Phonics

Phonics is defined as the science of sound; a method of teaching beginners to read and pronounce words by learning the phonetic value of letters, letter groups, and especially syllables. Therefore, many kindergarten and first grade teachers based a large percentage of their instruction on phonics. However, there is a large majority of research that says phonics is not the ticket, but that whole language is.


 * Clymer, T. (1963). The utility of phonic generalizations in the primary grades. //The Reading Teacher, 16, 252-258//. **Clymer found that most letter-phoneme generalizations are unreliable. He looked at four popular reading programs for children and chose forty-five of the most clearly stated phonics [letter-phoneme] generalizations in these programs. Clymer found that most letter-phoneme generalizations do not work much of the time. For example, of over thirty vowel generalizations tested, only half of them worked at least 60 percent of the time. (Clymer, 1963).


 * Manning, M, Manning, G., Long, R., & Kamii, C. (1993). Preschoolers' conjunctures about segments of a written sentence. //Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 8, 1, 5-11//. **Manning and her colleagues found children who were not yet able to use phonics (letter-sound correspondences) to figure out print words in sentences were able to use word order to figure out print words. This finding suggests that children can learn to read using shared reading (a technique where the teacher points to the words in full view of the children as he/she reads to the children) before they can learn phonics. (Manning and Manning 1993).


 * Goswami, U. (1986). Children's use of analogy in learning to read: A developmental study. //Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 42, 73-83//. **In her article, Goswami found that children who had begun to read were able to use the word she read to them to figure out how to read the second word in the pair when the letters represented similar rimes (e.g., the //-ark// in //hark// & //lark//) but not when the letters represented similar phonemes within rimes (e.g., /a/ and /r/ in //hark// & //harm//). (Gaswami, 1986).


 * Moustafa, M. (1995). Children's productive phonological recoding. //Reading Research Quarterly. 30, 3, 464-475//. **Moustafa found children's knowledge of analogous print words better explains their correct pronunciations of unfamiliar print words than their knowledge of letter-phoneme correspondences. She showed 75 first grade children common words such as //green// and //black// and analogous unusual words such as //grack// created from letters representing the onsets and rimes in the common words. Moustafa found that 95% of the time children could pronounce the unusual words, they could also pronounce the analogous common words used in the study. In contrast, only 64% of the time the children could pronounce the unusual words, they could correctly identify letter-phoneme correspondences used in the words. (Moustafa, 1995).


 * Freppon, P. (1991). Children's concepts of the nature and purpose of reading in different instructional settings. //Journal of Reading Behavior, 23, 2, 139-163//. **Freppon found children with contemporary literature-based reading instruction are more successful at sounding out unfamiliar words when reading than children with traditional reading instruction. She studied 24 first-grade children in four classrooms, two with a contemporary literature-based reading program that focused on meaning and two with a traditional reading program with skills taught out of context. Freppon found the children in the contemporary classrooms had a better sense that reading was constructing meaning with print. She also found that the children in the contemporary classrooms needed to sound out words less often, but when they did so, they were almost twice as successful as the children in the traditional classrooms. While the children in the contemporary classrooms were successful 53% of the time they sounded out words, the children in the skills classroom were successful only 32% of the time. (Freppon, 1991).