Why do we learn phonics

Skills that are learned stay with a child throughout their life and provide a stepping stone into their education. Phonics can be tricky to understand if you have never used it to learn to read, take a look at the Department of Education website to find out more:.

If you are unsure of letter sounds, download Read with Phonics:. Skip to main content. And why do we teach it? These two ideas — whole word and phonics — had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to be known among educators as the "three-cueing system.

In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks: Does it look right?

Does it sound right? If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading. Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV.

MSV is a cueing idea that can be traced back to the late Marie Clay, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories about reading in a dissertation in the s. Clay developed her cueing theory independently of Goodman, but they met several times and had similar ideas about the reading process.

Their theories were based on observational research. They would listen to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and use that information to identify a child's reading difficulties.

For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence.

Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. The goal was to comprehend text. These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late s had taken hold throughout America.

It was implemented across New Zealand in the s and went on to become one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs. But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to different conclusions about how people read.

It was the early s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher. Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words. So, in , Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab.

They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context. The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader.

This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research. Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example. Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.

Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems. The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works. It's not hard to find examples of the cueing system.

A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture Eagle Eye , getting their lips ready to try the first sound Lips the Fish , or just skipping the word altogether Skippy Frog. There are videos online where you can see cueing in action.

In one video posted on The Teaching Channel, 17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "picture power" to identify the words on the page. The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book.

The class reads a book together called "In the Garden. It's what's known as a predictable book; the sentences are all the same except for the last word. The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the.

The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note. In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the floor come to a page with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her guess.

This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader's workshop. But the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns — hallmarks of the three-cueing system.

Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading. But many of the words in those books — butterfly, caterpillar — are words that beginning readers haven't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out.

When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read. Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.

Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut! Goldberg had been hired by the Oakland schools in to help struggling readers by teaching a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach.

Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing.

And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read it. It was clear to Goldberg after just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the approach.

It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it.

Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing. She had never come across any of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job. People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics. The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument. Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say.

Marilyn Adams came across this belief in the early s. She's a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the research on how children learn to read. Soon after the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state education officials in Sacramento, California. She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. Help me. A woman raised her hand and asked: "What does this have to do with the three-cueing system?

Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading. But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary. She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading.

But she got tons of pushback from teachers. In , Adams wrote a book chapter about how the three-cueing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out about reading. She hoped it would help put three cueing to rest. By this time, the scientific research on reading was gaining traction. In , a national panel convened by Congress to review the evidence on how to teach reading came out with a report.

The evidence that phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years later in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same conclusion. Eventually, many whole language supporters accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction.

These strategies include using a knowledge of sound-spelling relationships — in other words, an understanding of phonics. In addition, research has shown that skilled readers attend to almost every word in a sentence and process the letters that compose each of these words.

Therefore, phonics instruction plays a key role in helping students comprehend text. It helps the student map sounds onto spellings, thus enabling them to decode words. Decoding words aids in the development of word recognition, which in turn increases reading fluency. Reading fluency improves reading comprehension because as students are no longer struggling with decoding words, they can concentrate on making meaning from the text. In addition, phonics instruction improves spelling ability because it emphasizes spelling patterns that become familiar from reading.

Studies show that half of all English words can be spelled with phonics rules that relate to one letter to one sound. Phonics instruction should be explicit rather than implicit.

Implicit instruction relies on readers "discovering" clues about sound-spelling relationships; good readers can do this, but poor readers are not likely to do so. Explicit instruction is the most effective type of phonics instruction, especially for children at risk for reading difficulties. A good phonics lesson begins with an explicit explanation of the sound-spelling being taught along with guided opportunities for students to blend, or sound out, words using the new sound-spelling.

These exercises should be followed by guided and independent reading practice in text that contains words with the new sound-spelling. This portion of phonics instruction is key. If we use building a house as an analogy, understanding text is the complete home; single word reading ability is the structural frame of the house, and phonics is the foundation of that frame. Effective phonics instruction is important because letter-sound knowledge is the foundation needed to build up reading and writing abilities.

The phonics screening check will indicate whether children have gained the necessary skills. If not, schools need to review current methods of teaching and implement methods that stick with evidence-based principles of explicit, systematic phonics teaching.

Festival of Social Science — Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Hua-Chen Wang , Macquarie University. What is phonics?