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Published: 31 January 2017

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Illusory phonics: Balanced magic

 Kerry Hempenstall, Senior Industry Fellow, School of Education, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

My blogs can be viewed on-line or downloaded as a Word file or PDF at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/olxpifutwcgvg8j/AABU8YNr4ZxiXPXzvHrrirR8a?dl=0

What are some of the different perspectives on phonics (2025)

AI Overview

“The effectiveness of phonics instruction, particularly systematic synthetic phonics, is a subject of ongoing debate. While phonics is often seen as a crucial component of reading instruction, research suggests that its effectiveness may be limited, especially when viewed as the sole approach to teaching reading. 

Here's a more detailed look at the arguments:

Arguments against the sole use of phonics:

• Focus on decoding:

Some argue that phonics instruction, especially the focus on decoding nonsense words, doesn't necessarily translate to improved reading comprehension or the ability to read fluently. 

• Limited evidence of effectiveness:

Research has shown that systematic phonics may not be significantly better than other methods, and some studies suggest that it may even hinder the development of strong reading skills. 

• Neglect of other factors:

Critics argue that phonics instruction often neglects other important aspects of literacy development, such as vocabulary building, language comprehension, and engagement with literature. 

• Possible negative consequences:

Some studies suggest that excessive focus on phonics can lead to anxiety and even negative impacts on children's self-esteem and overall literacy development. 

Arguments in favor of phonics:

• Foundation for reading:

Phonics provides a strong foundation for decoding words, which is essential for reading fluency and comprehension. 

• Improved word recognition:

Phonics instruction can improve a child's ability to recognize words and decode unfamiliar words. 

• Support for specific needs:

Phonics can be particularly helpful for children who struggle with certain aspects of reading, such as decoding or spelling. 

Balanced approach:

The most effective approach to teaching reading likely involves a balanced approach that integrates phonics instruction with other literacy activities, such as reading aloud, shared reading, and engaging in meaningful conversations about books. 

In conclusion:

While phonics instruction can be a valuable tool in teaching children to read, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. A balanced approach that considers the individual needs of students and incorporates a variety of literacy activities is likely to be more effective in promoting strong reading skills.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=Illusory+phonics+is+ineffective&oq=Illusory+phonics+is+ineffective&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRiPAtIBCjQwOTc2ajBqMTWoAgiwAgHxBdj9tOERU0Sj&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

“Experts say a new test for grade 1 students will be less time consuming and better at identifying students who are struggling. (ABC News: Patrick Rocca)

In short:

Primary school children in Victoria will increasingly be taught to read via a teaching method called 'phonics'.

It's a way of explicitly teaching sounds, which enables children to decipher unfamiliar words.

“Victorian state school grade one students will sit a new 10-minute literacy assessment under the state's move to phonics teaching for reading, which experts say will improve early intervention for struggling kids.

Phonics — explicit literacy teaching focusing on the sounds in words — is being introduced into the Victorian curriculum despite resistance from the Australian Education Union.

Experts and the state government say the teaching method will improve results.

"Phonics, at heart, is basically just teaching children the letter sound relationships and it helps them to decode unfamiliar words,'' Jordana Hunter from the Grattan Institute said.

"The research evidence is very clear that phonics is a very important component of an effective teaching approach in the classroom."

Docklands Primary School is teaching students literacy according to the phonics method.  (ABC News: Patrick Rocca)

Under the reforms, the state will also mandate a new reading assessment for all grade one government students in 2026.

The test takes less than 10 minutes and replaces the current English Online Interview, which takes 40 minutes. Some schools will begin using the test next year.

Karina Stocker is a teacher at Docklands Primary School where children are being taught to read by being taught phonics.   (ABC News: Patrick Rocca)

The assessment asks students to read real words as well as "nonsense" words to test their ability to decode the word.

"They are words that the students have never seen before, so we are checking if they have that code knowledge to say the sounds and read that word," Docklands Primary School acting assistant principal Jaclyn Dominey said.

The nonsense words are shown alongside a cartoon to show that it's a made-up word.

A new reading assessment for grade 1 students will ask them to read real words as well as 'nonsense' words.

Children are taught to read nonsense words, to practise how to decode unfamiliar words and sounds. (Supplied)

Experts and teachers say the new test is less time-consuming and better at identifying students who are struggling.

"It helps them [teachers] really pinpoint where a child is at with their learning process, and that helps them provide targeted support to catch them up if they need that extra support to get over the line,'' Dr Hunter said.

By testing childrens' ability to figure out how to read a word they've never seen, teachers can identify whether students are mastering reading. (Supplied)

She said there had been great overseas success with phonics and the year 1 test.

"In England, which introduced a year 1 phonics screening check many years ago, they've seen a really significant increase in the performance of students in terms of their ability to master reading, and that has actually flowed through to better outcomes in international assessments as well."

Phonics is a method of literacy teaching increasingly being adopted across schools in Victoria.(ABC News: Patrick Rocca)

Earlier this year, the Australian Education Union expressed concern about the widespread introduction of phonics, saying it was being done without any consultation with teachers.

The AEU said the move demonstrated a "lack of respect for the teaching profession, who must be at the centre of any decisions around teaching and learning."

"No other profession would be treated with the breathtaking disregard the minister has shown," the union said.

Education Minister Ben Carroll has also announced the roll out of phonics will be fast tracked, and schools would share in $5 million to buy more handheld whiteboards and decodable texts.

"Whatever your post code, every child will get the benefits of learning how to read properly and it will set them up for life,'' Mr Carroll said.

The state Labor government had previously resisted calls to adopt phonics in classrooms but changed its mind in the past two years.

Mr Carroll said the results from overseas were positive and couldn't be ignored.

"The evidence is in that putting phonics at the heart of teaching kids to read has immeasurable results,'' he said.

"This puts us on a path to be right up there with the world's best by focusing on reading and making sure our kids get the best foundation to become lifelong learners."

'Phonics' being introduced to Victorian education curriculum, despite pushback from teachers union

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-08/phonics-victorian-education-curriculum-literacy-reading/104698040

By state political reporter Richard Willingham. Sunday 8 December 2024

“Amid sliding literacy rates, Australian governments are finally picking a side in a longstanding, global war over how children should learn to read.

Some linguists refer to it as “the forever war” – more than half a century of passionate, highly politicised argument over how best to teach reading to children. It

A recent report from the Grattan Institute found a third of Australian children couldn’t read well – a grim echo of the OECD’s PISA results from last year that showed student proficiency in reading, maths and science had only slightly stabilised in what remains a 15-year downward trend.

The report found “a key cause of Australia’s reading problem is decades of disagreement about how to teach reading. But the evidence is now clear. The ‘whole-language’ approach – which became popular in the 1970s and is based on the idea that learning to read is an easy, natural, unconscious process – does not work for all students. Its remnants should be banished from Australian schools.”

It also supported what many already knew: that disadvantaged students were especially underserved by the whole-language method. Wealthier kids could better offset their education’s inadequacies with private tuition and the attentions of their educated parents.

The principal casualties of decades of whole language – or its modern variation, “balanced literacy” – are children, but the secondary casualties are those teachers who are now coming to realise, sometimes hauntingly, that their practice may have contributed to higher rates of illiteracy.

“It emerged from the zeitgeist of the time, and we were recognising that children had emotional lives. The idea that we’ve got to let kids be kids, and they all learn differently. But they don’t.”

Sue Hiland is a teacher, instructional coach and associate lecturer in education at La Trobe University. She says that when she first entered a Victorian prep classroom – the grade before Year 1 – she buzzed with enthusiasm. “When I entered my first classroom as a graduate teacher, it was a grade prep/one classroom,” she says. “I had just completed my pre-service teacher training and had not been taught a single thing about how early readers acquire literacy. There was plenty of content around ‘multiliteracies’ but not how to teach the very first foundational skills of reading, writing and spelling.”

Hiland used the balanced-literacy approach for about three years, she says, before her suspicions about its inadequacy prompted her to seek alternatives on her own. “The grief I experienced when I realised that I hadn’t been meeting my students’ needs was pretty crippling, and so I can only imagine what that must be like for a teacher of 20 years to have to go through and accept that they had not done the best for their students,” she says.

“Nobody, no teacher, wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to teach reading badly today’. We just have not been given the tools.”

Describing whole-language theory succinctly is difficult, as it comprises a medley of ungrounded and romantic assumptions about teaching and a child’s development. Also, because of the idea’s age, it has mutated over the years.

It didn’t explicitly begin in the 1960s, but its popularisation might be pegged to late in that decade. It reflected the moment’s progressive suspicion of authority, and concepts of “explicit instruction” and “teacher-centred learning” were replaced with “child-generated learning”. There was an ideological repulsion with rote learning, and an insistence upon limiting teacher authority and conferring greater autonomy to the child. The systematic teaching of phonics – decoding words by learning the correspondence between certain letters and their sounds – was thought destructively dull, mechanical, dispiriting. In other words boring, and likely to discourage a child from developing a love of reading.

Whole language rested upon a belief that children should be allowed to learn and make meaning in their own idiosyncratic ways, and that the acquisition of reading would occur just as naturally as that of speech. Practically, it depended upon contextual learning – or the “look then say” method. This encouraged children to infer words by looking at the associated pictures, or to guess them via the word’s neighbours within the sentence.

“It was much more about not imposing on students – you need to learn this, this and this – but letting students discover in a much more immersive process,” says Tanya Serry, a professor of literacy and reading at La Trobe University who co-founded the SOLAR Lab (Science of Literacy and Reading) with Pamela Snow in 2020. “It was a romantic view, and put forward in good faith,” she says.

“My personal view is that it emerged from the zeitgeist of the time, and we were recognising that children had emotional lives. The idea that we’ve got to let kids be kids, and they all learn differently. But they don’t. We’ve all got the same brain structure. We all need the same things to learn what we need to learn. The so-called progressive education didn’t align with what we know from the discipline of cognitive science, the science of how we learn.”

The skills of speaking and reading are both separated by vast expanses of evolutionary time and occur in different parts of the brain. Modern neuroimaging can demonstrate this – so too stroke victims who may lose one ability, but retain the other. Our brains are inherently wired to make speech; they are not inherently wired to decode written language. Immersion may work for some kids, just as some kids may learn to swim by simply being thrown into a pool. But many will also drown.

When whole-language teaching started leading to poor reading rates, the next step was the synthesis of whole language and phonics known as balanced literacy.

Critics have long argued this method was deeply compromised because it so often taught phonics incidentally, not systematically. Ben Jensen, the chief executive of Learning First – an education research and consultancy group – suggests the unstructured teaching of phonics offers a useful alibi to those still suspicious of explicit instruction. “The phrase ‘phonics is already being taught’ is offered without much evidence. Offering some phonics is very different to comprehensive, high-quality teaching of it. ‘We are doing phonics’ is a middle-ground cop-out.”

Tanya Serry says the big problem with balanced literacy is that no one’s really defined it. “There’s not a clear, defined scope and sequence of what is taught, and the reading instruction still promotes a lot of focus on the meaning, without getting kids to just learn those foundational skills.”

These arguments are not new – even if some of the supporting neuroscience is. In 1955, American author Rudolf Flesch published the bestseller Why Johnny Can’t Read. Its basic argument was that by asking children to infer words based upon illustrations, or the contextual clues of the sentence, teachers were encouraging students to guess, not to read.

Following a critical story on United States public radio in 2019, prominent whole-language proponents Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell – whose instructional materials are used not only widely in American elementary schools, but here in Australian primary schools – were moved to defend their theories in a somewhat absurd blog post in 2021. “The goal for the reader is accuracy using all sources of information simultaneously,” they wrote. “If a reader says ‘pony’ for ‘horse’ because of information from the pictures, that tells the teacher that the reader is using meaning information from the pictures, as well as the structure of the language, but is neglecting to use the visual information of the print. His response is partially correct, but the teacher needs to guide him to stop and work for accuracy.”

It’s not “partially correct” but plain wrong – this hypothetical student has been encouraged to guess and suffers from not having been explicitly taught the fundamentals of reading.

If children aren’t taught the foundations of reading, they may obviously come to struggle – and feel ashamed, inadequate, frustrated and avoid reading altogether. Several teachers told me they’ve seen students diagnosed with a learning disability who they think may simply have suffered a faulty education.

That the debate has endured for so long, unsurprisingly, owes to its politicisation. Unsurprising, because its origins themselves were political. Stressing the importance of explicit instruction and the primacy of phonics became “right-coded” – and dismissed by many as an expression of retrograde conservatism.

George W. Bush supported phonics, and a conspicuous part of the 2000 Republican platform was the Reading First policy, one that pledged billions of dollars to states that adopted federally approved reading programs based on “explicit and systematic instruction”. The same year, the US National Reading Panel released a 450-page report assessing the evidence for different methods of teaching reading and found that systematic phonics instruction was crucial.

Five years later, the Australian government launched the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, which echoed those findings, namely that the teaching of reading should be “grounded in the basic building blocks of reading”. Three years later, the inquiry’s chairman, Ken Rowe, lamented that little had changed because “higher-education providers of education and those who provide ongoing professional development of teachers, with few exceptions, are still puddling around in post-modernist claptrap about how children learn to read”.

Tanya Serry says: “My sense is that to justify one’s practice, one has to have an ideological position to say ‘this is why I’m not listening to them’… A lot of whole-language and balanced literacy has been ideologically based. It sounds romantic and very respectful and child-friendly, child-focused and so forth. But there really isn’t strong theory for it.”

Ben Jensen is hopeful a popular threshold has been finally crossed. Serry, who runs a short course for teachers, is perhaps more cautious. “Academics have been as mixed as educators on this. In my view, where things have fallen over is a lot of pre-service teacher preparation programs have not prepared, and continue to not prepare, students adequately to teach reading according to evidence-based practice and principles.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 3, 2024 as "Phonic youth".

By Martin McKenzie-Murray. Making meaning of the reading wars. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/education/2024/08/03/making-meaning-the-reading-wars

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So, in the newspapers there has been quite a debate about phonics and effective reading instruction. It appears that a recognition of effective literacy instruction is seen as valuable in increasing children’s reading skill – one better than our current situation.

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This next segment is the original document.

Illusory phonics - simply sprinkle a little phonics into your literature-based program and poof! - your program is balanced.

We know from a strong consensus of research that effective programs include phonics (among other components), so it is tempting to conclude that simply adding some phonics to a list of activities in an existing program will supply some vital catalyzing ingredient, strengthening the existing program, and thereby make it research-based. However, program effectiveness is not ensured solely by the presence of a portion of this vital program element. It also depends on the proportions in the final curriculum mix, in the quantity and quality of the elements, and when and how the curriculum is taught.

The proper role of phonics in a literacy program can be compared to a building’s foundation. We understand that stable buildings invariably have foundations. However, foundations may be weak or strong or in-between. It is not the mere presence of a foundation that provides the fundamental strength and stability of a building. It derives from the presence of the correct foundation. The difference between a strong and weak foundation lie in the details of the former’s make-up, such as appropriate concrete composition and the correct grade of reinforcing mesh - evenly laid through the site. A foundation’s preparation is equally critical. Trenches are meticulously prepared to ensure that the poured foundation is correctly sited to support the walls, and of adequate breadth and depth. Also, formwork or scaffolding is employed to provide initial support to any exposed or potential weak points, and to avoid any risk of slump.

The concrete of phonics requires the additional strength of reinforcing mesh if it is to avoid cracking under pressure. Thus, those approaches ensuring that students have or develop sensitivity to the sound structure of spoken words at the time that letter-sound correspondences are presented - have an increased likelihood that the phonics teaching will evoke in students appreciation of the alphabetic principle. Gradually, it will produce a generative strategy to handle the eventual heavy load presented by previously unseen words.

The foundation for a building is formed and poured before any other task, because all the construction that follows is reliant on the integrity of this initial base. If a fundamental element of the foundation is missing, then the structure is inevitably compromised. The building will be unable to attain its anticipated integrity and performance. Indeed it may fail, catastrophically or sequentially, either initially or later in its lifespan.

This foundation is allowed curing time to ensure it sets hard (thereby providing strength) before it is expected to carry a load. If this load is applied too early, the foundation will be weakened or deformed, and the building may not have the strength to handle its own weight much less the additional load of the building’s superstructure itself. So, in explicit phonics students are taught the foundations of spoken and written word structure before attempting to carry the load of reading increasingly sophisticated texts. They are provided with carefully planned, rather than incidental, instructional sequences.

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