine the correct pronunciation of irregularly spelled words requires that the reader uses a flexible decoding strategy known as a ‘set for variability’. This strategy involves the reader being able to try several pronunciation approximations (based on English orthographic-phonological probabilities) if they are uncertain of the correct one. These approximations, when used in conjunction with sentence context cues, are usually sufficient for the word to be successfully decoded, (provided the word is in the reader’s listening vocabulary). However, because of their ‘stand-alone’ method of delivery (such as learning of isolated letters and letter sounds via worksheet or workbook tasks that constitute most phonics programmes), such methods do not allow the students to develop cipher knowledge awareness. While phonics programmes do not specifically focus on the teaching cipher or lexical knowledge or the ‘set for variability’ decoding strategy, they at least expose the readers to the alphabetic principle by encouraging them to look closely at the spelling patterns in words. Many phonics programmes also tend to focus on teaching spelling rules. However, many of these rules are presented as explicit statements (e.g., when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking) and a problem with this (and many other rules) is that they are not always accurate. Words such as eat, mean, boat, and bait for example, do conform to the vowel rule, but there are many occasions where the rule is not correct (e.g., great, heard, board & said). In these examples it is not the first vowel that ‘does the talking’. In fact, often neither vowel has a specific vowel sound but a completely different sound altogether. While phonics rules are explicit, cipher and lexical knowledge develop in a more implicit way where the reader needs to initially induce the correct pronunciation via trial and error approximation attempts. Phonics rules are also rather slow and laborious to learn and apply whereas the implicit nature of cipher and lexical knowledge means that such knowledge is best learned and integrated during regular reading by using metacognitive and flexible word identification strategies such as the ‘set for variability’ strategy. Phonics programmes are also generally very teacherdominated. This is because many of the skills and concepts tend to be taught via rote learning measures using a lock-step series of lesson sequences. Many phonics programmes have also often been described as ‘skill and drill’ approaches that rely heavily on fixed and rigid sets of lessons and dominated by lots of workbook and/or worksheet tasks. Given that the development of phonemic awareness is a critical precursor component of cipher and lexical knowledge (which in
turn positively impacts on later reading development) any early literacy programmes should include both relevant assessments that focus on these skills and instructional components that encourage the metacognitive strategy development for improving both reading and spelling skills. Maybe some phonics is better than no phonics, provided that the relevant assessment data indicates that there is a need for such a programme in the first place. However, ascertaining the relevant instructional needs requires that teachers have access to relevant assessment tools, and currently, these are not freely available for most schools. Whole language plus phonics: the myth of a ‘balanced’ approach While it is often claimed that most schools use a combination of both whole language and phonics approaches under the guise of a ‘balanced’ reading programme, the reality is not quite that simple. Having 20 minutes of a stand-alone phonics programme followed by 20 minutes of regular guided reading does not constitute a ‘balanced’ approach. Moats (2000) argues for example that “a lot of people who have a casual acquaintance with the research have persuaded themselves that balanced reading instruction means a little of this, a little of that. Take a cup of phonics from one cupboard and add a half pint of whole language from the fridge, and the resulting blend will succeed with children” (p.iii). As Moats further argues “It doesn’t work that way” (p.iii). There is now sufficient research evidence demonstrating that children who enter school with high levels of literate cultural capital including phonemic awareness, learn to read more quickly and more efficiently than do those who enter with minimal levels of such awareness. The evidence also shows that in order to benefit from any phonics-based instruction requires a satisfactory level of phonemic awareness first. Stand-alone phonics programmes tend not to include any focus on either the assessment or the teaching of phonemic awareness. Rather, they tend to focus directly on the teaching of spelling-to-sound relationships in the printed words. The rationale behind most phonics programmes includes the expectation that all children will somehow learn how the alphabetic system works by receiving a ‘teach-by-exposure’ instructional approach where letters and spelling patterns are continually presented in the form of activities like card games, workbook and worksheet tasks. Some children (e.g., those with already high levels of phonemic awareness) may improve their knowledge about the English spelling system from such instruction alone. However, most children who develop early reading difficulties tend to be those who enter school with minimal levels of literate cultural capital, and involvement in phonics programmes for these groups will not be particularly effective unless attention is first given to the assessment and teaching of the precursor phonemic awareness skills.
classes. Furthermore, such teachers are also less likely to need to rely on stand-alone commercial phonics programmes as their main resource for teaching about the English orthographic system. There are currently few if any phonics programmes that give sufficient attention to the assessment or teaching of the important precursor phonemic awareness skills. Also phonics programmes tend to not have any focus on improving teachers’ research-based pedagogical knowledge relating to how children learn to read and/or why some have difficulties. Finally, phonics programmes tend to assume that all children need to be exposed to a whole lot of information about all the letters and spelling patterns (including many spelling rules) and then expect them to somehow remember all this when reading and writing at some later stage. For the phonemically aware student, some of this information may be recalled at the appropriate time as a means to help them decode, but this is more likely to occur if the students are also taught about the alphabetic principle and how this develops cipher and lexical knowledge. Given that the ultimate purpose of phonics-based instruction must be to develop improved decoding and spelling skills, it makes sense that the effects of such instruction should also be seen to transfer to regular reading and writing contexts. The current modus operandi of most stand-alone phonics programmes are likely to be even less effective if the students then go into an instructional reading environment where phonological-based word identification strategies are not also promoted and encouraged. References: Juel, C., & Minden-Cupp, C. (2000). Learning to read words: Linguistic units and instructional strategies. Reading Research Quarterly, 35, 458-492. Moats, L.C. (2000). Whole language lives on: The illusion of “balanced” reading instruction. Washington DC. Thomas B Fordham Foundation.
Conclusions Any phonics is probably better than no phonics at all. However phonics programmes are likely to have differential effects on different children depending upon each child’s level of phonemic awareness. Teachers who have the relevant pedagogical knowledge about how children learn to read and why some have difficulties learning to read are likely to be more able to design and implement relevant and focused instruction in their