Why It Has to Be Phonics-ONLY

 

Q. Our teachers say that they do, too, teach reading with phonics. It's just not the only strategy they use. They say phonics doesn't work with all kids. Are they right?

 

Well, no, they are not. Phonics works with 99% of the kids. The system they're using obviously works with only about one-third - based on the percentage of students today who are reading at or above grade level.

 

Phonics is merely the logical code that connects the sounds the alphabet letters make with the written symbols for them. The 70 "phonograms," or sound-symbol correspondences, are taught in a particular order, along with the specific rules of spelling and proper handwriting.

 

You can teach phonics with a set of flash cards, a teacher's manual, paper, pencil and a chalkboard, using school library books for the most part. It takes about 40 hours of training to learn how to teach it. Most kindergartners are reading and writing very well by Christmas of the kindergarten year when taught with a phonics-only method. But almost no teachers' colleges teach it, so almost no teachers know how to use it any more. It's a shame, too, because it's easy, cheap and highly effective.

 

The vast majority of teachers only know how to teach "implicit" phonics, and that's the problem. With implicit phonics, kids are never taught the complete code in a systematic, intensive way. In the vast majority of classrooms today, if you don't know what a word is, you have several different strategies to try to come up with it:

 

What the first letter is, so you can guess

What the last letter is, so you can guess

Position in the sentence

Context of the sentence

Accompanying illustration

 

. . . and so on. Phonics - "sounding it out" -- is only one strategy among many, and even then, the kids aren't really taught the system, just a few decoding tricks.

 

Kids in Whole Language classrooms or programs (also called "balanced literacy" or "eclectic") aren't taught how words come together in patterns of sounds under certain rules. Phonics is just a last resort to use when you're guessing. It's an unfortunate comedown for the basic building block of the English language.

 

Phonics should be the ONLY technique used to teach reading, and it should be taught "explicitly" --  as the intricate, logical system that it is. Instead, teachers are trained to offer kids phonics along with more "progressive" techniques. No wonder they get so confused and disappointed when they can't read well: it's because their best tool has gotten lost in the shuffle.

 

How do we know this is true? It's obvious that there are a whole lot more kids with reading difficulties today than a generation, or two, or three, before. It's obvious that kids come to college with much, much smaller vocabularies than in the past, and so college work has had to be dumbed down significantly. We're also spending many, many times more money on education, per pupil, than in the past. The productivity of school has taken a precipitous decline. And the main reason is that teachers no longer use a phonics-only approach to teaching reading in the early grades.

 

What's the proof? The excellent literacy that's achieved in those few classrooms around the country where phonics-only reading is employed. In the lowest-income neighborhoods, with the most non-English speaking children, 100% of the children are reading and writing at grade level. They are able to decode multisyllabic words at age 6, and to write full sentences with perfect grammar and punctuation. Romalda Bishop Spalding, the reading teacher for whom the Spalding method of teaching phonics was named, has said that in the decades she taught in the ghettos of Harlem in New York City, she could count on the fingers of one hand the kids who couldn't read and write at grade level.

 

            It appears that schools got away from phonics-only instruction years ago when educational psychologists became convinced that, since good readers scan text rapidly as wholes, instead of decoding individual words one by one, beginning readers should be taught that technique, too. It's called "Whole Language," and it has muscled aside phonics-only instruction in our schools, to our peril.

 

            Publishers loved Whole Language because it requires so much more in the way of "consumables" - worksheets and little booklets and other teaching materials. So they've made more money, by far, and that's why school is costing so much more, by far. Whole Language books for early primary pupils were written - or, shall we say, "pre-engineered" -- with easily-recognizable "sight words." A different set of about 200 were prepared for each grade level. Kids quickly memorized those sight words, and when they read the specially-prepared readers, it looked as though they were reading with great facility.

 

            Unfortunately, though, those educational psychologists were dead wrong. When kids advance into the later grade school years, and on into their secondary school careers, they hit a brick wall when they encounter unfamiliar words. They only know how to memorize - not decode. With their shrunken vocabularies, stuck with sight words, they have poor reading comprehension. The ed psych crowd didn't realize that good readers can scan whole sentences at a time because they have already done the work of establishing the brain architecture necessary to do that. Since Whole Language denies kids that, they are disabled . . . and for the most part, for life.

 

Homework: Here's a good article that explains what happens when teachers try to teach reading without a phonics-only approach: http://www.nrrf.org/essay_Explicit_or_Implicit_Phonics.html