After School Treats

Phonics: The Best Way to Learn to Read

For a good education in the importance of phonics, see the National Right to Read Foundation, www.nrrf.org

More specifically, here's a phonics program that After School Treats highly recommends: www.spalding.org

In the Omaha area, you can learn to read with Spalding phonics or get remedial help at the Phoenix Academy in Rockbrook Village, 108^th & West Center Road.

The best thing parents can do is to read aloud to their children for 20 or 30 minutes every day from birth until high school, since the best way to connect sound with text is by doing just that: reading aloud, and making words come alive. But ironically, few people realize what the basic building block of reading is: not words on a page, but sound!

Ever since the alphabet was invented, how did people learn to read? By using phonics - matching the written symbols in text that we call the "alphabet" to the sounds that the letters make when pronounced aloud so that they're spelled correctly.

Is that a lost skill? Of course not!

If you didn't learn to read with phonics - and very few people today did - it's never too late. You can get started right now! The first step is realizing there's such a thing as phonics, and learning its subskills - proper handwriting, the rules of spelling, the principles of grammar, how to translate the letters in written text into meaning in your mind, and many more.

Rhyming games, familiar childhood songs, and face-to-face interaction are all important for forming "phonetic awareness" in a young child, an important prereading milestone. You can't do those things if your eyes are glued to the
TV, though. That's just one more reason why the less time a child spends in front of the TV set, the better prepared he or she will be for listening to a teacher, interacting with other pupils, being able to "encode" language by speaking coherently, and very soon, reading independently and accurately, too. So if you love kids, be aware, and turn that darn thing OFF. :>)

You can open up the secrets of reading easily, efficiently and inexpensively. Best of all, you don't have to be a teacher to teach yourself or your child how to read!

Young children, teenagers and even adults can gain in both reading and spelling by working with the phonograms - the sounds of one, two, three or four alphabet letters combined, as represented by their written symbols. They are the basic tool of phonics instruction. And yet very few people today, even in education, know what the phonograms are:

The 26 alphabet letters, with /q/ taught as /qu/ . . . and:

wor

ear

ough

igh

dge

eigh

With systematic, intensive, explicit phonics instruction, the heart is a set of phonogram flash cards, usually available for $20 or so, that contain the proper pronunciation of the phonogram, some examples of words that it appears in, and some simple cues for knowing how to spell and pronounce the word in which the phonogram is found. The child goes through the cards the same way you do math flash cards, and with instruction in the rules of spelling and handwriting, within literally a few hours, the vast majority of students are reading, even if they are only 4 or 5 years old.

Do-it-yourself phonics instruction is increasingly available even if phonics instruction isn't offered in schools. But here's the best news of all:

The very best way to learn phonics is, simply, to read aloud. If a parent is reading aloud to a young child, the child should be able to see the text and try to follow along. Take time to stop every now and then and help your child "sound out" a word. Enjoy the reading! Be happy that the time you're investing will pay off bigtime in better listening skills as well as better speech, better grammar, and of course better reading.

About 20 to 30 minutes every day should do the trick, starting when a child is very young, and continuing throughout life. Be extra diligent about it in the year before your child starts school, and you'll be rewarded with an early reader.

This fun and easy reading instruction plan should be of high interest to parents of children getting ready to start school, and those who are struggling with reading in the early grades. Wouldn't you rather send your child to school already reading? And wouldn't you rather get your older child out of remedial reading programs, and into the mainstream, by teaching these classic techniques?

Let's explore why phonics instruction is the best reading instruction, and why so few schools use it:

� Only a handful of schools across the country these days teach reading and writing exclusively with the logical decoding power of phonics. Phonics is a system that the brain uses to instantly and accurately translate written words into meaning in the mind based on the sounds those symbols make if they were spoken aloud.

� Phonics is a highly effective strategy for reading instruction, with a success rate approaching 100%, including for children of below-average and impaired mental functioning. Children reach relatively high levels of literacy and start gaining large vocabularies and good reading comprehension at ages 4, 5 and 6 when they are taught the basic skills of phonics. Children tend to become strong readers after just 20 minutes a day of properly-taught phonics in the kindergarten year, followed up in the first few grades with additional skills and practice. It's so easy to teach, parents can use phonics at home and send their child to kindergarten already reading, or well-prepared for school and ready to read.

� Phonics taught properly has these three main characteristics:

�� Systematic - language is part of a system with specific rules and principles that should be taught deliberately, piece by piece, until the child understands how the system works as a whole.

�� Intensive - reading should be taught using the child's senses of sight, hearing, speaking and the physical movements of handwriting in a coordinated, multisensory approach.

�� Explicit - the skills of phonics should be taught separately and purposefully, leaving nothing for the children to guess or discover implicitly on their own.

�� If a child or adult has trouble sounding out unfamiliar words, skips words and lines when reading aloud, has spelling problems, and can't concentrate while reading for very long, that child or adult shows signs of missing out on the basics of reading which come best through solid phonics instruction. Those bad habits do not develop when proper phonics is the way the person has been instructed to read. Unfortunately, after age 10 or so, it's harder to teach the brain new approaches to decoding text, and those readers usually never gain the big vocabularies and effective reading comprehension skills of phonics readers. That's why reading remediation is so difficult after third grade or so, and why starting readers out with properly-taught phonics is so important.

� If phonics is so good, why don't all schools use it? Decades ago, all schools taught reading with phonics and a logical, alphabetical approach to language instruction. That fell by the wayside in the 1950s and '60s when educational psychologists convinced teachers to start using an "eclectic" mix of techniques called "Whole Language." Those techniques include:

n the memorization of common sight words

n guessing, using context clues based on the meaning of the surrounding text

n trying to infer meaning based on the illustrations that came with the text

n looping the eye around the whole word or sentence to try to rapidly guess at the meaning.

Remember the "Dick and Jane" books? They were based on Whole Language, with a tightly-controlled, pre-chosen vocabulary of sight words that helped the children "read" with very little effort. These techniques were originally developed to help deaf and hard-of-hearing students learn to read, since they could not use phonetic "cues" because of their hearing difficulties. However, the techniques not only don't help readers who can hear, they actually confuse them - a simple explanation for today's epidemic of dyslexia and reading and spelling disability, in contrast to the widespread high literacy of generations in the past. However, about 50 years ago, it was thought that Whole Language techniques took less effort and were more fun than phonics, getting students "engaged" with books and viewing school as less of a drag because there were no rules to learn and no repetitive drills. Educators quickly came to believe that phonics was "boring" for kids, and no wonder Whole Language techniques became more popular. Consequently, it has been Whole Language techniques, not phonics, that have been taught in colleges of education for decades. Very few teachers today know how to teach phonics correctly or even know the phonograms or the rules of spelling.

� Schools will protest that they do, too, teach reading with phonics. But they use the sounds the letters make as only one among six or seven strategies of Whole Language, along with memorization, guessing and "reading the pictures." When phonics is minimized, its effectiveness is destroyed almost entirely. It's as if phonics is the "broccoli" on a plate of candy and cookies offered to children. Naturally, they pass over the "broccoli" for the sweets, and miss out on the superior mental "nutrition" of phonics. By denying them the power of their sense of sound in decoding text, no wonder children get confused. They're not "flying blind" - they're "flying deaf." It's clear that phonics shouldn't be mixed with Whole Language. Phonics techniques by themselves are considerably more effective alone than when mixed in with many other techniques and "cue" systems.

� If your school uses Whole Language, also known as "eclectic" reading techniques or "balanced literacy," that means that a little bit of phonics is thrown in, but only implicitly, not explicitly. Students no longer "sound out" and pronounce words, but are taught to look at the pictures that come with the text. If they don't know the word, they are told that it is OK to just skip it.

� To find out if your child has had more than a minimal amount of phonics, ask him or her to recite the vowel sounds - a e i o u - and the "short" vowel sounds - ah eh ih oh uh. You could also offer your child a lengthy word and observe how the child "attacks" it. If the child "sounds it out," that's a phonics-instructed child. Most of them just guess, get red-faced, and give up. You should note that kindergartners taught phonics properly can not only pronounce, but can spell, a tough word such as "chrysanthemum," just by listening to it being read aloud. Can your child? If not, that's a red flag.

�� Phonics has been estimated to be 10 times cheaper than Whole Language methodology, mainly because it works right the first time. Also, its required materials are much less expensive than what's required for Whole Language reading instruction. With phonics instruction, materials are limited to a set of phonics flash cards, writing paper, pencils, chalk or markers, chalkboards or dry-erase boards, a set of books with reading selections matched to the phonograms being taught at that particular time in the school year, and existing school library books.

� Why is Whole Language so much more expensive? Whole Language requires the use of consumable workbooks, which have to be replaced year after year as the children fill them in. It also requires many, many books written specifically because they contain illustrations and other "cues" for the sight-reading word lists that the children memorize - not because they are good stories because in fact, they aren't. The problem is, the children can easily read these books that have been "pre-engineered" for their success, but when they encounter regular library books or unfamiliar words in the upper grades, they are stumped - because they haven't been taught to read with principles, only with guessing techniques and simplistic sight words. With phonics, children first learn to read from their own writing, and quickly shift to top-quality children's literature with enriched vocabulary, engaging stories and unique characters.

�� In phonics schools, all kindergarteners are reading and writing by spring. In Whole Language schools, a significant percentage of the students never attain functional literacy.

�� With systematic, intensive phonics, once the child knows the phonograms and the rules, speedy and accurate decoding of words produces excellent reading and writing skills.

�� At fourth grade, the vocabulary of the typical phonics-trained child has been pegged at 10 times larger than the vocabulary of a Whole Language child. Research has shown that, on average, a phonics reader has a working vocabulary of about 50,000 words, while a Whole Language reader has only mastered 5,000. The reason the phonics reader knows and uses so many more words is because the phonics child knows the "code" to discern the meaning of the nearly 750,000 English words and is adding lots of words every school year, while the Whole Language child can memorize only a limited number of words at a time.

�� The "eclectic" method of Whole Language is contradictory and confusing. There's simply too much for the child to do at one time. It's like buying the child the finest in golf equipment, putting him or her on the best golf course . . . and then telling the child to stand on one foot and swing left-handed until he or she "catches on."

�� With phonics, the child learns the 70 phonograms, or sounds of letters. The child reads from left to right, top to bottom, in an orderly, organized, meaningful decoding of words.

�� With Whole Language, words are viewed as visual images, or patterns, to be processed only visually, like characters in the Japanese language. It is a highly laborious and inaccurate method. The logical, alphabet-based English language is much more efficient and precise chiefly because of its phonetic base - the consistent, reliable connection between the written symbols and the sounds they make when pronounced aloud.

�� Sight reading was developed for deaf children in the 1800s, who could not use their sense of sound to learn to read. But for children who can hear, it is foolish not to teach reading with their sense of sound. MRI brain scans show that children read by matching the sight of the letters to the sounds they make. Because Whole Language techniques are visual, they deny children the multisensory tools they need to learn reading in the quickest, best way. Whole Language also has been linked to dyslexia and eyestrain because it makes children depend too much on their sense of sight and not enough on their sense of sound.

�� Phonics, in contrast to Whole Language, involves the child in the reading by using the sound of the word, the sight of the word, speaking the word, and writing the word properly. Skills for listening, handwriting, diction, spelling and grammar are taught along with phonics. Whole Language classrooms fail to integrate those communication skills effectively, and that's why a child might get 100% on a spelling test one week after memorizing the words, but then in the next week, misspell many of the same words in a written report . . . because the memorization faded. With phonics, the reader gains principles and skills that don't fade away. That's a crucial difference - one that more and more parents, taxpayers and educators are beginning to discover.