A teacher’s approach to the task of reading is guided by what they think reading actually is. If armed with a viable definition of reading and an understanding of some of the instructional implications of the definition, teachers can use almost any reading materials to help children develop productive reading strategies. The teacher is the key.
According to Weaver, (2002, p.15) the following is a good perspective of what reading could be:
‘Learning to read means learning to bring meaning to a text in order to get meaning from it.’
However, you only need to read the news, walk into any classroom or peruse the children’s book shelves in your local book shop to know that phonics is currently king. Unfortunately, phonics is only further authenticated by high-stakes testing and governmental learning objectives (Davis, 2014).
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Children are fast becoming to believe that to learn to read is to identify words correctly. This is because in school they have learnt that correct word pronunciation is what reading is. However, one hopes that, when reading for pleasure, at home, the child may read for meaning. Whether a teacher is aware of it or not, Weaver (2002, p.15) believes it is reasonable to assume that teachers who focus intensely on a phonetic strategy for reading are leading children to believe that the following definition of reading is true, that:
‘Learning to read means learning to pronounce words.’
The Problems With Extreme Phonics Advocacy
Most proponents of a phonics based approach seem to think that once words are identified, meaning will take care of itself. They emphasise decoding rather than comprehension. You can understand why some people believe the emphasis on phonics to be logical. Language is oral and writing is a graphic representation of language. Is reading then the act of turning writing into its oral counterpart? If letters and letter combinations (graphemes) simply represent spoken sounds (phonemes) we simply need to teach a child to pronounce the word and they will be readers. If you teach a child what each letter stands for – they can read. They will then be able to immediately go on to the works of Shakespeare and War & Peace without any problems.
Comprehension
For example you are likely to be a fluent reader who knows all their grapheme / phonemes combinations. As a result you should be able to read the following passage:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997)
I’m sure after reading this passage you’d be unable to provide an adequate summary; not because you couldn’t read the passage correctly but because you couldn’t place the text in a context that made sense to you. This is the same for children who develop only a phonetic philosophy to reading. Sure, they read the passage accurately, but they will recall relatively little. This is because:
In isolation, most words do not have a single meaning but rather a range of possible meanings – thus phonics will only be of limited use to the reader.
Words take on specific meanings as they transact with one another on the page together – thus phonics will certainly not help in this transaction and indeed due to its time consuming nature, can damage this process.
Meaning is not in the text or words themselves but in the reader’s interpretations – phonics makes no contribution to this.
Readers make sense of texts by bringing to bear their life experiences, knowledge and feelings – Phonics plays no part in this.
Meaning emerges as a child engages with a whole text in context. – Phonics can only ever be a helpful friend to this process.
Single Words – Multiple Meanings
Take the simple word ‘run’. According to phonetic advocates, once you can decode and pronounce the word, meaning should take care of itself. Consider what you think the word run is to mean and then read the following examples and see if your meaning works in the context of the whole sentence.
Can you run the shop for an hour?
Can you run the printing press?
Can you do the run for charity?
Can you run in the next election?
Can you help with the school run?
They’ll print 500 copies in the first
Jenny has a run in her tights.
There was a run on BBQs this weekend.
It was a long
Now, the question is, in these and other sentences, how can a young phonetic-based reader know what run means? They are at a disadvantage. I’m sure the strategy of decoding and word recognition was not all that was required for you to take the full meaning from the sentences. It is clear then that we do not simply add together the meanings of individual words in a sentence to get the meaning of the whole. This is because we cannot know what a word means until we see it in context as a whole. Thus many phonic activities fail children in their pursuit of reading for meaning because they are not engaging in whole text, but rather, making individual sounds or sounding out individual words in isolation. This leaves children at a serious disadvantage when they approach real texts. Take for example these examples:
Get Sally to chair the meeting.
Separate the white from the folk
That was a close
Though these examples provide a common sense view that decoding does not take care of meaning in reading, phonics is still the primary method of word identification instead of one of several cue systems that a young reader has available to them. Therefore its incorrect and unethical for teachers and children to believe that reading comes down to the following:
printed symbol = a spoken symbol =meaning.
Phonic Rules Aren’t Rules
As the primary means for identifying unfamiliar words, phonics has certain unavoidable and unquestionable limitations. In the first place, phonic rules and application of them are difficult for many children to understand (Artley, 1977, Weaver, 2002). An early children’s text can have anything up to 21 regular consonants, 25 consonant blends and 13 silent consonants. As for vowels you have single vowels, diagraphs, blends, plus rules which apply to multi-syllabic words. This is a massive load.
The fact is, even if this kind of content can be taught, the sound-symbol relationships in English are not sufficiently consistent to make it possible to use phonic generalisations with any degree of regularity. Note, just as two common examples, the ea diagraph in – break, bread, near and beach. Not to mention the ng in – longer, singer, finger and ranger.
Another example is ‘paws’, which phonetically could produce something that also fits, pause, pours and pores. So if ‘paws’ is encountered out of context, you cannot identify the sound with a real word unless you already recognise the word ‘paws,’ in the context of the text, however children fed on a phonetic based diet are at a disadvantage when bringing context of this kind to their reading (Davis, 2014).
If you are beginning to think that spelling/sound correspondences are very complicated, you are absolutely right. There are just too many exceptions. Just look at this small selection of examples:
Rule Idea
Words Conforming From Common Word Lists
Exceptions
When there are two vowels side by side, the long sound of the first one is heard and the second is usually silent.
309 (bead)
377 (chief)
When a vowel is in the middle of a one-syllable word, the vowel is short.
408
249
When there are two vowels, one of which is final e, the first vowel is long and this e is silent
180 (bone)
108 (done)
The first vowel is usually long and the second silent in the diagraphs ai, ea, oa, ui
179 (nail)
92 (said)
In the phonogram ie theI is silent and the e has a long sound
8 (field)
39 (friend)
When words end with silent e, the preceedinga or i is long.
164 (cake)
108 (have)
When a follows w in a word, it usually has the sound a as in was.
15 (watch)
32 (swam)
The two letters ow make the long o sound
50 (own)
35 (down)
W is sometimes a vowel and follows the vowel diagraph rule
50 (crow)
75 (threw)
When y is used as a vowel in words, it sometimes has the sound of long i.
29 (fly)
170 (funny)
One vowel letter in an accented syllable has its short sound
547 (city)
356 (lady)
If the first vowel sound in a word is followed by a single consonant, that consonant usually begins the second syllable.
190 (over)
237 (oven)
When a word has only one vowel letter, the vowel sound is likely to be short
433 (hid)
322 (kind)
This is just a small sample of a list taken from Weaver (2002, pp.70-74). For the full list see here. Here we can see how even children’s common words lists regularly don’t follow phonetic rules consistently enough to be useful and so, according to Tovery, giving children phonetics as their go-to reading strategy leaves them at an incredible disadvantage.
‘The instruction required for children to deal constantly with these often abstract rules simply do not warrant the time and effort often expended. This time might be better spent actually reading.’ (Tovery, 1980, p.437)
Phonics Is Damaging Reading-For-Pleasure & Life-Long Reading
We have to also consider the damage that phonics instruction is causing. We are seeing a decline in life-long reading by children (The National Endowment Of The Arts, 2007) and the eroding away of time in which children could be reading for pleasure at school (NUT, 2016). Unfortunately, we are denying children satisfying experiences with books if we assume that first and foremost, reading means pronouncing words and painstakingly gauging their meaning on an individual basis. It is all too common to assume that word identification precedes comprehension; whereas in fact it is clear that comprehension is the other way around. Because we are getting the meaning of the whole, we can then grasp the meaning of the individual words. Words have meaning only as they transact with one another, within the context of a whole text, as the earlier examples have demonstrated.
The Obsession With Vowels
It is worth noting too that most phonics instruction is based around ‘vowel rules’. Yet vowels are the least important element to be concerned with in the identification of words. The following sentence illustrates this fact:
I gss u cn rd ths txt
wtht vwls.
Only by trying to read text as a whole can you or indeed children understand the meaning of it. Not by reading each letter, word, or sometimes even whole sentences in a text.
Reading is not the process of identifying the pronunciation and meaning of individual words, which phonics instruction could wrongly lead you to believe – particularly if you’re a young child. I think the examples above prove that meaning is more than the product of word pronunciation or identification. Reading is, in fact, a complicated act of processing large pieces of information which transcends individual words.
Innate Grammatical Knowledge & Using Experience (Schemas)
Children learn, from the earliest age, before they can even begin to talk themselves, to become unconcerned with individual words but rather quickly become concerned by complete utterances, which they are not only quick to comprehend but look to reproduce in sophisticated grammatical order. For example speaking in either subject, verb, object, subject verb or verb subject order. This is called syntactic cueing and it’s interested in the typical grammatical order words often come in. Babies learn that words must fit together to make a logical construction and so even the youngest of children can bring this knowledge to reading. This process of grammatically delimitating a word’s possible meaning is so automatic that children are often not aware of it, but it nevertheless occurs – and is made possible by grammatical schemas identified as innate by Noam Chomsky who describes it as our deep structures (1966). Unfortunately, as is often the case under phonetic rule, use of the one strategy ‘sounding the word out’, children are denied the opportunity to apply this far quicker and natural strategy to their reading. With this said however, if a child does fail to apply syntactic reasoning to a potential word then of course use of a sound-symbol can be a very helpful cue indeed!
Take for example:
The train went into the station.
If a child can’t recognise the word station immediately as a sight word, the reader will be aware that the train went somewhere and this somewhere must begin with the simple to remember st sound and even ends with an nsound. A reader who has been taught to use a combination of cues will reconstruct this writer’s message quickly and without the pain and time-consuming ‘sounding it out’.
Phonics Can Lend A Helping Hand Towards Comprehension Or Sabotage It
Taking the above into account it can follow that children must be taught basic phonics rules to make decoding problem words easier. However, much of the current phonics drive goes well beyond what is needed by children. Basic phonics can be a useful tool for the identification of unfamiliar words just not as the primary means. Rather it should act as a supportive partner to other cueing systems described above. If we want children to read for meaning, which I’m sure all of us do, children using all their knowledge of the world (schemas) and language – and the fact that words must ‘fit’ together – and make sense (syntactic), is usually all that is required to enable them to read unidentified words.
But basic phonetic knowledge is helpful when a child needs to make a choice from among several plausible words. For example:
The postman put a l______ through the door.
The unknown word of course could be package, letter or box. Noting, however, that the word begins with l tells the reader it is ‘letter’. However, if the child has only been taught the phonetic cueing system that of sounding out of the word this simple task could soon become an incredibly boring, time-consuming and above all unnecessary task. Remember too that each time a child has to stop to decode the individual letters in a word, they are losing their connection to the context of the piece and by the end are unlikely to have any clue what the text was about as a whole.
So with this being true, what should be included in a phonics program to make is a useful aid to word identification? Well, consonant symbol-sounds, including consonant-diagraphs and blends (ch, th, sh, bl etc..), are important as most words begin or end with them. This knowledge alone should give a child enough leverage over unfamiliar words to quickly become a competent reader. Teaching the 27 vowel generalisations is unlikely to be helpful or necessary. Analysis of the 650 most common words (Artley, 1976) showed that 68% of them conform to simple long and short vowel sounds and so these certainly could be taught. In polysyllabic words the percentage was 80%. This means that 4 in every 5 words could be read if children were taught the long and short vowel symbol-sound relations. On coming to a problem word they could simply pronounce both to see which would make logical sense. Take for example the following:
The smoking is coming th-r-oo the window. This works in context a lot better than th-r-ow.
Such a procedure is often already done by children anyway. Take for example when they are exposed to words like troop, boot and foot, where there is no rule. Yet another example could be trailing the difference between the pronounced e and the silent e. Take for example:
I had a good ______ at the party. This will need only to try time and tim-e.
Phonic-Book Sets
We also need to consider the impact of phonic-book sets. Amazingly, these are often incredibly hard to read. They are often obligated to simplify and restrict the language in them to such a degree that they often get to the point where the selections are more difficult or boring to read precisely because the language is so unnatural and warped. When reading these phonic sets you often have to ask yourself: who ever uttered a sentence like that? No one places deliberate and artificial letter/sound restrictions on themselves so why should these books? This makes it nearly impossible for children to use them in order to develop their own understanding about real print and how it really works. They are left at a disadvantage. Virtually all phonic-book sets focus at the outset on skills for identifying sounds or words rather than on strategies for constructing meaning from the text as a whole.
Instead of this, children should be asked to read every-day – and should avoid having to read artificially ‘simplified’ or contrived language, which doesn’t represent real books or the real world. There is no need to have a division between ‘learning to read’ and ‘reading to learn’, like the sole phonic approach does. From the very beginning, children can, be presented with, and encouraged to, read real texts with real purpose.
Phonics In Review
Since vowels are relatively unimportant in identifying words, it seems unnecessary to teach numerous vowel rules, as most phonics programs do.
Spelling/sound correspondences are often very complex and not easily reducible to rules that can or should be taught.
Only a few of the frequently taught rules are both consistent and comprehensive – that is, applicable to a considerable number of words.
Even most of these rules probably do not need to be explicitly taught to whole classes of children, since most children can and will internalize spelling/sound patterns just by reading a lot and/or with minimal guidance in observing correspondences and patterns.
Thus most children probably do not need nearly a much phonics instruction as they are typically receiving in today’s phonics programs and phonic-book-sets. (Weaver, 2002, pp.778)
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is reasonable to conclude that phonetic cueing can only act as an aid to word identification and can’t be judged as a sound method for learning to read. The fact children who have been exposed to a militant phonics approach learn to read does not necessarily mean that they learned to read because of the approach, though people unaware of the nature of the reading process and what is involved in learning to read are of course inclined to make this assumption.
‘What works is not always phonics, and, in fact, for young children, what works best in reading may seldom be intensive phonic instruction’ (Carbo, 1987).
The reality is that we have children who do not need phonics to become good readers, children who become good readers despite phonics and children who are also unable to master phonics and so don’t become good readers. The reason that most children are able – perhaps best able to learn to read without intensive phonics instruction is, as we have begun to see, that learning to read involves much more than learning to sound out letters and identify words. It involves learning to bring one’s own experiences, feelings and knowledge to the task of transacting with a text, and it involves learning to use and coordinate all three language curing systems: syntactic, semantic and grapho/phonemic. For more information on this, you might want to read my post here.
It’s amazing then to think that children can learn to read with, or perhaps in spite of, an approach that focuses mainly on phonetics. Luckily, children have a natural, innate tendency to create meaning by transacting with their environment. Children can translate print to their daily lives because many of them can naturally translate their reading to what they have learnt about spoken language as a baby and because they have a tremendous capacity for forming their own ways of thinking about how language works -again, a capacity clearly exemplified in their toddler years -where they learn to speak more and more like adults.
Finally then, when reading is taught with emphasis on meaning – context cues can become the dominant force and are the closest cues related to the actual purpose of reading, that of comprehending. After all it is comprehending that makes an independent and life-long reader.
References
Artley, A. S. (1976) ‘Vowel Values in Early Reading Words’ In The Reading Teacher
Artley, A. S. (1977) ‘Phonics revisited’ In Language Arts, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 121-126
Carbo. M. (1987) ‘What Works’ Isn’t always phonics Phi Delta Kappan 68:431-35
Davis, A., (2014) Guardian Available Online [https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2014/mar/04/reading-lessons-phonics-world-book-day]
The National Endowment Of The Arts, (2007) To Read Or Not To Read
National Union For Teachers (2016) Reading For Pleasure Available Online [https://www.teachers.org.uk/files/active/1/Reading-4-Pleasure-7225.pdf]
Weaver, C. (2002) (3rd Ed) The Reading Process USA: Heinemann