Phonics was not always accepted as a reliable means of teaching reading to children, let alone adults, as it is today. In a brief history of phonics and how it got started, one can tell that phonics was pitted against the “whole language” approach back in the 19th century, where maximization of exposure to all sorts of literature was used to motivate children to read and be familiar with the context of these materials in order
to determine on their own how such words they encounter were pronounced. Being highly dependent on the use of whole words, the approa ch totally clashed with the Phonics method because the latter dealt with words as individual letters and syllables with individual pronunciations rather than as a whole.
This whole language approach, however, caused some problems because they gave very little focus on sounds, which is a vital aspect in learning how to read. This led to the consideration by the United States of the use of phonics in the year 1990. But instead of replacing totally the whole language approach with the phonics system, the two were integrated to arrive with a hybrid approach.
The result was that students were better able to understand the sound of words by identifying individual alphabetic codes that made up the pronunciations of words, which is an important step to better reading instruction. This gave way to better contextual understanding of literature as aimed by the whole language approach.
Later on various forms of approaches to phonics were developed. From then on reading instruction in schools have gradually improved, which led to further studies that aimed to further develop the capacity of learning and reading for every generation. Until now, the methods of reading instruction continues to be worked upon and they are as we know them today.
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