What Is Phonics?

What Is Phonics?

The word ‘phonics’ comes from the ancient Greek word for ‘sound’. Since the Greeks were the first culture to develop an alphabet to represent the sounds in their language, it is fitting that in English we use the word ‘phonics’ to mean the teaching of the letter-sound relationships for reading, and the sound-letter relationships for spelling.

A few hundred years ago, English spelling was not fixed as it is now – the practice at that time was to spell words in a way that reflected their language of origin. This meant that a single sound could be spelt a number of different ways. For example, the /f/ sound is spelt ‘ph’ in phonics which is derived from a Greek word, whereas the /f/ sound is spelt with an ‘f’ in font, from the Latin word for a fountain. With the invention of dictionaries, spelling patterns became set and have not changed very much since. Learning the phonic code of the English language is therefore not a simple task because there is not a strict 1-to-1 correspondence between the letters and the sounds, as found in some other phonetic languages such as Indonesian. To make matters worse, we have only 26 letters (from Latin) to write down the 44 sounds of English.

Teaching Phonics

Phonics instruction provides explicit instruction and practice with reading words, both in isolation, and in texts. Several approaches have been used to teach phonics systematically, including the following:

• Analytic phonics

  Analytic phonics is a somewhat indirect approach in which the teacher gets the children to work out the letter-sound relationships for themselves by presenting them with groups of words containing the same sound. For example, the teacher might write the letter ‘f’ followed by several words such as fox, fish, fun and four, and then use a whole-to-part approach to get the children to recognise that all the words start with the same letter and the same sound.

• Embedded phonics, analogy phonics and onset-rime phonics

  The embedded phonics, analogy phonics and onset-rime phonics approaches teach children by presenting groups of words which start or end in the same way, for example, bake, cake, make, rake, shake, and getting the children to learn the sounds made by the group of letters ‘-ake’. These approaches are also indirect because the focus is not on individual sounds.

• Phonics through spelling

  Phonics through spelling programs teach children to isolate the sounds in words and apply a set of rules to write them down. In some programs, children are expected to extrapolate from these rules themselves so they can apply them in reverse when reading, whereas other programs combine this approach with synthetic phonics.

• Synthetic phonics

  Synthetic phonics programs use a part-to-whole approach in that they directly teach children the rules to convert graphemes (letters, and groups of letters, used to represent individual speech sounds) into sounds. For Example, the word phonics would be ‘sounded out’ as /f/-/o/-/n/-/i/-/k/-/s/, and then blended together to make the whole word.

Which Approach Is Best?

The research literature strongly favours the direct approaches of teaching the phonic rules of English – synthetic phonics and phonics through spelling. This makes sense because the code of English is a complex one, so it is unreasonable to expect young children to work it all out for themselves. Furthermore, the indirect approaches, which teach group of sounds like ‘-ake’, make the code of the English language look more complex than it actually is – there are only about 100 reading/spelling rules in English, yet there are thousands of patterns like ‘-ake’.

Recent government studies by the major English-speaking countries (including U.K., U.S.A. and Australia) have all concluded that Phonics is the best way to teach basic reading skills. For example, the final report of the Australian Government’s National Inquiry Into the Teaching of Literacy, released in December 2005, is unequivocal in its support for teaching phonics to beginning and struggling readers:

Recommendation 2

The Committee recommends that teachers provide systematic, direct and explicit phonics instruction so that children master the essential alphabetic code-breaking skills required for foundational reading proficiency.

For recommendations such as these to be acted upon in English-speaking countries, they will need a revolution in their education systems because instruction in phonics has been out of favour in most schools and teacher-training institutions for about 50 years. Using a phonics approach to teach reading requires a high level of technical knowledge about the sound/letter code of the English language, skills that most teachers have not had detailed training in.

Chris Brooks
Principal
High Performance Learning

(Chris has written a highly successful program that teaches Phonics – for more information go to Learning to Read and Spell Using Phonics or click on the picture opposite to sample some of the interactive multimedia materials Chris has produced to enable people to learn how to read while they read.)

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