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Teaching Phonics Essay

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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. There are different aspects to phonics that should be taken into account by teachers. The first is how important phonics is to children. It is said that “both phonics and fluency need to be taught, practiced, and nurtured in the earliest stages of reading instruction and provided to students at …show more content…

This means that they need to have to know effective ways to teach it and how to use the various types, which will be talked about in this paper. There are several different types of phonics but the two main types are implicit and explicit (Ruddell, 2009). The implicit approach, or analytic, is when the teacher teaches the relation between sounds and letters in the context of the word it is found in. This means you are looking at the whole word and not isolating sounds. The explicit approach, or synthetic, approach is the opposite of the analytic approach. Instead of looking at the word as a whole, the teacher looks at each individual sound (Ruddell, 2009). From what I know I believe that both of these need to be brought into the classroom. It is important for the child to know each sound so they are able to sound out unfamiliar words in their readings but it is also important for them to be able to recognize a word in context so they can identify words easily and quicker. In my experience in classrooms I have noticed the different ways these approaches were used. In my kindergarten placement the teacher usually used the explicit approach. Each day we would concentrate on two or three letters and the sounds they made. We would practice the pronunciation and read a poem or sing a song with the letter in it. In my second grade class the teacher had a very different way. She would have the children look at the whole

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