Phonics was a teaching trend that was often left behind in classrooms. But, more and more teachers, and students, are finding that this is a crucial element in the academic realm.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the latest in education, phonics making a comeback, and discuss why schools are revisiting phonics trends in the classroom.
Let’s get started.
What Is Phonics?
A formerly popular way of teaching students how to read and write was through the method known as phonics. Using phonics, children learn to distinguish one word from another in the English language by hearing, identifying, and using different sounds.
Phonics helps children decode words as they read. The concept functions under the assumption that the English written language can be compared to a code. Using this theory, phonics allows students to know how those letters sound when they’re combined by learning the sounds of individual letters.
In addition to gaining a better understanding of sounds, phonics also helps students with their written skills as well.
Examples of Phonics
Using phonics, students match the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters.
Example: the sound k can be spelled as k, ch, ck, or c.
Decoding unfamiliar or unknown words by sounding them out becomes a more manageable task when we teach students to blend the sounds of letters together.
Example: learning the sounds for the letters s, a, p, and t means learning to build up the words: “sat,” “pats,” “pat,” and “tap.”
Understanding the Comeback
Historically, phonics has been a long-debated method for the classroom. While it was initially viewed as effective, it took a turn over the last few decades. While phonics could still be found in classrooms across the country, the focus was on the more explicit, systematic teaching of phonics.
The balanced literacy approach of a well-rounded phonics curriculum that puts heavy emphasis on sounding out words took a back seat. But today, we’re seeing the pendulum begin to swing back toward phonics once again as the science of reading is trending more than ever.
The Science of Reading
The science of reading encapsulates a body of scientific knowledge and research-based evidence of best practices for reading instruction. Children learn best from systematic and targeted instruction in areas such as phonics and word recognition, according to the science of reading.
With the goal of improving reading instruction, education across the country is moving away from a balanced literacy approach and towards the science of reading.
What Students are Learning From the Science of Reading
The science of reading research focuses on a few critical components in early literacy instruction, including:
Text comprehension
Vocabulary and oral language comprehension
Fluency
Phonics and word recognition
Phonological awareness
Through systematic and strategic lessons, students gain an understanding of these different complex components of the English language.
How Phonics Is Taught
Systematic teaching of phonics helps to introduce young children to the joy and wonder of books, an art that has been long forgotten in most classrooms.
There are four primary ways that phonics is taught to students, including synthetic phonics, embedded phonics, analogy phonics, and analytical phonics.
Synthetic Phonics
In phonics, one of the most popular methods of teaching in the classroom comes in the form of synthetic phonics. Using this method, synthesis is formed when sounds, or phonemes, associated with particular letters, or graphemes, are pronounced in isolation and then blended together.
Example of Synthetic Phonics
For example, children are taught to look at the breakdown of three letters when looking at a single-syllable word, such as cat.
Using the example of “cat,” the student pronounces a sound, or phoneme, for each letter.
Example: cat = /k, æ, t/
They will ultimately come to blend the sounds, or phonemes, together to form the final word, cat.
Analogy Phonics
Using the phonograms in a word, students can also adapt to a form of analytic phonics. In analogy phonics, students analyze the rime, or phonogram, which includes the vowel and the sounds following it.
Example of Analogy Phonics
For example, looking at the word “cake,” students would analyze the -ake sounds following the vowel.
Children use these phonograms to learn about “word families.”
Example: cake, fake, bake, and make
Analytical Phonics
Another popular method of teaching phonics, more widely used in Europe, is through analytical phonics. Rather than pronouncing sounds in isolation, as with synthetic phonics, students identify or analyze the common phoneme in a set of words. Ideally, the teacher would foster this study by providing words all containing the same phoneme per lesson.
Example of Analytical Phonics
For example, rather than splitting apart different words, pupils and teachers together will discuss the similarity of words.
Example: pen, push, park, and pat
Embedded Phonics
Looking at the bigger picture when it comes to phonics means identifying the English language as an entire program. Therefore, teaching reading means understanding that different phonics methods together help to form this program.
In the embedded phonics approach, rather than the skills being taught systematically, they are identified opportunistically. Rather than being taught in separate lessons, embedded phonics differs from other methods in that the instruction is always in the context of literature.
Final Thoughts
It’s not surprising to learn that things are changing in the classroom. And, much like most historical trends, in or outside of the school, it comes with the swinging pendulum.
Phonics was introduced to learning initially to help students with their reading and writing comprehension. Unfortunately, it was left in the dust decades ago because of much controversy. Regardless of the reason why it was phonics disappeared from classrooms, one thing is for sure today.
In the ever-changing world of the classroom, we see more and more that phonics is making its comeback, and rightfully so. As teachers battle with continued declining scores in reading and writing comprehension, it’s time to go back to the basics!
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