When Teaching Reading Begin with Phonics

“Will you help me Miss? I still can’t read.”

That question and statement and the look on the face of the teenager saying it haunts me today.

In the early eighties I was asked by a friend would I consider volunteering a few hours a week tutoring students with poor reading skills.
As a former primary teacher I had some idea of the approach I would make. I had taught preps through to year nine.

Thinking there would be only a few students I decided to use a few of the vocabulary-controlled books available at the time. The subject matter suited teenagers but the language was at grade three or four level. We could “read” and discuss each book at school and the student could take it home to read.
The next week we would study another book. I believed the problem would be rectified in a few weeks.

However the reality was not that straight forward.

Fifty plus students were functionally illiterate.
Every student I spoke to,or worked with had the same difficulties.
They had no understanding of phonics – no word attack skills.
Therefore reading a text even a simple one was almost impossible.

I began teaching phonics systematically.

Back to basics. When we speak we make sounds. Our reading and writing system is an alphabetic one. Because the English alphabet is twenty-six letters and the sounds forty-four, one, two, three or four letters can be used to spell one sound. There are seventy common phonograms (letter combinations). Vowels, consonants and syllables also needed to be taught.

Many students had enormous struggles while others once they caught on became fluent readers. Trade teachers listened to the students read because they could see there was logic behind the process.
Using his newfound phonics knowledge one student stated angrily, “Is that all it was!”

The students thought they were “dumb”…
No one questioned the fact that they were not taught how to read.
Modern research indicates a systematic phonics method of teaching works very well with boys.

Teachers are usually good readers. Good readers forget the effort needed to learn to read and cannot understand why some people have a problem.

Unlike language ability, which is innate, reading is a skill and needs to be taught to most people and reading needs practise to master.
We spend twelve years at school and it takes that time to develop some mastery over the language.
Phonics is only the beginning!

Let me fast forward.

After a time spent in publishing I once again heard the call of teaching and decided to go back to primary school to update my qualifications and embrace the new educational philosophy.

A lot of innovation was worthwhile and made school an interesting place to be.
Whole language was the buzzword. – reading, writing, listening and speaking!
My goodness we had never studied the language in that way before!

Invented spelling. The discipline of learning how to write coherent sentences and punctuation was piece meal. It was the message that was important. It didn’t matter that many students couldn’t read the books in front of them or write and spell.

I remember asking one of my students at the technical school what happened to you in primary school. He said the teacher just told me to sit down and read.
Discovery learning was adopted! Phonics programs, graded readers and grammatical exercises were thrown out.

Criticism of the alphabetic-phonics method of teaching reading continues.
Criticizing the premises of whole language is not encouraged in our Education system.

By eliminating the sense of sound from the reading process, the crucial link between the alphabetically written word and its spoken equivalent is not understood.
I know I am another voice crying in the wilderness like many others who espouse systematic phonics teaching to beginning readers.

However an insight I have recently had through researching reading on the Internet has made me even more concerned about the way we teach reading in schools.

We have not thought about our brain in the process of teaching reading.
We understand more today about how our brain works.

Let’s look at a possible scenario.

In 1956 researcher Edward Miller who happened to be dyslexic (has problems with reading and writing) developed a theory of “Educational Dyslexia”.
He believed dyslexia could be artificially induced.

He was taught the sight method (ideographic teaching technique – or whole word memorization) of learning to read, by a newly graduated teacher.
When you impose an ideographic teaching technique on an alphabetic writing system, you get reading disability. Why?

A sight-reader has developed a “spatial-holistic” orientation to reading in his brain.

This is automatic. The process of sounding out words can be for this type of reader irritating and painful. It produces behavioral disorganization by introducing two conflicting stimuli. The better a reader gets at memorizing words the more chance there is of developing a cognitive block to decoding words sound by sound.

In contrast, if a child’s first-learned way of identifying words was phonetic, and if that ability becomes automatic that child will never become dyslexic.

I have seen this in an adult who I was tutoring in phonics.
He had learned to read the whole word way. He had such disorganization in his brain that he couldn’t continue. It will take a long time for him to repair the damage – if he wants to.
I am pleased he has now contacted me and wants to continue because he is noticing a difference in his reading! The struggle is worth it!

Dr Seuss, whose incredibly popular books were written to supplement the whole word reading programs in schools is quoted as saying,
“I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country,”
I totally agree.

Do I think reading is only about phonics? Absolutely not!

One of the favorite stories from my childhood is the Emperor’s New Clothes. My interpretation of the moral of the story is we don’t want to say what we really see because we will look foolish.

Well I am past worrying about how I look.

Reading problems are caused by the school system and not because something is wrong with the child having difficulty learning to read and write.

People have literacy problems because none of the current methods of reading instruction work for everyone.

Research studies over the past twenty-five years show that to learn an alphabetic writing system a person must be taught the sounds of his or her language and be trained to hear the order of these sounds in words.
It is the sounds that the letters represent. When this learning is consolidated the next step is to teach systematically how these sounds can be spelled.

It is glaringly obvious!

I am a fluent phonetic reader.
I do not need to concentrate on decoding the text: I read for meaning.
I thank my parents, my primary school and
The Adelaide Primers Part One and Two for this.

It makes me angry that educators can’t see beyond their own prejudices and don’t learn from the wisdom of the past.
When you have sat with as many children struggling to learn to read as I have and then you are expected to add to this dilemma through a flawed teaching philosophy you wonder –

What is education is all about?