My daughter is currently in year 5 at junior school. Since the age of 4, she has had some difficulties with reading and writing, especially with spelling words. The school she attends, like most British schools, uses phonics as the approach to learning to read.

What is phonics? Phonics is designed to enable children to learn sound-to-letter correspondence. In other words, children are taught how to decode letters into their respective sounds, so that they will be able to read unfamiliar words by themselves. Phonics is all about the sound a letter or group of letters make, rather than recognizing whole words. In a typical phonics reading class, children sound out each letter of a word (phonemes) before saying what the actual word is: c a t – cat. Phonics is designed to teach letter sound mappings in a systematic way, e.g. when the letter ‘i’ is followed by the letter ‘gh’, the ‘i’ is usually a long sound and the ‘gh’ is silent, e.g. ‘high’, ‘thigh’, etc. There are many websites and apps (that incorportprate the mulimodal approach to learning) that schools use to demonstrate these spelling generalisations, such as: http://www.readingrockets.org/literacyapps/phonic.

My daughter from the age of 4 until now (aged 9) spells simple words incorrectly because she insists on using what she has learnt in phonics. For example, ‘dun’ (done). This makes perfect sense because ‘dun’ rhymes with ‘sun’, ‘bun’, ‘fun’, etc. But ‘done’ also, it rhymes with ‘come’. Naturally, my daughter is often not sure which vowel configuration to use, and I’m sure she is not alone. My daughter is constantly looking for rules when she reads and writes.

But the rules that phonics lay out are not anywhere near reliable. Mayer (2002) exposes this unreliability by proving that some of the rules of phonics, e.g. when there are two vowels side by side, the long sound of the first one is heard and the second is usually silent. ‘Lead’ fits this generalization, but ‘chief’ does not. Mayer says that this phonics generalization has a reliability of 45%. According to Mayer, there are many other generalizations that have low reliability rates.

Children are also asked to read and write nonsense words, such as ‘halp’, ‘snope’, ‘thun’, ‘flarp’, which can be further confusing for young children because they might try to make sense of the meaning of the word when there isn’t one. When people read, every word is connected to meaning. The question therefore is, shouldn’t children be taught to interpret meaning, not spell nonsense words that are read and written with no context? Surely the whole purpose of reading is to interpret meaning in context.

Furthermore, there are many accents and dialects of English. People from the north of England pronounce some vowel sounds differently from people in the south. ‘Bath’ has a short vowel sound in the north and a long vowel in the south. So together with the rules of phonics, children may find reading such words confusing.

Is phonics the best approach to learning to read? The answer is probably not, since there are so many irregularities in the English Languge. I am hoping that further research will find better, more effective ways for children to learn to read.

References:

Mayer, R (2002). "Phonics Exposed: Understanding and Resisting Systematic Direct Intense Phonics Instruction". Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp 145-7, 154 7.

Schoenfeld, A. and Pearson, P, (2009). "The Reading and Math Wars", in Handbook of Education Policy Reserch. pp 561 - 563.

The Telegraph, (25 April 2016) "The phonics reading method doesn't work for every child".

The Independent, (28 November 2012) "Why phonics tests spell trouble".