Misconceptions And Misinformation Regarding How Educators Can Teach Phonics

Phonics is imperative to learning to read because it allows for the reader to distinguish these associations in letters and words that they read to captivate comprehension (Walbank & Bisby, 2016). At the preschool-grade, knowledge of the alphabetic principles should be extensive and in-depth, however, too much focus can lead to over application of this skills having words read but not comprehended. The directional approach for teaching phonics should be precise, articulated well with graphemes organised in a logical and systematic way allowing plenty of time to recite the new skills received inherited obtained attained gained acquired (Learning Point Associates, 2004). Likewise, with phonological awareness the expertise of listening to the sounds in phonemes and words, phonics helps complete the process of sounding out to decode what has been read to eventually move onto the primary goal of learning to read being comprehension (Fellows & Oakley, 2014). Another approach is to teach phonics is the analytical technique in which the teacher guides students to observe phonemes and graphemes by scrutinising full words to bring forth another critical thinking skill required to understand what the text means (Ewing & Maher, 2014). This essential component combined with

Phonics will start to be taught in nursery or reception and a child will not be able to learn to read without proper understanding of phonics.

The contrasting perspectives of the two passages, “CliffsTestPrep” by Jerry Bobrow (2006) and “The Place of Phonics in Learning to Read and Write” by Marie Emmitt (2013), address the issue of the importance of phonemic awareness in reading and writing scores. Bobrow believes that phonemic awareness is important to understand since it affects reading scores. Emmitt however, argues that there is no evidence that phonemic awareness has a major impact on reading achievement.

’51. Having considered a wide range of evidence, the review has concluded that the case for systematic phonic work is overwhelming and much strengthened by a systematic approach’ (Rose, 2006, p20). To further his proposal Rose (2006) proclaimed that the teaching of systematic phonics should be enhanced and active by the age of five; It can be evidence through practice that children as young as five can define the terminology for a phoneme and a grapheme, due to the position phonics has within the English curriculum. There is also a world-wide debate on the various ways educational practitioners can most effectively implement phonics in their practice states Dombey (2010). Due to the impact of the Rose Review, it could be suggested that the value of systematic phonics had increased, meaning that primary teachers have to be confident in their ability to teach and support pupils in their reading and spelling through the use of phonological

Spelling needs children to recall the word from memory and recompose it without being able to see it.

Although for awhile, phonics had lost some of its popularity, research has proven its usefulness when teaching children to read. Without explicit instructions in phonemic awareness and phonics a student is in danger of learning issues. The Headsprout Reading Basics program can prevent these issues from occurring through explicit instruction in phonemic awareness,

Systematic phonics instruction is beneficial to children regardless of their socioeconomic status; it helps children from different backgrounds overcome reading difficulties. Different strategies to phonics instruction might be used in the classroom, such as synthetic phonics (children first are learning how to convert letters into sounds, and after they are learning how to blend the sounds together to create words); analytic phonic (children learn words and after analyze letter-sound relationships in these words); analogy-based phonics (children identify unknown words using the parts of word families they learnt before); phonics through spelling (children divide the words into phonemes , and after writing letters for phonemes they are creating words).

There are a variety of different approaches to systematic, explicit phonics instruction. The first of which is “synthetic phonics” . This approach continually builds on itself to from words by first teaching letter sounds, then practicing the combination or “synthesis” of the letter sounds, finally achieving the goal of combining those practiced sounds to create recognizable words.

As the standards of education change a consistent factor remains the focus on reading. Early childhood educators must provide an atmosphere that is both developmentally stimulating to the student while also meeting the standards of education. The methods used to help recognize phonics and begin the transition into emergent readers vary from student to student. Without the foundation of phonics research shows that a child will not learn to read. All children must know the alphabet in order to communicate effectively. Phonics cannot be drilled into the child. This will only produce memorization. Instead, educators must understand a child’s individual needs as well as balance. There is no true need to teach phonics as a separate subject. Most children will develop a sense of curiosity from their own knowledge, ideas, and interest. There will of course be a select few that may benefit from a more formal instruction. When children

We learn literacy through phonological practices prompted in reading development to increase fluency and comprehension (Konza, 2006). Phonological awareness concerns itself with manipulation of sound patterns related to speech and intonation and has a relationship to phonemic awareness, being the smaller components of language such as individual letter sounds (Hill, 2012). Rose recommends that synthetic phonics are needed for ‘letter-sound correspondence’, learning how words are blended and broken up for spelling and finally being able to recognize words in print, as well as singularly (2006, p. 18). Understanding of these literacy components culminate to skills required to read (National Reading Panel, 2000). Oral language is casual and elusive in syntactical meaning, so in order for children to become effective readers they need to have exposure to formal and ‘decontextualized’ language properties (Konza, 2006, p. 35). Students will not be able to associate speech to written language

Phonics is a teaching method that relates phonemes to graphemes and readers use that information to decode words. The student identifies the sounds that letters make and then blend the phonemes into a word. As students learn the sounds of the approximately forty-four phonemes they are able to use additional rules of syllabication to learn longer and more complex words.

Phonics is described as “understanding letter-sound relationships, as well as larger letter pattern/sound pattern relationships” (Ruddell, 2009). Though in my opinion there is a lot more to phonics than this. There are several aspects to phonics, different types of phonics, negatives to the idea, and several ways to teach it. In this paper I will address all of these based on research I found, the discussion I had with my peers, and my own opinion.

What is Phonics? Phonics is the teaching of the association of sounds with letter identification. With that, there is an extreme amount of emphasis on word decoding skills to help a student sound out unfamiliar words. Phonics is actually a word-recognition strategy that becomes a teaching method only through heavy emphasis. Using phonetic principles, youngsters learn to associate the correct sound with each part of a word and to recognize and pronounce words. (Farr 2004) Phonics systematically teaches a child to break the code of written language. (Ghate 2003) Children are taught to identify letter-sound correspondence with phonics, which helps them put together a word by using sounds.

“In 1655, Blaise Pascal, a philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, was one of the first individuals to focus on the decoding process and introduced the use of a phonetic system into the teaching of reading.” (Bowen, 2013) Pascal’s approach associated with how one teach reading in which phonemes( sounds) are associated with particular graphemes (letters) are pronounced in isolation and blended together (synthesized). (Word of Life, 2015) Phonics was known to be the most used strategy in teaching reading in the United States until the 1920s. (Smith, 2002)

Phonics instruction is a teaching approach that is implemented by educators in Australia as it effectively supports young children to learn the sounds of the English alphabet. In other words, phonics instruction assists children in identifying approximate pronunciations for learning new words. Furthermore, phonics is a critical part of teaching literacy to young children (Mesmer & Griffith, 2005, p.336) and is further identified in the NSW English K-10 Syllabus (Board of Studies, 2012) and the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) (DEEWR, 2009). Phonics instruction is a valuable method for teaching children how to read independently and no matter