Is Phonics a ‘Method’ for Teaching Reading?

I often see people referring to phonics as a “method” for teaching reading. Some are ‘fans’ of phonics, some ardent opponents, but every time I read such a statement, I wince a little at the subtle, yet crucial, misunderstanding therein. Because the simple fact is no, phonics is not a method for teaching reading. Phonics is the body of knowledge and skills needed to decode written English which, despite some protestations to the contrary, is a phonics-based writing system. Phonics is, therefore, not a pedagogy (a method of teaching) but is essential content or curriculum. This distinction is important because the choice you are making when deciding whether to teach phonics is not which method to use to teach children how to read but whether to directly teach reading at all.

Children need phonics because the fact is that all fluent readers of English, whether they realise it or not, DECODE. They/you/we are not aware of decoding while reading, precisely because we are so fluent that it becomes almost effortless. To be clear, this is not a matter of scientific debate. Decoding is how *all* competent readers read. Even our ability to build a bank of fluency-enhancing, instantly recognised ‘sight words’ is inextricably linked to, and reliant on, our knowledge of the alphabetic principle and our ability to bond the pronunciation of each word to the orthographic map of each word.

Dr. Hollis Scarborough’s ‘Reading Rope’ deftly illustrates what it takes to read with understanding. Decoding and its related skills comprise the ‘word recognition’ strand i.e. how to accurately identify the words on the page, while it is our oral language, vocabulary and background knowledge that reveal the meaning in print. Both strands are vital. Both need deliberate and explicit teaching in a curriculum designed with this understanding, and schools need to excel in both aspects for children to flourish.

Scarborough (2001)

To further understand reading we need first to understand writing. Writing is a technology invented in some human cultures over the last few thousand years. In most cultures, until very recently, writing/reading was a skill acquired only by a few scribes and a select elite. So, while writing is an extension of our ability to speak, there is a critical distinction to draw between them. Humans universally evolved with the ability to communicate through speech. It clearly conferred a survival advantage. We did not, however, evolve an ability to read and write. This matters a lot. In the words of evolutionary psychologist David C. Geary, how to speak (or walk, for example) is biologically primary knowledge or knowledge that we have evolved to learn easily. Such knowledge is characterised by not needing to be taught. Everything else, including reading and writing, is biologically secondary knowledge, it is much harder to learn and is characterised by needing to be taught.

The writing systems invented also varied in nature. Some forms of writing were/are logographic, where a picture or symbol represents a whole word. Others developed a way of representing/encoding, the individual speech sounds in words. English, like its European counterparts, is of the latter type. Written English is essentially an alphabetic code. Symbols/graphemes (letters) are used to represent the individual sounds (phonemes) that combine to make a spoken word. The reason that some find this difficult to appreciate is that, over time, the English system has become very complex, it has a deep, and to the casual observer, almost impenetrable orthography (spelling system). In a phonics-based writing system a grapheme is the written representation of a phoneme, in other words the spelling of a speech sound. In a simple writing system, a specific grapheme (in such a case, this is usually a single letter) will only ever correspond to, one speech sound and, in reverse, each of the language’s speech sounds will only ever be represented by a unique grapheme. Such systems are easy to learn. Finnish for example, has a very simple orthography and thus, Finnish children are usually fluent readers and spellers within a few weeks of starting school (or even before they arrive). In English however, while there are some simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences, most phonemes are represented by more than one spelling and most spellings (single letters or combinations of letters) are used to represent more than one sound.

So, if this complicated map of how English is encoded and decoded (and the skills to use it) is the content, then how do we teach it? The simple answer, given the critical importance of reading, is REALLY WELL! Thankfully, while phonics can appear fiendishly complicated, it literally becomes child’s play when broken down into small steps and observable patterns, and is presented in a systematic way, building from simple to complex. Phonics, being by nature multi-faceted, multi-sensory and highly practical, lends itself very well to such treatment. This is what good systematic phonics programmes do. This is the pedagogical aspect of phonics.

Consciously choosing not to teach phonics as the foundation of reading, but instead to immerse children in language and print in the hope that they might deduce how to read, is adopting what might be described as a minimally-guided approach. Sometimes a little ‘incidental phonics’ is taught in such scenarios, but this is often a last resort. Instead, when children cannot read the words, they are taught to use a variety of ‘compensatory strategies’ such as guessing from pictures or what they think to be the context. In fact, this has been the ‘pre-eminent’ way to teach reading in most English-speaking countries for many decades and, if you’ve been around a while, you might tell me ‘‘this can work”. You/your child or children you have taught, learned to read without any phonics, “you just need lots of stories, being read to, sharing books, sharing a love of books” and so on. Well, yes, it is true that some children, if immersed in a print- and language-rich environment, will apparently learn to read with little direct phonics’ instruction. But we need to qualify this statement. Firstly, while a few might learn to read very well, many others might only learn to read well enough to get by at school (and therefore not attract attention or support) but not nearly as well or as effortlessly as they might have with explicit instruction. Indeed, many children, who excelled at school and were considered good readers, only hit the limits of their reading ability at high school or university, when they met more challenging material than their imperfect reading schema could cope with. Many hitherto high-achievers are only diagnosed dyslexic in the tertiary phase of their education.

Secondly, such autodidacts will usually have considerably-impaired spelling compared to pupils who have been explicitly taught the alphabetic code. Reading is ‘fuzzy’ compared to spelling. Children can in-fill decoding gaps with context guesses or can just ignore words they cannot decipher. But spelling is much more exacting. There is only one way to spell each word and the evidence is clear that children who are explicitly taught how English writing works, spell much more accurately than those who are not.

But the final and most important point is this; the children who learn to read well by merely being immersed in books haven’t learned to read so well because of how reading was taught but in spite of the fact that it wasn’t.  Such children will have been born doubly blessed. Not only will they have had ample access to books and language, but they will also have inherited a neurobiology that means that they are adept at phonemic awareness, blending and segmenting sounds, phoneme manipulation, rapid-naming, symbol-sound pattern matching etc., so much so, that the phonic-based nature of written English becomes apparent to them without the direct guidance that most children need. They are able to grasp the alphabetic principle and intuit an approximation of how the language works. Note that this is not the same as saying reading is natural (or biologically primary) to these children. It is simply that they got lucky, and their brains were able to adapt relatively easily to the demands of reading English. Most children are not this lucky.

In their 2006 paper Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching, Kirschner, Sweller and Clark concluded that (with my added emphasis):

“After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to intermediate learners. Even for students with considerable prior knowledge, strong guidance while learning is most often found to be equally effective as unguided approaches. Not only is unguided instruction normally less effective; there is also evidence that it may have negative results when students acquire misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge.”

The evidence is unequivocal. Direct, explicit instruction is the most effective way to teach novices, and as an experienced reading/dyslexia tutor, the emphasised sentence, above, leaps out. Every reading tutor who understands the role of decoding and phonics will tell you that they often spend as much time dismantling their students’ damaging and unhelpful misconceptions about reading as they do teaching them how to read. Sadly, the damage is often permanent. The child who must be retaught how to read, after falling behind, will often never develop into as fluent a reader as they might have become had phonics been taught well in the first place. The rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer Matthew Effect compounds the misery. Children who find reading easy tend to enjoy reading, and so read more. This results in improved fluency/vocabulary/background-knowledge; they progress faster, find reading even easier, more enjoyable and so a virtuous cycle develops.  The child who struggles, however, will likely do less reading than is needed, and will thus fall behind their peers in both decoding and language. The gap between them and their progressing peers grows, as will their disdain for reading. A vicious downward cycle ensues.

However, when phonics is taught well, even those children with apparently little aptitude for decoding will never need to struggle to the point that a negative cycle develops. Well-designed phonics curricula ensure that steps are small and recursive, and the child is only ever expected to read what they have first been given the knowledge and skills to read. Every child is set up for, and can then be inspired by, success. The design and the delivery of the phonics curriculum is crucial. Hence you will often see phonics specified as ‘systematic synthetic phonics’. ‘Synthetic’ indicates that phonics should be taught by starting at the individual grapheme-phoneme level. This avoids hard-to-shift misconceptions that arise when an ‘analytic’ route is taken (where words are first learned as ‘wholes’ and then analysed into component parts). ‘Systematic’ means following an intricately planned, detailed phonics curriculum designed to avoid the “misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge” referred to by Kirschner et al. So, while I’ve been at pains to explain that ‘phonics’ is vital content it is hopefully also clear that how it is taught is equally crucial. It is not enough to add some ‘incidental phonics’ here and there, or to teach a basic amount and assume that all will be well.

As an aside, it has become increasingly common for Balanced Literacy/Whole Language advocates to claim they teach phonics ‘systematically’ in an effort to persuade teachers, schools, policy-makers that their programmes meet evidence-informed standards. When ‘systematic phonics’ is specified it means that phonics/decoding should be directly taught as the first and only way to identify words when reading, and that this should be done in the systematic way described above. Teaching some phonics as part of a wider, multi-strategy approach, is not what is meant by the term “systematic phonics” even if you could argue that the phonics element is ‘systematically’ taught (e.g. ‘every lesson mentions phonics’).

Over the decades where minimal guidance in the teaching of reading prevailed, HUGE numbers of children across the English-speaking world left school functionally illiterate (as high as 40% in the UK). A very large proportion of these will have been casualties of the inadequate teaching of phonics. This is simply untenable. The ability to read is crucial, many would argue an inalienable right. It is the key that unlocks access to every other part of the curriculum and a huge world beyond. We cannot leave it to chance. Children from deprived backgrounds are the most likely to be damned by inadequate teaching of phonics. They are the least likely to have access to good schools, the least likely to have access to books and rich language, and the least likely to have parents with the expertise to tutor them or the money to pay someone else to do so.

If you have got this far and are still struggling to see why I find the distinction between phonics content and phonics pedagogy so important, it is simply this, that someone who thinks that phonics is just one way to teach reading likely thinks, mistakenly, that phonics is just one way to read. There is no other way to read English fluently, and it is imperative for all children to know and be able to use phonics. If this were better understood, then I am sure that all would do their best to teach phonics as well and as comprehensively as possible.

*****************************

While this blog focuses on the word recognition aspect of reading, I will take this opportunity to recommend several books for ideas as to how to provide a language- and content-rich environment needed to support the language comprehension strand. Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap, Doug Lemov’s Reading Reconsidered, Isabel Beck’s Bringing Words to Life and Creating Robust Vocabulary, Alex Quigley’s Closing the Vocabulary Gap and Closing the Reading Gap.

Decodables – How To Teach Reading

Decodables are books designed to facilitate the development of decoding skills in the early stages of learning to read. Many educators are talking about decodables, but there is a lot of misunderstanding and even misinformation out there as to what decodables are and how it is suggested they should be used. Hopefully this post will provide some clarity and enable you to better understand what decodables are and how to use them.

1. Decodables 29:27
2. Is Phonics a Method for Teaching Reading? 32:01
3. Introduction 05:56