| Phonics for Beginners Another Reason to Homeschool by Ned Vare (permission to copy and distribute granted) If you don't know Phonics, you can't read. If you don't know Phonics, you can't read this sentence or any other. You're reading this, so you know Phonics. You might not have memorized all (or even many) of the rules, but still you know how reading happens -- you are making sounds that correspond to the letters in print. First, terms: LANGUAGE is what we speak ("lang" means tongue). Language is the sounds that our speech makes. That's true even when we read silently -- we "hear" the words in our heads. Language comes "naturally" to children. In our infancy, turning the sounds we hear into spoken sounds is a natural act that does not need to be taught and, in fact, cannot be taught. So speaking is like walking in the sense of being a natural skill. But reading and writing -- the two parts of literacy -- are not natural acts or skills. They must be learned. There are two kinds of writing: PICTOGRAPHIC and PHONETIC. In pictographic writing, ideas are represented by symbolic pictures or "ideographs" as in hieroglyphic pictographs. Learning a pictographic language, such as Chinese, requires the memorization of the designs of a great many symbols in order to communicate accurately, and even then, it can be problematic because the pictographs represent ideas, not specific words. In phonetic languages, letters and letter combinations represent the actual individual sounds of the spoken language. With phonetic languages such as English, Spanish, and Hebrew, there are only a few sounds, and since letters represent those sounds, words are communicated accurately, and therefore, meaning is precise and clear. One reason why public schools are doing such a poor job is that they abandoned the Phonics method of teaching reading about fifty years ago, in favor of "Whole Language." Unfortunately for several generations of school children, WL tries to teach reading as though it were a pictographic language -- one that requires children to memorize words whole -- by their design ("Look-Say") -- not as a phonetic code that connects letters to sounds (sounding out). Using repetition (as in Dick and Jane), Whole Language depends on recognition of whole words by their looks, as though they were ideographs. The result is confusion and reading problems: Children in public schools are not taught how to decode words by time-tested phonetics (Phonics), but are forced to guess at new whole words (using pictures and context clues) instead of sounding them out by using the letters. Whole Language does not work because it leaves out the key to how our language works. Phonics is the key. Recently, we've read that a National Reading Panel has advocated a "blend" of Phonics and Whole Language. That smacks of politics since the two are not blendable -- one teaches how to read and the other does not. Whole Language advocates "immersing" the child in "literature", and expects that to be enough to inspire him/her to read. It's not -- it's merely therapy. Reading requires skill and specific knowledge. Children need to learn how to convert the marks on the page into specific sounds (sometimes called decoding); in other words, they need Phonics in order to learn HOW to read. After that, maybe "immersion" can have some benefit. Phonics (also known as Phonetics) Note: Phonetic writing is perhaps the greatest of man's inventions. It turned guesswork into precision communication. English has 26 letters and 44 sounds. Simple. A child needs to learn the letters, and their sounds both alone and in combinations. The few basic concepts contain almost all of what a child needs in order to read easily and well. During their first years, children have listened to speech and so they have what is called "phonemic awareness" -- they know the sounds of the language -- and begin to imitate them in order to get what they need and want -- usually MAMA! But decoding a page of printed words does not come naturally. The individual marks on the page need to be learned for what they represent: The different sounds of the language. That needs to be learned, although not necessarily taught, a little at a time. So how can we parents help? When your child is curious, begin with single letters (try magnetized letters on the refrigerator door) and say their names and the sounds associated with each, such as A-a (short vowel sound as in Am and At) and E (as in Egg, and set) and I (In or It); Up, hOt, etc. Next step, BAG or CAT, then start changing one letter at a time: BAG-BAD-BAT-CAT-CUT-COT-HOT-HAT-HIT-SIT-SET-LET, etc. One book comes to mind as a good primer for reading phonetically: Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss. Play with words and letters as long as it's enjoyable for you and your child. When it's not interesting, let it go. There's no hurry. Some children become interested in reading when they�re 3 or 4, some when they're 10 or 12. By the time they're 16, no one can tell who learned first. Forcing or coercing can lead to reading problems. Once you notice that the child gets the idea that letters represent individual sounds (r-a-t), you've done your job. The child needs to be able to decode words independently, not to have someone give the pronunciation for all words, or rely on pictures as clues. You will probably be surprised how quickly they get it, and once that happens, the rest of the rules -- those for long vowel sounds (such as the final e, changing rat to rate), and various combinations of letters -- get easier to learn and use. Despite what many school teachers want us to believe, English is a very regular language and reading can be learned quickly, easily and painlessly. Of course there are weird exceptions that need to be learned individually, but mostly it follows a very few, simple rules. Stick with what's regular and try not to dwell on the exceptions during the early stages. |
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