Information AboutPhonics |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT PHONICS | |
| reading | |
| learning | |
| early childhood education | |
|
Phonics refers to an Instructional Design for teaching children to read. Phonics involves teaching children to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters (e.g., that the sound /k/ can be represented by ''c'', ''k'', or ''ck'' spellings). PHONICS IN ENGLISH Phonics is a widely used method of teaching Children to read, although it is not without controversy (see " History And Controversy " below). Children begin learning to read using phonics usually around the age of 5 or 6. Teaching English Reading using phonics requires children to learn the connections between letter patterns and the sounds they represent. Phonics instruction requires the teacher to provide students with a core body of information about phonics rules, or patterns. Note: This article uses General American pronunciation. Basic rules Alphabetic principle English spelling is based upon the Alphabetic Principle , the idea that letters represent sounds. For example, the word ''pat'' is composed of three letters, ''p'', ''a'', and ''t'', each representing a Phoneme , respectively, , , and .Phonemes are represented by characters placed between slash marks. Wikipedia uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (see IPA Chart For English ) to represent phonemes, accounting for the use of the character to represent the sound of the letter ''a'' in ''pat''. This system is used because it is standardized and precise. Some letters in English regularly represent one sound, such as ''b'', ''m'', and ''d''. However, the alphabetic principle is not sufficient to represent all of the spellings in English. Reading in English also requires understanding of additional patterns that do not follow the "one letter–one sound" principle. For example, the word ''shirt'' is composed of five letters which represent only three sounds, , , and . The connections between spellings (also called Graphemes ) and sounds are called "sound-symbol correspondences" or "sound-spelling correspondences," among other names. Sound-symbol correspondences often follow certain conventions, and these conventions are often called "phonics rules" or "phonics patterns." When English spelling rules take into account syllable structure, phonetics, and accents, there are literally dozens of rules that are 75% or more reliable. See reference -Abbott, M. (2000). Identifying reliable generalizations for spelling words: The importance of multilevel analysis. The Elementary School Journal 101(2), 233-245. English has many phonics patterns. These vary considerably in the degree to which they follow the stated pattern. For example, the letters ''ee'' almost always represent . On the other hand, the grapheme ''ough'' represents as in ''enough'', as in ''though'', as in ''through'', as in ''cough'', and as in ''bough''. Therefore, teachers generally teach that ''ee'' says but rarely teach a pattern for the letters ''ough''. Because a large body of patterns that constantly conflict is antithetical to students remembering the patterns they are taught, elementary school children often learn a selection of these patterns known to be most consistent. A selection of these is given below, although not all of these are taught by teachers. Vowel phonics patterns
Consonant phonics patterns
The final "short vowel+consonant pattern" is just one example of dozens that can be used to help children unpack the challenging English alphabetic code. This example illustrates that, while complex, English spelling retains order and reason. Sight words and high frequency words
History and controversy Because of the complexity of the English alphabetic structure, more than a century of debate has occurred over whether English phonics ought to be taught at all. Beginning in the mid 19th century, some American educators, prominently Horace Mann , argued this point precisely. This led to the commonly used "look-say" approach ensconced in the " Dick And Jane " readers popular in the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1950s, however, phonics resurfaced as a method of teaching reading. Spurred by Rudolf Flesch 's polarizing, bombastic criticism of the absence of phonics instruction (particularly in his popular book, '' Why Johnny Can't Read '') phonics resurfaced, but—owing to Flesch's polemical approach—the term "phonics" became associated with political ideology. The popularity of phonics rose, but many educators associated it with " Back To Basics " Pedagogy and eschewed it. In the 1980s, the " Whole Language " approach to reading further polarized the debate in the United States. Whole language instruction was predicated on the principle that children could learn to read given (a) proper Motivation , (b) access to quality Literature , (c) many reading opportunities, (d) focus on meaning, and (e) instruction to help students use meaning clues to determine the pronunciation of unknown words. For some advocates of whole language, phonics was the antithesis of this emphasis on getting at the meaning. Parsing words into small chunks and reassembling them had no connection to the ideas the author wanted to convey. Much of the whole language theory easily dovetailed with phonics, but the whole language emphasis on understanding words through context and focusing only a little on the sounds (usually the alphabet consonants and the short vowels) could not be reconciled with the phonics emphasis on individual sound-symbol correspondences. Thus, a false dichotomy between the whole language approach and phonics emerged in the United States, leading to intense debate and ultimately to a Congress ionally-commissioned book and two government-funded panels focused on phonics. The book '''' (Adams, 1990) argued that phonics was an effective way for students to learn to read. Adams argued strongly that both the phonics and the whole language advocates were right. Phonics was an effective way to teach students the alphabetic code. By learning the alphabetic code early, students could quickly free up mental energy they had used to word analysis and devote this mental effort to meaning, leading to stronger comprehension earlier in elementary education. This result matched the goal of whole language instruction while the means supported the advocates of phonics. The argument, eventually known as "the Great Debate" continued unabated. The National Research Council re-examined the question of phonics (among other questions in education) and published the results of its Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, and Griffin, 1998). The National Research Council's findings matched those of Adams. Phonics was a very effective way to teach children to read, more effective than what was known as the "embedded phonics" approach of whole language (where phonics was taught opportunistically in the context of literature). They found that phonics must be systematic (following a sequence of increasingly challenging phonics patterns) and explicit (teaching students precisely how the patterns worked, e.g., "this is ''b'', it stands for the /b/ sound"). The most recent attempt to determine what approach made the most sense was undertaken by the National Reading Panel ( National Institute Of Child Health And Human Development , 2001), which examined quantitative research studies on phonics (as well as other areas of reading instruction). Their meta-analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council: phonics is a more effective way to teach children to read than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction. They found that phonics had particularly strong benefits for students of low socio-economic status. DIFFERENT PHONICS APPROACHES Synthetic Phonics is a method employed to teach phonics to children when learning to read. This method involves examining every spelling within the word individually as an individual sound and then blending those sounds together. For example, ''shrouds'' would be read by pronouncing the sounds for each spelling "" and then blending those sounds orally to produce a spoken word, "." The goal of synthetic phonics instruction is that students identify the sound-symbol correspondences and blend their phonemes automatically. (see Synthetic Phonics ) Analytic phonics has children analyze sound-symbol correspondences, such as the ''ou'' spelling of in ''shrouds'' but students do not blend those elements as they do in synthetic phonics lessons. Furthermore, Consonant Blends (separate, adjacent consonant phonemes) are taught as units (e.g., in ''shrouds'' the ''shr'' would be taught as a unit). Analogy phonics is a particular type of analytic phonics in which the teacher has students analyze phonic elements according to the phonograms in the word. A phonogram, known in linguistics as a Rime , is composed of the vowel and all the sounds that follow it. Teachers using the analogy method assist students in memorizing a bank of phonograms, such as ''-at'' or ''-am''. Students then use these phonograms to analogize to unknown words. Embedded Phonics is the hallmark of traditional whole language phonics programs. Phonics is taught in the context of literature using "mini-lessons," short lessons that emphasize phonic elements with which the teacher has seen students struggle. The focus on meaning is generally maintained, but the mini-lesson provides some time for focus on individual sounds or phonograms. Embedded phonics differs from other methods in that the instruction is always in the context of literature and that separate lessons are not typically taught. There has been a resurgence in interest in synthetic phonics in recent years, particularly in the United Kingdom . The subject has been promoted by a cross-party group of Parliamentarians, particularly Nick Gibb MP. A recent report by the House Of Commons Education And Skills Committee called for a review of the phonics content in the National Curriculum . The Department For Education And Skills have since announced a review into early years reading, headed by Jim Rose. Jim Rose's group has now reported and the UK Government has decreed that synthetic phonics should be the method of choice for teaching reading in primary schools in England. Free phonics programs using synthetic phonics can be found at Don Potter’s Education Page and The Phonics Page . Phonics is the core of beginning reading programs like Hooked On Phonics . REFERENCES SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|