Basic Phonics

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 524.

TEXTESOL III Newsletter (in press)
Stephen Krashen

There are several possible positions about the role of phonics in reading, although they do not exhaust all the possibilities.

Intensive, Systmatic Phonics. Ehri (2004) defines this position as follows: "Phonics instruction is systematic when all of the major letter-sound correspondences are taught and covered in a clearly defined sequence .." (p. 180).

This position claims that we learn to read by first learning the rules of phonics, that is, we learn to read by sounding out or reading outloud ("decoding to sound"). It also asserts that our entire knowledge of phonics must be deliberately taught and consciously learned: Intensive instruction is "essential" (Ehri, 2004). Proponents of Intensive Systematic Phonics tell us that learning to read is hard work (Ehri, 2004).

Ehri gives us some idea of what the "major" rules are: They include "long and short vowels and vowel and consonant digraphs consisting of two letters representing one phoneme, such as oi, ea, sh, and th. Also, phonics instruction may include blends of letter sounds that represent larger subunits in words such as consonant pairs (e.g. st, bl), onsets, and rimes" (p. 180). (It is unclear what happens to the "minor" rules, whether they are also taught or whether they acquired incidentally. One must ask: if the minor rules can be acquired, without direct instruction, why can't all phonics rules be acquired?)

Basic Phonics: According to this position, it is helpful to teach some rules of phonics, but just the basics, just the straight-forward rules. (I introduce the term Basic Phonics here, attempting to provide a label for a position that already exists, but has not, in my view, been made explicit.)

According to Basic Phonics, we learn to read by actually reading, by understanding what is on the page. Most of our knowledge of phonics is the result of reading; the more complex rules of phonics are subconsciously acquired through reading (Smith, 1994).

A conscious knowledge of some basic rules can help children learn to read by making texts more comprehensible. Smith (1994) demonstrates how this can happen: The child is reading the sentence "The man was riding on the h____." and cannot read the final word. Given the context and knowledge of ‘h' the child can make a good guess as to what the final word is. This won't work every time (some readers might think the missing word was "Harley"), but some knowledge of phonics can restrict the possibilities of what the unknown words are. (One could subdivide Basic Phonics into sub-positions, into those who claim that learning the basics is essential and those who claim it is helpful.)

Basic Phonics appears to be the position of authors of Becoming a Nation of Readers, a book widely considered to provide strong support for phonics instruction:

"…phonics instruction should aim to teach only the most important and regular of letter-to-sound relationships … once the basic relationships have been taught, the best way to get children to refine and extend their knowledge of letter- sound correspondences is through repeated opportunities to read. If this position is correct, then much phonics instruction is overly subtle and probably unproductive" (Anderson, Heibert, Scott and Wilkinson, 1985, p.38).