PHONICS

• Phonics is the association of sounds with letters. Teachers using the phonics method of reading use basal readers which gradually introduce skills and vocabulary. Phonic rules are taught so the student has a formula to sound out unfamiliar words.
• Over 80% of the English language is phonetically based, but many schools do not teach phonics for reading or spelling.

• The whole language method of teaching reading is to expose children to meaningful stories in learning to read.
• Many whole language teachers do not teach decoding skills for sounding out unfamiliar words. Students are instructed to read the story to derive context clues for unfamiliar words or new vocabulary.
• Many do not teach children the phonetic patterns and rules of the English Language. Some teachers do not even teach spelling.

What Happens to Decoding Skills?

Ask yourself this question: what is more important, reading Shakespeare and Tolstoy, or being able to read newspapers and medical books?

 

 

Certainly we all want our children to read for enjoyment. But if children who are taught to read with mini-literature great books do not learn how to decode words, they will never be able to read newspapers or college entrance questions.
 

What Happens to Reading Skills?

Without the decoding skills of phonics, a child must rely on the remainder of the sentence for context clues or picture clues in figuring out an unfamiliar word. The unfamiliar word will not be sounded out by the reader because the child does not have these skills.

 

 

By teaching phonics, you give to the reader the formula for sounding out unfamiliar written words that are in their spoken vocabulary, but not in their sight vocabulary. Some children are natural born readers and learn how to decode words by themselves. Unfortunately, not many children are natural born readers.
 

What Happens To Spelling Skills?

By removing phonics from spelling, children must use memory skills for each word versus applying rules for over 80% of the English Language. For example, by failing to teach the "ou" sound, children do not have the formula for spelling loud, round, mouth, trouble, count.

 

 

If a teacher uses spelling words from a science unit, i.e., crustacean, currents, pollution, camouflage, oceanographer, then the student must memorize each word versus learning a formula for phonetic values. In a phonics classroom these might be the words for the week: proud, round, mouth, trough, loud, ground.

Yes, children can memorize the science words for the week's spelling test, but will they be able to spell the word's next week?