Reading with Phonics

By Florence Barnes

Ever since the sight word method replaced phonics as the way to teach children to read and spell, there have been arguments -sometimes called "the reading wars" - for and against phonics. The author remembers far enough back to the days before all this started - when teaching letters and sounds went without saying and parents could depend on the school system to teach their children to read.

Reading difficulties forced theorists to re-think their strategies so they came up with a philosophy of reading: that children would learn to read on their own because they want to learn to read. There would be plenty of books classed as "children's literature" and teachers would be "facilitators."

In Reading With Phonics, the author discusses reading methods and arguments for and against phonics. She tells about some of the children she has tutored since retiring from teaching.

An earlier book, Learn To Read From Sounds with an accompanying cassette tape on which phonetically arranged words are read is also available from Trafford Publishing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 6, 2007
• ISBN: 9781412205191

Florence Barnes

Florence Barnes has retired from a lifetime of teaching primary and elementary grades. Since retirement she has done some individual tutoring in beginning and remedial reading. She has four grown children and lives near Ashern, Manitoba with her husband, Tom.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Have you any books about how to teach reading? I asked the young woman in the bookstore.

I don’t think so, she replied as she led me to the children’s section. All we have are these beginner books for children.

Here’s one, I said as I spied Paul Kropp’s, The Reading Solution – Making Your Child A Reader For Life, in the self-help section. That’s only about encouraging children to read, she explained. To teach them how to read you have to teach them letters and sounds.

I don’t know where she learned this common-sense method, but she did not learn it by reading books about modern theories of teaching reading. The letters and sounds, or phonic system, was replaced by the sight word method, or memorizing, because learning letters and sounds was thought to be too boring and too difficult. Theorists eventually realized that the sight word method had disadvantages so they discarded it in favor of the whole language philosophy which promotes the idea that children learn to read naturally, the way they learn to speak.

The lady in the bookstore explained in two sentences the current debate: simply encouraging children to read versus teaching them how to read by teaching them phonics.

It has to be said clearly that many children learn to read very well and many teachers teach reading very well. We need to discuss the current theories about teaching reading because they do not work for many children.

A child goes confidently to school with high hopes of learning and pleasing his teachers and parents, but soon something begins to go terribly wrong. He can’t make sense of the marks in the books he is supposed to be reading. His parents become worried, and it is small consolation to him that others in his class are having the same problem. The sad part is that nothing happens to help him because it is not the policy of modern educational philosophy to teach children how our written language works.

Spoken language is shown in print by letters that stand for the sounds of words, and if we know the sounds and how to blend them together, we can read and write. We do not use picture writing. Words in no way look like what they represent, so memorizing words only from how they look makes no sense. The public looks for reasons for reading failure – lack of money, broken homes, too much TV, lack of parental involvement and the list goes on. Many children fail to learn to read because the policy of the education system is that they should learn to read but we should not teach them how.

Teaching children to read by sounds or phonics simply means beginning by teaching them the sounds of consonants such as ‘c’ and ‘t’, and the short vowel sound ‘a’, and joining or blending the sounds together to say ‘cat’. Immediately children learn how print works – that letters stand for the sounds of words. Continue by teaching all the consonant and vowel sounds until children know the complete phonic system and become independent and capable readers and writers.

The alternative to learning phonics is to memorize ‘cat’ by being told what it says or by looking at a picture of a cat. This is the sight word method, or look and say. In the discovery method children are told to sound the first letter and read ahead to guess what word might fit the meaning. Mistakes or miscues are allowed as long as the word makes sense in the context. This is whole language philosophy.

The belief is that children learn to read naturally, the way they learn to speak, and that they learn to read by reading. In teacher-training classes teachers are advised to teach phonics only incidentally.

My purpose in writing this book is to promote the teaching of phonics – the letter-sound relationship of our written language – completely and systematically from the very beginning of learning to read. We do not need to oppose other methods as long as we teach all the phonic knowledge as a definite teaching program in the curriculum, so that it becomes an automatic tool for all children to help them to recognize unknown words and to remember words they have already learned.

Chapter I

When you read you begin with ABC, sings Maria in, The Sound Of Music. Since words in English are written according to the sounds that the letters of the alphabet stand for, it makes sense to teach children those letters and sounds and how words are shown in print according to sounds.

This is wrong, claims whole language advocate Mem Fox. When you read you don’t begin with ABC, she says, because individual letters are difficult to recognize on their own, without supporting context. It’s easier, much easier, she goes on, to recognize words such as apple, ball, and cat than it is to recognize ABC.

The fallacy that letters and sounds are difficult for children to learn is at the root of our illiteracy problem. We don’t need a lot of research and theories to tell us that if we use common sense we will teach children that cat says what it does because the letters say c-a-t, and not because the teacher says: Look at the picture of a cat. This word says ‘cat’. It makes no sense to expect children to learn words in print without learning the reason the words say what they say.

Memorizing words from sight without knowledge of sounds became known as the sight word method. This method entailed endless repetition of words in basal readers to assist children to memorize. Reading difficulties came about because children were not learning the letter-sound basis of written language. Rather than bringing back complete and systematic phonics teaching, whole language theorists did away with the sight word method basal readers by advising that children go right into reading children’s literature, and to learn to read as they read.

Mem Fox says, In fact, the more support there is around letters and words, the easier reading becomes because there’s so much else in the text that points the reader in the right direction for meaning making.

In other words, children are expected to guess words from context instead of simply reading the words with knowledge of sounds and then fitting them into the context as they read.

Whole language theorists are in the habit of classing the sight word method along with phonics as a bottom-up way of learning to read. They criticize the repetitive, vocabulary-controlled reading material required to enable children to remember words by sight. Mem Fox says, If I had my way, no child learning to read would ever be exposed to the bound-to-be-boring banality of basal readers.

What then? If not phonics, and not the sight word basal readers with their repetition of memorized words, what do they propose? They propose that children go right into reading on their own. The author explains:

The lesson to be learned from this information (about learning words) is to begin the teaching of reading by reading whole stories aloud, using Big Books whenever possible. This will create readers as well as teach reading.

Reading stories to children is definitely a part of teaching, but reading to children is not the same as teaching them to read. In whole language children are expected to begin with large parts-a top-down theory of learning to read. Mem Fox explains the whole language belief in the following statement:

So it is actually easier to read a story than to read a paragraph, easier to read a paragraph than a sentence, easier to read a sentence than a word, and easier to read a word than to recognize a letter.

It is evident that phonics-first teaching of reading is at the opposite end of the scale from this top-down theory.

Explicit teaching of phonics to children went without saying in early schools. No one would have dreamt that this teaching would some day go out of favor. The do-gooders who brought about change claimed to be saving children from unhappiness caused by having to put some effort into learning letters and sounds. There was no thought in the public in those early days that children were being overworked in schools when they were taught to read and spell.

There has been much research and discussion on the topic of reading, and all of it is interesting to those who have the time and inclination to follow it. However, it is all beside the point in the topic of this book, which is the need to teach children first what the letters say at the very beginning of learning to read. Once children have the ability and know-how to read words they can go on with their reading, with further instruction as needed.

Not so, counters Ken Goodman. We can’t assume, he states, "that perception of letters and words in the process of making sense of real meaningful texts is the same as recognizing letters and words in isolation or