The role of phonics in learning to read: What does recent research say?

The role of phonics in learning to read: What does recent research say?

Hempenstall, K. (1999). The role of phonics in learning to read: What does recent research say. Fine Print, 22(1), 7-12.

The role of phonics in learning to read: What does recent research say

“The role of phonics instruction in learning to read has always been controversial. It has been particularly so in the last 15 years in Australia given the dominance of the Whole Language movement in pre-service and in-service teacher education, and in education department policies. The Whole Language philosophy rejects explicit phonics teaching on principle because it teaches reading by emphasising units smaller than the whole word, that is, through individual letters, syllables and morphemes. Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons), and Success For All. Both approaches emphasise early and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and make use of explicit phonics in the early stages of reading. Though unsupported by Department of Education funding, the Direct Instruction approach is now in use in an estimated 150-200 schools in Victoria. Its value in assisting those students who struggle with reading there is a strong momentum for reform of reading instruction In several English speaking countries, there is a strong momentum for reform of reading instruction. Dramatic legislation in the USA and Britain in recent months may possibly lead to similarly far-reaching policy changes in Australia in the not-too-distant future. The changes have arisen because of an overwhelming concern over literacy in those communities, and because of is being increasingly recognised by schools, most of which adopt the programs after viewing their use in other local schools. In Britain, the National Literacy Strategy (1998) has been released to all primary schools, requiring them to abandon the current Whole Language approach to reading. Components of the former system such as reliance on context clues to aid word reading are discredited in the Strategy, and explicit phonics are to be introduced from the earliest stages of reading. evidence that the Whole Language model of reading, the same approach supported by governments throughout Australia, is exacerbating the problem.

International directions

In the USA, the Reading Excellence Act (1999) was recently enacted because of the unacceptably low reading achievement of students in US schools. It acknowledges that part of the responsibility rests with methods of reading instruction, and with policies that have been insensitive to developments in the understanding of the reading process. The Act attempts to bridge the gulf between research and classroom practice by mandating that only programs in reading that have been shown to be effective according to strict research criteria will be funded in future. This reverses a trend in which the criterion for adoption of a model was that it met preconceived notions of ‘rightness’ rather than that it was demonstrably effective for students. Thus, the basis for adoption of programs formerly emphasised preferred process over student outcome. Under the new Federal system, explicit phonics teaching is highlighted as an essential element in any beginning reading program. Teacher training institutes have long emphasised Whole Language as the model of choice, and few teachers have been provided with the skills necessary to teach in the newly prescribed manner, so massive teacher retraining programs are being introduced. Of the programs thus far accredited for funding, two approaches are known in Australia: Direct Instruction (Corrective Reading, Reading Mastery, Teach.

Current practice in Australia

In Australia, some Whole Language purists consider phonic cues have no place at all in a reading program, though most would view them as worthy of mention as secondary strategies. They envisage reading as primarily a linguistic rather than a visual exercise; one of only sampling segments of the print and actively predicting what the words will be. If children need assistance, they are urged to predict more wisely by attending more closely to the context. This approach is disastrous for learners in difficulty, and has been gradually discredited by research over the last fifteen years. Even those who acknowledge a role for phonic cues in Whole Language approaches expect students only to identify a letter or two of a word so as to aid the confirmation of the guess. Further, Whole Language advocates argue that these phonic cues can and should be learned without explicit teaching. A central belief is that exposure to meaningful, authentic literature is all that is required to learn to read because learning to read entails similar processes as learning to speak - a natural process. Since we learn to speak without formal instruction, so we should learn to read the same way. Unfortunately, it isn’t so. Mastering a written language is an achievement that far outweighs the requirements of speech production. Written language is an artificial, visually-based device quite distinctly more challenging than the biologically wired, sounds-based processes of speech.

Phonemic awareness: The missing link?

An extensive amount of reading research over the past ten years has emphasised the critical role of phonemic awareness in successfully beginning reading. It is an awareness that words are made up of smaller sound segments or phonemes. It is this conscious reflection on the structure of words that allows us to decide that “sat” has three phonemes, and “splat” has five. This is a difficult task for young children—many even consider a spoken sentence as one continuous stream of sound. With appropriate help, they can learn to distinguish individual words despite the uninterrupted flow of a sentence. In stages, they learn to appreciate that it is possible to segment words into syllables (foot-ball); and, around Year 1, into phonemes (m-a-t). This awareness is critical in learning to read and spell an alphabetic writing system like ours. It is a skill that can be reliably and accurately assessed in children, it can be taught or (for the fortunate) it may be deduced by experience with print. Its absence is now considered a major cause of reading failure, though its presence alone does not guarantee success. and the strategy does not assist students to decipher words previously unseen. When students enter a reading program with phonemic awareness they are part the way towards appreciating the alphabetic principle. Reading becomes a task that ‘makes sense’, not a confusing array of shapes jumbled together seemingly at random. When phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge are combined the effects are enhanced; that is, the children associate the shape of a letter with the sound in a word. Mastering a written language is an achievement that far outweighs the requirements of speech production.

The relationship between phonics and phonemic awareness is often misunderstood. Phonemic awareness is an aural/oral skill that (at least in part) can exist without contact with print. Until contact with writing however, there is no communicative value in developing such a skill, and many children do not routinely pay attention to these meaningless segments of speech, and hence do not develop this capacity. Other children become fascinated with rhymes and alliteration, Pig Latin, Spoonerisms, and they enjoy inventing words—constructing them from speech segments. Some children enter school with thousands of hours of valuable literacy experience through rhyming games, Sesame Street, Playschool, I-Spy, plastic letter games, stories read to them, and teaching dolly to read. Other children have had either little interest or lacked the opportunity for such exploration. Still others may have had such experiences but without taking the cognitive leap towards a conscious awareness. Students described as dyslexics, for example, may have a weakness (perhaps partly genetic) in this area, and require intensive structured teaching (as opposed to mere opportunities) to develop their phonemic awareness. A lack of phonemic awareness alone is not a primary language deficit, as it is unnecessary for oral communication, and only becomes important when one is confronted with the reading task. It is the understanding of the alphabetic principle that allows students to decipher novel words. Using the alphabetic principle as a cipher represents what Perfetti (1991) calls a productive process in contrast to the very limited process of memorising words. Share (1995) sees this phonological recoding process as critical to the development of skilled reading, and describes it as being: “... a self-teaching mechanism, enabling the learner to acquire the detailed orthographic representations necessary for rapid, autonomous, visual word recognition” (p. 152). This point is also critically important in designing effective programs for older students. Tempting as it may be to teach whole word recognition to older struggling readers because the phonic strategies seem so ‘babyish’, one cannot bypass the ‘sounding-out’ stage. It is a necessary step on the path to automatic whole word recognition. It is only by practising these steps that ‘word pictures’ arise. Many students enter school with little phonemic awareness (Adams, 1990), and exposure to any one of a variety of forms of reading tuition may be sufficient to stimulate such awareness for them, thus making the alphabetic principle more readily conceptualised. However, in an unacceptably high number of students this process does not occur. The aim of phonics teaching is to make explicit to students this alphabetic principle. In a Whole Language classroom, in which phonics is viewed at best as one (subsidiary) strategy among others, to be used only when the prediction-confirmation strategy breaks down, there is considerably less emphasis on student mastery of this principle.

When print is encountered, the capacity to perform the phonemic operations described above becomes critically important. In order to develop the alphabetic principle (that units of print map onto units of sound), students must already have (or soon develop) phonemic awareness. It is the alphabetic principle that allows students to move beyond the early logographic stage of reading in which each word is a unique, indivisible shape to be recognised visually. Memory constraints make the logographic strategy of limited usefulness Teachers may point out word parts to students in the context of authentic literature as the situation arises, but the limitations of such incidental phonics may impact most heavily on at-risk students (Simner:1995). The major problem for at risk students, argued by Byrne (1996) involves the risk for such learners of failing to be explicit and unambiguous. “It might be prudent to tell children directly about the alphabetic principle since it appears unwise to rely on their discovery of it themselves. The apparent relative success of programs that do that (Bradley & Bryant:1983; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley:1991, 1993, 1995) support the wisdom of direct instruction.” (p. 424) f i n e p r i n t Similar sentiments have been expressed by a number of researchers in recent years (Adams & Bruck:1993; Baker, Kameenui, Simmons, & Stahl:1994; Bateman:1991; Blachman:1991; Felton & Pepper:1995; Foorman:1995; Foorman, Francis, Beeler, Winikates, & Fletcher:1997; Moats:1994; Simmons, Gunn, Smith, & Kameenui:1995; Singh, Deitz, & Singh:1992; Spector:1995; Tunmer & Hoover:1993; Weir:1990). Consensus remains to be achieved regarding the details of the strategies best able to ensure the understanding of the alphabetic principle; however, the cited authors acknowledge that direct instructional approaches are more likely to be successful than relying upon discovery or embedded-phonics approaches.

Phonics ain’t phonics

If one accepts the value in teaching phonics, there are essentially two approaches that may be employed: implicit and explicit phonics instruction. What is the difference? In an explicit (synthetic) program, students will learn 40-50 associations between letters and their sounds. This may entail showing students the graphemes and teaching them the sounds that correspond to them, as in “This letter you are looking at makes the sound sssss”. Alternatively, some teachers prefer teaching students single sounds first, and then later introducing the visual cue (the grapheme) for the sound, as in “You know the mmmm sound we’ve been practising, well here’s the letter used in writing that tells us to make that sound”.

In an explicit program, the processes of blending (“What word do these sounds make when we put them together mmm-aaa-nnn?”), and segmenting (“Sound out this word for me”) are also taught. It is of little value knowing what are the building blocks of our language’s structure if one does not know how to put those blocks together appropriately to allow written communication, or to separate them to enable decoding of a letter grouping. After letter-sound correspondence has been taught, phonograms (such as: er, ir, ur, wor, ear, sh, ee, th) are introduced, and more complex words can be introduced into reading activities. In conjunction with this approach ‘controlled vocabulary’ stories A lack of phonemic awareness ... only becomes important when one is confronted with the reading task are employed—books using only words decodable using the students’ current knowledge base. Herein lies another problem for Whole Language purists. A fascination with authentic texts precludes the use of controlled vocabulary stories - the very ones that will build students’ confidence in the decoding strategies that they have been taught. Flooding children with an uncontrolled array of words does no favours for struggling students; it forces them to guess from context (a strategy promoted by their Whole Language teachers). Even good readers find that contextual guessing is accurate on only about one occasion in four. Guessing is a hallmark of poor readers—good readers 9 abandon it as moribund. The end result is that struggling students are burdened with a limp strategy—one that fails them regularly when they most need it. The term “synthetic” is often used synonymously with “explicit” because it implies the synthesis (or building up) of phonic skills from their smallest unit (graphemes). Similarly, “analytic” is used synonymously with “implicit” because it signifies the analysis (breaking down) of the whole word to its parts (an analysis only necessary when a child cannot read it as a whole word). In implicit phonics, students are expected to absorb or induce the required information from the word’s structure merely from presentation of similar sounding words (“The sound you want occurs in these words: mad, maple, moon”). The words may be pointed to or spoken by the teacher, but the sounds in isolation from words are never presented to children. A major problem with implicit phonics methods is the erroneous assumption that all students will already have the fairly sophisticated phonemic awareness skills needed to enable the comparison of sounds within the various words. More importantly, when the effects on readers of implicit phonics programs are compared with those of explicit programs, the differences are significant and favour explicit approaches (Foorman, et al.:1997).

The instructional process

There are also two approaches to the instructional process (as opposed to the instructional content)—“systematic” and “incidental”. In systematic instruction, attention is directed to the detail of the teaching process. Instruction will usually be teacher-directed, based on an analysis of the skills required and their sequence. At its most systematic, it will probably involve careful demonstration, massed and spaced practice of those skills (sometimes in isolation), corrective feedback of errors, and continuous evaluation of progress.

Incidental (or discovery, or embedded) instruction shifts the responsibility for making use of phonic cues from the teacher to the student. It assumes that students will develop a self sustaining, natural, unique reading style that integrates the use of contextual and graphophonic cues, avoiding the (argued) negative effects of systematic instruction.

In Whole Language literature is now something of an about-face. The new position is “But we’ve never disparaged phonics, only the teaching of it outside of the context of stories”. Unfortunately, even if one accepted this sophism, such a restriction precludes many students from deriving benefit from phonics.

Purist Whole Language teachers have never felt comfortable with demonstrating to students precisely how words are composed of sounds. They were exhorted in their training not to examine words at other than the level of their meaning. Teachers who acceded to this stricture took meaning centredness to extremes, unfortunately producing an example of ideology precluding effectiveness. Other Whole Language teachers who could not accept such an extreme view, might have included some references to alliteration or rhyming words during a story. “Did you notice that ‘cat’ and ‘mat’ end with the same sound?” Sadly, for struggling students such well intentioned clues are neither explicit enough, nor are they likely to occur with sufficient frequency to have any beneficial impact. This approach is sometimes called “embedded phonics” because teachers are restricted to using only the opportunities for intra-word teaching provided within any given story.

Many students have great difficulty in appreciating individual sound-spelling relationships if their only opportunities to master them occur at variable intervals, and solely within a story context. In a story, the primary focus is quite properly on story comprehension not word structure; in this circumstance focussing on word parts is both distracting and ineffective. practise these phonic generalizations in text that is controlled for regularity to a reasonable degree, otherwise they may fail to appreciate the benefits of this strategy. Phonics encourages children to seek patterns of letters they can recognise. It also focuses attention on all the letters, not only a few; we know from eye movement studies that skilled readers view every letter and do not sample only a few as some Whole Language theorists have claimed. It is the understanding of the alphabetic principle that allows students to decipher novel words

Activities in context or in isolation?

The ‘We do phonics in context’ model also implies that it is valuable to mix phonics instruction with comprehension activities. In the early years of schooling, students are vastly superior in oral comprehension compared to written comprehension. Most children enter school already knowing thousands of words, but it is some years before their written vocabulary matches their oral lexicon. Written and oral language development are each appropriate emphases for instruction, but given the wide initial disparity, it is more effective to address them separately. Thus, the use of teacher-read stories is an appropriate vehicle for oral comprehension, and allows for a level of language complexity that students could not attain if the stories were presented in written form. The relatively undeveloped decoding skill requires simpler text to allow the development of the competence and confidence needed for the ultimate objective - equivalent oral/ written comprehension proficiency. Those arguing that the two are inextricable have confused process with objective, and compromise the development of both oral and written language. Students also must be able to blend the letters or letter clusters. The beginning reader approximates the word by sounding it out, and then matching that approximation to a real word that fits the meaning of the sentence. This requires teaching and time allotted for adequate practice- children vary in the amount of practice needed to achieve mastery. Blends should be taught as continuous sounds where possible e.g. “man” should be sounded “mmmaaannn” not as “mmm aaa-nnn”. Continuous blends make it easier to telescope the sounds into a real word. Oral reading practice provides the teacher with opportunities to provide corrective feedback to students. Every error (not only those altering meaning) is an opportunity for teaching: systematic correction is far more valuable for students than is waiting for self-correction, or worse, ignoring errors because of the erroneous view that correction may dishearten the child, or because of a faith that errors will eventually reduce through some presumed but undefined mechanism.

What phonics elements should be included in a comprehensive reading program?

There are aspects of reading that are not well comprehended unless they are explicitly taught in isolation from meaningful text. Among these are letter-sound correspondences. Children must be taught the most common sounds that letters represent, and at-risk students especially require careful systematic instruction in individual letter-sound correspondences (“This letter says mmm”). At-risk students also need ample practice of these sounds in isolation from stories if they are to build a memory of each sound-symbol relationship. Second, they must have the opportunity to practise these phonic generalizations in text that is controlled for regularity to a reasonable degree, otherwise they may fail to appreciate the benefits of this strategy. Phonics encourages children to seek patterns of letters they can recognise. It also focuses attention on all the letters, not only a few; we know from eye movement studies that skilled readers view every letter and do not sample only a few as some Whole Language theorists have claimed. practise these phonic generalizations in text that is controlled for regularity to a reasonable degree, otherwise they may fail to appreciate the benefits of this strategy. Phonics encourages children to seek patterns of letters they can recognise. It also focuses attention on all the letters, not only a few; we know from eye movement studies that skilled readers view every letter and do not sample only a few as some Whole Language theorists have claimed.

Students also must be able to blend the letters or letter clusters. The beginning reader approximates the word by sounding it out, and then matching that approximation to a real word that fits the meaning of the sentence. This requires teaching and time allotted for adequate practice- children vary in the amount of practice needed to achieve mastery. Blends should be taught as continuous sounds where possible e.g. “man” should be sounded “mmmaaannn” not as “mmm aaa-nnn”. Continuous blends make it easier to telescope the sounds into a real word. Oral reading practice provides the teacher with opportunities to provide corrective feedback to students. Every error (not only those altering meaning) is an opportunity for teaching: systematic correction is far more valuable for students than is waiting for self-correction, or worse, ignoring errors because of the erroneous view that correction may dishearten the child, or because of a faith that errors will eventually reduce through some presumed but undefined mechanism.

Automatic, rapid, context-free decoding occurs as the over learned sequences of letters gradually begin to be perceived as syllables and words. Then skilled reading becomes so effortless that our limited attentional capacity can be devoted to comprehension of what we read. In contrast, children who continue to struggle at the level of print are using most of their attention to decode, and have little left to devote to comprehension. About 90% of reading problems occur at the level of the word (Stuart:1995), not with the process of comprehension. Once children master the basics, subsequent progress is largely determined by their volume of reading experience. Hence, our reading program should now be devoted to ensuring literature matches their interest and extends their higher order comprehension processes. To see children progressing in this way is exhilarating. To presume that the processes of skilled reading can be induced in children without their progressing through beginning stages is sadly misguided.

Does phonics mean enormous quantities of work sheet exercises, trying to remember large numbers of rules with dubious utility? Does it necessitate the use of such stilted stories as “Nan can fan Dan”? It certainly happened in past times when the purpose of reading became submerged under a fascination with the elements of the process. However, research has continued to separate the necessary from the marginal, and has increasingly defined the proper place of phonics in a comprehensive literacy program.

The learner or the task?

There has long been tension between the points of view of those primarily interested in the qualities of the learner and those more interested in the capacity of the environment (instruction) to influence what is learned. The former group have sought explanations within the learner for educational success or failure, whilst the other side (instructivists) has examined the structure of the task and the process of teaching for the such explanations.

Thus far, the results are on the board for the instructivists whilst the ‘qualities of the learner’ side have detoured through some pretty muddy swamps. Remember the “ability training model” in which one sought underlying process variable like visual perception, memory, motor skills for explanations of reading failure? Having diagnosed such an underlying cause, one attempted to train the pesky skill to ‘unblock’ the barrier to learning. A whole generation of students with difficulties learned how to draw a pencil line without straying from between two parallel lines. Unfortunately the acquired skill had no impact on reading. In fact, meta-analytic research has produced the following outcomes for such comparative research (See Kavale, 1993; Kavale & Forness, 1987; White, 1988).

Intervention No of studies Av effect size

Perceptual-motor training 180 0.08

Modality instruction 39 0.14

Direct skill teaching 25 0.84

Effect size: Strong >0.5 Moderate 0.35-0.05 Weak 0.84

The instructivist approach of examining the task and manipulating instructional variables has led to much better results. This is advantage holds true in the comparison of phonic instruction and whole langauge instruction (Foorman, Francis, Beeler, Winikates, & Fletcher:1997). When considering adults, since the task remains the same, the techniques proved most successful for young students have an a priori advantage over other alternatives in the absence of contrary evidence. There has been some reported work with older children, adolescents and adults. Elbro, Neilsen and Petersen (1994) argued for emphasis upon the alphabetic principle because of the memory constraints imposed by training in whole word recognition:

“In many cases the adults reported that they had completely overcome their reading difficulties, but when asked to read novel words they hesitated and admitted that this was difficult for them. These results underline the validity of a positive definition of dyslexia that is based on 11 poor mastery of the phonemic principle of written language. (Siegel, 1988; Stanovich, 1991; Rack, Snowling, & Olsen, 1992; Stanovich & Siegel, 1992)” (p.220).

A number of similar studies involving adults with reading difficulties have revealed marked deficits in decoding (Bear, Truax, & Barone, 1989; Bruck, 1990, 1992, 1993; Byrne & Letz, 1983; Perin, 1983; Pratt & Brady, 1988; Read & there are essentially two approaches that may be employed: implicit and explicit phonics instruction Ruyter, 1985; cited in Greenberg, Ehri, & Perin, 1997). In the Greenberg et al. (1997) study the adults’ performance on phonologically-based resembled those of children below 3rd grade. The findings were also consistent with those of Bruck (1992), Byrne & Letz (1983), Fawcett & Nicholson (1995), Pennington, Van Orden, Smith, Green, and Haith (1990), and Pratt and Brady (1988). Even very bright well-compensated adult readers acknowledge that they have had to laboriously remember word shapes, have little or no idea how to spell, and are constantly struggling with new words, especially technical terms related to their occupations. These are classic symptoms of the need for a strong phonics emphasis in the instructional process; indeed, some have argued (Greenberg et al., 1997) that it is most likely the failure of the school system to address the phonological nature of the reading problem that precluded satisfactory progress for these individuals.

The critical variable is not age but stage - whether child or adult—the path to facile reading is similar. Certainly adults have a history that cannot be ignored—most relevant is the likelihood of unproductive habits strongly engraved by years of practice. Adults need to unlearn in addition to learning. The implication is that this may entail slower progress, with the requirement of (possibly) vast amounts of practice accompanied by feedback to ensure the new habits are used effectively. On the positive side is that adults are usually vastly more experienced with language in general, and when their decoding difficulties are relieved their comprehension of what they read improves much more rapidly than it does for most young children.

Phonics is the starting motor for an engine subsequently fuelled by confidence and enjoyment. Some starting motors turn sluggishly and demand a significant load from the battery (parents and teacher). If the battery fails, the journey may never begin. However, all phonics are not equal. It is possible to teach phonics carefully and with parsimony; it is possible to do so ineffectively and excessively; and it is possible to do it in name only. Questions such as “What/When/How much phonics?” continue to be examined, but not the question “Should we teach phonics?”, for it has been answered resoundingly in the affirmative.

References

Adams, M.J., 1990, Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Baker, S. K., Kameenui, E. J., Simmons, D. C., & Stahl, S. A., 1994, “Beginning reading: Educational tools for diverse learners” School Psychology Review, 23, 372-391.

Bateman, B., 1991,. “Teaching word recognition to slow learning children”, Reading, Writing and Learning Disabilities, 7, 1-16.

Blachman, B. A., 1991,. “Early intervention for children’s reading problems: Clinical applications of the research in phonological awareness”, Topics in Language Disorders, 12 (1), 51-65.

Byrne, B., 1996,. “The learnability of the alphabetic principle: Children’s initial hypotheses about how print represents spoken speech”, Applied Psycholinguistics, 17, 401-426.

Elbro, C., Nielsen, I., & Petersen, D. K., 1994, “Dyslexia in adults: Evidence for deficits in non-word reading and in the phonological representation of lexical items”, Annals of Dyslexia, 44, 205-226.

Felton, R. H. & Pepper, P. P.. 1995,. “Early identification and intervention of phonological deficit in kindergarten and early elementary children at risk for reading disability”, School Psychology Review, 24, 405-414.

Foorman, B. R., 1995,. “Research on ‘The Great Debate’: Code-oriented versus Whole Language approaches to reading instruction”, School Psychology Review, 24, 376-392.

Foorman, B. R., Francis, D. J., Beeler, T., Winikates, D., & Fletcher, J., 1997, “Early interventions for children with reading problems: Study designs and preliminary findings” Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 8, 63-71.

Greenberg, D., Ehri, L. C., & Perin, D., 1997, “Are word reading processes the same or different in adult literacy students and third-fifth graders matched for reading level?” Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 262-275.

Kavale, K.A., 1993,. “A science and theory of learning disabilities”, In Lyon, G.R., Gray, D.B., Kavanagh, J.F., & Krasnegor, N.A. (Eds.): Better understanding learning disabilities. Baltimore: Brookes Pub.

Kavale, K.A. & Forness, S. R., 1987, “Substance over style: Assessing the efficacy of modality testing and teaching”, Exceptional Children, 54, 228-239.

Moats, L. C., 1994, “The missing foundation in teacher education: Knowledge of the structure of spoken and written language” Annals of Dyslexia, 44, 81-102.

Perfetti, C. A., 1991, “Representations and awareness in the acquisition of reading competence”. In L. Rieben, & C. A. Perfetti (Eds.), Learning to read: Basic research and its implications, pp. 33-44,. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Share, D. L., 1995, “Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition” Cognition, 55, 151-218.

Simmons, D. C., Gunn, B., Smith, S. B., & Kameenui, E. J., 1995, “Phonological awareness: Application of instructional design”, LD Forum, 19(2), 7-10.

Simner, M. L., 1995, “Reply to the Ministries’ reactions to the Canadian Psychological Association’s position paper on beginning reading instruction”, Canadian Psychology, 36, 333-342.

Singh, N. N., Deitz, D. E. D. & Singh, J., 1992, “Behavioural approaches”, In Nirbay N. Singh, & Ivan L. Beale (Eds.) Learning disabilities: Nature, theory, and treatment. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Spector, J., 1995, “Phonemic awareness training: Application of principles of direct instruction”, Reading and Writing Quarterly, 11, 37-51.

Stuart, M., 1995, “Prediction and qualitative assessment of five and six-year-old children’s reading: A longitudinal study”, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 65, 287-296.

Tunmer, W. E. & Hoover, W. A., 1993, “Phonological recoding skill and beginning reading”, Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 161-179. Weir, R., 1990, “Philosophy, cultural beliefs and literacy” Interchange, 21 (4), 24-33.

White, W. A. T., 1988,. “A meta-analysis of the effects of direct instruction in special education”, Education & Treatment of Children, 11, 364-374

Below is a group of more recent papers than mine to see how much the phonics issues may have changed.

Phonics Instruction in Early Literacy: Examining Professional Learning, Instructional Resources, and Intervention Intensity. (2025)

“Stagnant standardized test scores keep literacy achievement at the forefront of national education discussions. Increased conversations about the science of reading have propelled investigations into different types of phonics instruction. However, questions still linger such as “Which strategies are most effective for which students?”, “How should interventions be structured for the best results?”, and “Which school personnel should deliver these interventions?” To begin answering these questions, we conducted the present systematic literature review to synthesize the research surrounding phonics instruction for the last ten years in grades kindergarten through third using the systematic review methodology. Three overarching themes about phonics instruction emerged: (a) professional learning to foster a deep understanding of language; (b) instructional resources to support teachers with limited content or pedagogical knowledge; and (c) intervention intensity in relation to length and other factors. This review takes an in-depth look at what we, as scholars, know about phonics instruction and what we still need to know to advance reading scores.”

Dilgard, C., Hodges, T. S., & Coleman, J. (2022). Phonics Instruction in Early Literacy: Examining Professional Learning, Instructional Resources, and Intervention Intensity. Reading Psychology, 43(8), 541–575. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2022.2126045

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The science of learning to read words: A case for systematic phonics instruction (2020)

“The author reviews theory and research by Ehri and her colleagues to document how a scientific approach has been applied over the years to conduct controlled studies whose findings reveal how beginners learn to read words in and out of text. Words may be read by decoding letters into blended sounds or by predicting words from context, but the way that contributes most to reading and comprehending text is reading words automatically from memory by sight. The evidence shows that words are read from memory when graphemes are connected to phonemes. This bonds spellings of individual words to their pronunciations along with their meanings in memory. Readers must know grapheme–phoneme relations and have decoding skill to form connections, and must read words in text to associate spellings with meanings. Readers move through four developmental phases as they acquire knowledge about the alphabetic writing system and apply it to read and write words and build their sight vocabularies. Grapheme–phoneme knowledge and phonemic segmentation are key foundational skills that launch development followed subsequently by knowledge of syllabic and morphemic spelling–sound units. Findings show that when spellings attach to pronunciations and meanings in memory, they enhance memory for vocabulary words. This research underscores the importance of systematic phonics instruction that teaches students the knowledge and skills that are essential in acquiring word-reading skill. …

Our theory and research add to the science of reading debate in several ways. We provide an example of how an extensive program of scientific research has clarified important ingredients and milestones that need to be incorporated into beginning reading instruction to make it more effective. Our findings challenge instructional approaches claiming that beginners can learn to read whole words before they have acquired knowledge of grapheme–phoneme relations. Without this knowledge, students would remain in the pre-alphabetic phase. Our findings challenge the view that prereaders will move into reading through exposure to and practice in reading authentically written, meaningful storybooks without much attention paid to teaching them foundational skills. Without this, progress will be halting and limited. Students may not function beyond the partial alphabetic phase. Our findings challenge the strategy of teaching students that guessing words using syntactic and semantic cues is better than decoding words using graphic cues. Guessing does not build students’ lexical memory to support word-reading accuracy and automaticity.

Systematic phonics instruction has been mischaracterized as only skill and drill, with little attention to meaning. This is false. Phonics programs may use engaging games or interesting materials to teach letter–sound associations, for example, letter shape–sound picture mnemonics such as Sammy Snake in the Letterland program that Lyn Wendon created (see https://us.lette rland.com/). Students apply their letter–sound knowledge to decode words in meaningful texts from the outset. This was true in the phonics programs described previously. Teaching letter sounds and decoding necessarily occupies a larger portion of instructional time until students master foundational skills. This enables students to function at the full and consolidated alphabetic phases and benefit fully from more advanced forms of text reading and writing. Our developmental theory is consistent with the approach to reading instruction studied by Connor et al. (2009) and Juel and Minden-Cupp (2000). Their work suggests that students initially benefit most from joint teacher/student-managed, code-focused phonics instruction to learn the major grapheme–phoneme associations and how to decode and spell words. This applies to reading acquisition during the partial and full alphabetic phases. Once learned, students are ready to move into more child-managed, meaning-focused instruction that includes more extensive text reading and writing. This occurs as students move into the consolidated alphabetic phase. Implementing this approach requires that teachers assess students’ skills to determine which type of instruction is appropriate. This approach offers a way to resolve the reading wars, by providing both structured phonics- and meaning-based instruction tailored to individual students’ phase of development. Most of our studies have been conducted in English.

One issue is whether our theory and findings apply to students learning to read in other writing systems. English is unique among alphabetic systems in that spellings of words are more variable and opaque. The sources of regularity extend beyond grapheme–phoneme relations to include syllabic and morphemic regularities and statistical regularities. Seymour, Aro, and Erskine (2003) showed that students learning to read in English take much longer to become proficient than students reading in more transparent writing systems, such as Spanish, Finnish, or Greek. We suggest that phase theory is relevant across all alphabetic writing systems when students move into reading. The partial and full alphabetic phases describe the beginning period when students learn and apply grapheme–phoneme relations to read regularly spelled words. Evidence cited earlier in Cardoso-Martins et al.’s (2006) study indicated that phase theory more accurately portrayed Portuguese students’ development from the pre-alphabetic phase to the partial alphabetic phase than Ferreiro and Teberosky’s (1986) syllabic theory. Although Portuguese spoken words are syllabic, we found that beginners learned to read and spell better when they were taught grapheme–phoneme units than syllabic spelling sound units (Sargiani et al., 2019). Whereas the early period in learning to read is similar across alphabetic orthographies, the later period during the consolidated alphabetic phase may diverge. The need to learn more complex spelling patterns as part of the English writing system makes acquisition more complex and protracted than in transparent systems. Over the years, many other researchers have published influential theories and findings on reading processes and their development that have advanced our knowledge and improved instruction.

Of special note are researchers who have proposed and studied theories resembling amalgama tion theory to explain how people read words. Those theories also posit the formation of connections among orthographic, phonological, and semantic identities (ingredients of triangle models) to read words from memory, including Perfetti’s lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti, 1992; Perfetti & Hart, 2002), Seidenberg and McClelland’s (1989) computational triangle model, and subsequent derivatives (Plaut, 2005). Whereas we and Perfetti view written words as single lexical units bonded to their various identities and represented in memory, the computational models view written words as having distributed representations and resulting from the activation of connections among many units in memory. In sum, the theory and research presented in this article show that teaching students to decode unfamiliar words and enabling students to store spellings of familiar words bonded to their other identities in memory should be central goals of beginning reading instruction. Decoding is a means of getting spellings of words into memory so they can be read by sight. Being able to connect letters in spellings to sounds in pronunciations spontaneously when spellings of words are seen and heard also serves to retain words in memory. Both decoding and letter–sound mapping skills require knowledge of the alphabetic writing system. Gradual acquisition of this knowledge propels students through the alphabetic phases to become skilled readers.”

Ehri, L. C. (2020). The science of learning to read words: A case for systematic phonics instruction. Reading research quarterly, 55, S45-S60. https://www.goodteaching.ca/uploads/6/0/4/9/604969

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What can second language acquisition research tell us about the phonics ‘pillar’? (2020)

Rationale for teaching phonics

The OCRR makes a number of claims regarding the benefits of teaching phonics, including the following. I have also added, in square brackets, the references which Ofsted cites (via footnotes) to support these arguments.

The following are likely to have a positive impact on pupils’ self-efficacy: … knowing how to sound out words in a foreign language [Erler and Macaro, Citation2011]; ensuring that the building blocks of language are in place so that pupils can exercise greater autonomy. (p.5)

To improve learners’ understanding and production of language, a steady development in understanding of phonics, vocabulary, grammar and their interplay is needed. (p.7)

We know that knowledge of sound–spelling relations is critical. (p.8)

[T]o be better at reading comprehension, [Khalifa and Weir, Citation2009] learners need to become faster and more accurate at: decoding sound–symbol correspondences (how different combinations of letters map to different sounds) … This enables learners to become successful readers because it frees up their mental capacity to understand implied meanings and to process information across larger chunks of text [Field, Citation2013]. (p.7)

There are similarities between learning to read and to write in our first language and learning to do so in another language. Some of the concepts that lie behind early reading and early writing (and in particular, systematic synthetic phonics) are also relevant in the languages curriculum. The step-by-step, explicit approach to phonics and spelling can transfer to the languages classroom. (p.7)

The ability to decode words (turn the written word into sounds) also helps learners when reading texts, enhances autonomy and can improve vocabulary learning [Woore, Citation2014b]. (p.8)

It can be seen that generally little evidence is cited in support of the claims made. Nonetheless, as I will show below, my own reading of the research evidence tends to support Ofsted’s central claims that (a) teaching phonics is valuable in modern languages; (b) learners must develop both accuracy and fluency in mapping written forms to spoken forms, and vice versa; and (c) this can be beneficial for various aspects of L2 learning, including reading comprehension, vocabulary learning, self-efficacy and learner autonomy. However, the claims about learning to read in L2 – and particularly about the similarities between this and learning to read in L1 – merit further unpacking.

Below, I summarise what I consider to be relevant research evidence concerning the rationale for teaching phonics in modern languages. Inevitably in this short article, this review of the literature is brief and selective; many of the arguments in this section are developed in greater depth in Woore (Citation2021). However, it addresses what I think are three essential questions which must be considered when assessing the case for teaching phonics in a foreign language context. These are:

Is phonological decoding (the ability to convert written forms to sound) – which is the linguistic ability most directly targeted by phonics instruction – important in L2 learning?
Do learners develop proficiency in phonological decoding in the absence of phonics instruction?
Is teaching phonics effective in terms of developing students’ phonological decoding (without detriment to other aspects of their L2 proficiency)?

If we can demonstrate affirmative answers to questions (a) and (c), and a negative answer to question (b), then we have a case for phonics teaching.”

Woore, R. (2022). What can second language acquisition research tell us about the phonics ‘pillar’? The Language Learning Journal, 50(2), 172–185. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2022.2045683

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The Role and Importance of Phonics Instruction in Learning to Read: Historical Context and Ongoing Debate (2019)

“Phonics refers to the relationship between graphemes and phonemes in the English Language. (Read Oxford, n.d.) defined systematic phonics instruction as “reading instruction programs that teach pupils the relationship between graphemes and phonemes in an alphabetic writing system” (p. 12). The word ‘systematic’ refers to the teaching of “grapheme-phoneme correspondences in an ordered manner” (p. 12). Over the years, national inquires by the Australian, UK, and US education systems (Rowe, 2005; Rose, 2006; NICHD, 2000) have specified the importance of explicit and systematic phonics in teaching children how to read. Various prominent researchers have reiterated these points. For example, Willingham (2017) highlighted that for a reader to successfully decode, one needs to visually discriminate one letter from another, distinguish speech sounds, and learn the mappings between letters and corresponding sounds. Seidenberg (2018) also elaborated extensively on research that has demonstrated the importance of the phonological pathway in beginning reading, citing evidence from linguistic, psychological and computational modeling research. Pronunciation differences between Singapore English and other varieties of English, such as British English, have been documented for vowels and consonants (Low & Brown, 2005; Deterding, 2007). However, phonics instruction in Singapore is based on materials developed for other varieties of English, and therefore does not take into consideration how the local pronunciations of English words differ from other varieties, for example, in the pronunciation of vowels. Given the lack of literature exploring the implications of pronunciation differences on the teaching of phonics in the Singapore context, the lack of 109 localization could affect students’ ability to understand the regularities correspondences.”

“The role of phonics in reading instruction has been a contentious topic, especially in Australia, where the Whole Language approach has dominated teacher education and educational policies for many years. Whole Language philosophy generally opposes explicit phonics teaching, focusing on the meaning of whole words rather than their constituent sounds. However, some programs, such as Direct Instruction and Success For All, emphasize early, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and explicit phonics, even though they are not widely funded by education departments. In countries like the USA and Britain, legislative changes—driven by concerns over poor literacy outcomes—have recently mandated a shift towards explicit phonics instruction, moving away from Whole Language strategies such as relying on context clues. This has led to substantial reform in reading education, with teacher retraining and programs now required to meet evidence-based criteria to receive funding.”

CHALLENGES OF TEACHING PHONICS-BASED READING REMEDIATION IN SINGAPORE LEUNG WAI TUNG SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY 2019 The Role and Importance of Phonics Instruction in Learning to Read: Historical Context and Ongoing Debate.

of the English writing system, and to gain mastery of Singaporean grapheme-phoneme

Thu Enn!