If you knew there is a special code that could help your students read approximately 84% of all the words they will ever encounter, would you teach it to them? I suspect most of you would be eager to do it. At its core, that is exactly what phonics instruction is!
What Is Phonics?
Most historians agree that it was the Phoenicians who were the first culture to create a set of symbols to represent the sounds of their language. Borrowing from the Phoenicians’ example, the Greeks and the Romans developed their own systems of writing using letter and sound correspondences. The first written form of English was developed around the middle of the fifth century, and it followed suit.
In educational settings, phonics is a method of instruction that helps students learn to read by teaching them the letter and sound correspondences and then asking the students to blend those sounds together to form spoken words. This is often referred to as sounding-out words or decoding words. The approach can also be reversed to provide students with a strategy to spell or encode words based upon the isolated sounds they hear within a word.
The phonics approach to reading and spelling instruction has been with us for a very long time. Evidence of it can be seen in the New England Primer, which was published in 1690, and in the first widely utilized series of elementary school-level textbooks, the McGuffey Readers, used from 1800–1900. In fact, Williams Holmes McGuffey once stated that his books were:
“… especially adapted to the Phonic Method and to the Combined Word and Phonic Method, which are the two methods most extensively used by successful teachers of primary reading.”
Why We Stopped Using Phonics to Teach Reading
In the 1800s Horace Mann, considered by some as the father of American public schools, came back to America after a visit to Europe determined to change the way that reading was taught. Mann believed that whole words should be taught first.
The anti-phonics movement was further promoted in the early 1900s by Arthur Gates from Columbia University and Edmund Huey from John Hopkins University. Huey even went so far as to propose that it was permittable for a child to substitute words of his/her own for the words that were printed on the page.
While not generally a conspiracy theorist, I do want to mention that these events were happening during The Progressive Era, while our nation was considering passing its first laws limiting child labor and mandating childhood education. It’s hard not to speculate that perhaps this movement away from phonics may have been an attempt by the elites to keep the working class in their place.
By the 1930s, phonics instruction had been largely abandoned by most of our nation’s teachers, and this situation continued for decades. The whole-word memorization or “look-say” approach was used to teach multiple generations of American students. But there was a problem, a lot of children were having trouble learning to read, and their numbers just kept growing.
What the Current Research Says
As a response to this problem, the government’s National Reading Panel released a report in 2000, after conducting one of the largest research projects ever completed. They had reviewed the existing research on reading and concluded that early, systematic instruction in phonics is the best way to teach children how to read. The latest research supports their findings. Today’s best teaching practices for reading instruction are identified as “The Science of Reading."
With all the latest research pointing us in one direction, you may feel hopeful that the problem has finally been solved. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Generations of teachers have not been trained to teach phonics effectively, and most of them did not learn to read using phonics either. Historically, college classes for teachers on how to teach reading have amounted to little more than literature appreciation classes. College professors cling to their failed approaches, especially when large sums of money are involved. Publishers of some reading programs have added phonics lessons to their already existing programs, without fully researching how phonics should be taught.
We still have a long way to go in helping our teachers become more effective at teaching reading. Let’s hope they will be provided with the training and resources they need, so in turn they can help their students find success.
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