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Phonics in the Classroom

These days, it seems that more and more schools across our country are shifting to reading programs that focus on whole word or whole language based learning. And given that trend, it seems that the benefits of phonics are being far too often overlooked by educators and school systems today. Yet phonics should not be overlooked, as bringing phonics into the classroom provides students with a firm base of knowledge that will help them for years to come.

It is important, first of all, to understand the difference between what most US schools are focusing on, whole language reading, as opposed to phonics. Currently, children are being taught to read using the whole word, or whole language approach in which students are expected to learn entire words at a time, typically by repetition drills involving (at least initially) various activities such as following a story along while the educator reads the same story aloud. The individual words are not broken down but rather, the theory is that the more times the children are exposed to the words by both seeing and hearing them the quicker they will eventually learn them on sight. Phonics, however, takes a far more elemental approach, in which words are broken down into significantly smaller components, with the goal being for the student to eventually learn all of the different sounds of the English language and eventually be able to take that understanding and apply it to reading.

Whole word reading programs are well intentioned in that they attempt to teach students to develop an immediate recognition of familiar words which, if accomplished, could in theory lead to quicker and more conversational reading. However, the underlying problem with this concept is that this is not how the brain works. The brain wants to decipher difficult to understand concepts down to the simplest parts. Teaching whole language reading may work for some students, but for the vast majority, the failure to teach students the way that words are built, the exact sounds of each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, and the 44 different sounds that make up the English language, is serving as a deterrent to their learning.

Educators today need to get back on board with phonics, because the most effective way to stimulate young readers is to teach them the tools that they can use themselves to read. Students need to learn each of the individual sounds that make up these words, and the relationships that these sounds have with one another. This fundamental core of knowledge is what they will grab onto when delving into more and increasingly difficult reading tasks, and it is the educator’s job to provide them with arsenal.

When attempting to introduce a phonics program into the classroom, it is most helpful to stagger the instruction into a series of stages, the completion of each of which can be viewed as the achievement of a milestone of sort and can then trigger advancement to the next step of instruction. Some examples of the various stages that a comprehensive phonics program contains are:

1. Awareness of sounds: The most basic phonics instruction begins here. What do the letters of the alphabet sound like? How can the same letter sound different ways?
2. Sound-spelling awareness: How do different letter combinations make different sounds? What are the 44 distinct sounds that exist within the English language
3. Blending: How can different sounds be combined to create new sounds, and to create words?
4. Spelling: Spelling is clearly a critical component in any school system, phonics based or not. However, as part of a phonics program spelling encompasses not only how words are spelled but how the knowledge of sounds can help to determine how they are spelled.

One of the most exciting elements of a successful phonics education program is the knowledge that when implemented properly, it can result in tremendous results over a very short period of time. In fact, many students who begin a phonics program at the start of a school year by learning nothing more than single letter sounds can, by the end of that very same school year, be reading full sentences without assistance, due in large part to their deliberate mastery of the sound components of words in the English language. Mere reliance on whole word learning could take significantly longer, relying in many cases on memorization and the need to see the same words on multiple occasions before actually knowing what they are.

There are a number of commercially available programs in the marketplace today, and it is important for educators to consider all of their options and to figure out exactly which program is right for their classroom. However, regardless of which program may be chosen, there is little doubt that phonics education should be implemented in any classroom in which learning to read is a goal. It will turn good readers into great readers, and it will likely be what enables students who otherwise have been struggling to get started to become readers themselves.

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