How to Knock Down Five Strawman Arguments Against Phonics

Sarah and Patricia--

Just a reminder... research studies show clear learning benefits from phonics for kids in grades PreK-2 (older, remedial students may benefit, too, but for regular classrooms PreK-2).

I am a speech-language pathologist who has worked with under-diagnosed or misdiagnosed children with reading disorders for 40 years. Under the tutelage of language specialists in the field from City University of New York (CUNY) in the late 1970's, as older child language disorders began to be seen as, often, a part of the continuum of language-learning difficulties begun during the emergent speech/language years, I learned about Orton-Gillingham (before Wilson and before balanced literacy programs). Along with other language development strategies, I deployed systematic phonics utilizing a classic program which is rarely mentioned,
Explode the Code. I still use it to this day and used it for years in my bilingual language lab, Inglese Dinamic, Venice, Italy and here now in America with EL adult students. It is a staple of my intervention with challenged learners in my current practice and as part of our intervention methodology (www.mvllp.org). The 8 books cover all of the essentials and with the later books, even teaching active reading strategies before reading text, can be covered.

Teachers are burdened with curriculum demands and the programs that purportedly drive them. Students are burdened with too much technology, losing basic skills along the way because often, they have not been taught in the last number of years. Phonics is not boring if taught dynamically, systematically and with the knowledge and understanding that it drives mastery of 'the code'. Teaching programs have often focused on whole language approaches, and have not insisted upon teachers knowing intimately the language they mostly teach in -- English and English language structures (and the history of them!). Liberal arts teaching has declined in the face of all of this.

Teach phonics in an orderly, systematic manner. Combine it, particularly in the k-1 years with syllable segmentation, with print awareness and rhythm. Later, focus on onset-rime schemes, morphology and the aesthetics of language -- rhyme, rhythm, roots -- to build knowledge and rapid recognition. Pair these concepts with cursive writing instruction to build personal identity and yes, the art of language.

I am a speech-language pathologist who has worked with under-diagnosed or misdiagnosed children with reading disorders for 40 years. Under the tutelage of language specialists in the field from City University of New York (CUNY) in the late 1970's, as older child language disorders began to be seen as, often, a part of the continuum of language-learning difficulties begun during the emergent speech/language years, I learned about Orton-Gillingham (before Wilson and before balanced literacy programs). Along with other language development strategies, I deployed systematic phonics utilizing a classic program which is rarely mentioned,
Explode the Code. I still use it to this day and used it for years in my bilingual language lab, Inglese Dinamic, Venice, Italy and here now in America with EL adult students. It is a staple of my intervention with challenged learners in my current practice and as part of our intervention methodology (www.mvllp.org). The 8 books cover all of the essentials and with the later books, even teaching active reading strategies before reading text, can be covered.

Teachers are burdened with curriculum demands and the programs that purportedly drive them. Students are burdened with too much technology, losing basic skills along the way because often, they have not been taught in the last number of years. Phonics is not boring if taught dynamically, systematically and with the knowledge and understanding that it drives mastery of 'the code'. Teaching programs have often focused on whole language approaches, and have not insisted upon teachers knowing intimately the language they mostly teach in -- English and English language structures (and the history of them!). Liberal arts teaching has declined in the face of all of this.

Teach phonics in an orderly, systematic manner. Combine it, particularly in the k-1 years with syllable segmentation, with print awareness and rhythm. Later, focus on onset-rime schemes, morphology and the aesthetics of language -- rhyme, rhythm, roots -- to build knowledge and rapid recognition. Pair these concepts with cursive writing instruction to build personal identity and yes, the art of language.

Thank you for continue to advocate for foundational reading skills, including phonics! Do you have a recommendation as far as a resource that should be used systematically within a school and/or district?

I've long believed that phonics are necessary but not sufficient for learning to read. While a few folks do learn to read without systematic phonics instruction I would never in a million years count on that to work on a district level. It is getting harder to find folks absolutely against teaching phonics. I've brought up to you before the research around analytic vs synthentic phonics. As you well know, the key is systematic phonics. Since I am not aware of any phonics program that is 100% effective (or any other education program that is 100% effective) and I spent several decades meeting the needs of kids for whom the mainstream program wasn't working, it is important that teachers be schooled in all the various ways to teach phonics. If one approach fails to work then the other is waiting in the wings. One point that you have convinced me of over the years is that many teachers are not spending enough time on phonics instruction. The other point that I think all agree on is that teachers need more instruction on the teaching of phonics, with the provisio that that includes all approches that lend themselves to systematic instruction. Thanks for listening. Thanks for the post.

You make too much sense, Tim! And here's more support for your arguments:

British Educational Research Journal Vol. 45, No. 6, December 2019, pp. 1220–1234
DOI: 10.1002/berj.3559
The importance of early phonics improvements for predicting later reading comprehension
Kit S. Double* , Joshua A. McGrane, Jamie C. Stiff and Therese N. Hopfenbeck Department of Education, University of Oxford, UK

The role of phonics instruction in early reading development has been the subject of significant conjecture. Recently, England implemented a phonics screening check to assess the phonetic decoding of 6-year-old students, to ensure that all students master this foundational literacy skill and attain adequate phonemic awareness in the early years of primary schooling. Students who fail this check are obliged to retake the assessment the following year. In this article, we compare the performance of students who initially pass this check (pass) and students who fail the original assessment but pass the retaken assessment (fail–pass), with students who fail both the original and retaken assessments (fail–fail). Using data from the Key Stage 1 assessment of reading and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), we examined the reading comprehension performance of these students approximately 1 and 4 years after their first phonics screening. The results suggested that fail–pass students performed substantially better than fail–fail students, even after performance on the initial phonics check was controlled for. While fail–pass students do not appear to entirely catch up with pass students in reading comprehension, their relatively better performance underscores the importance of intervening for those students who are identified as having problems with phonetic decoding to increase their likelihood of success at reading comprehension in later schooling.

Hi
I teach adults to read and write using phonics ( City Phonics at City of Glasgow College Scotland). I have been an adult literacy tutor for 20 years and this programme’s logic and structure has offered my students a calmness, helping to erase their lack of confidence and allowing them to progress and achieve. Phonics isn’t just for kids ???? https://www.tes.com/news/phonics-isnt-just-kids-it-works-adults-too?amp

Dear Tim,

Phonics instruction is necessary k-2. It can also be beneficial for some students with reading difficulties who lack foundational understanding. What I am worried about is the “effective educators” who are following this recent call to action and are throwing out other instructional practices to primarily focus on phonics. We have K teachers doing an hour of phonics based on an orton approach with no real scope and sequence and including questionable practices like crossing the midline and eye tracking. Then we have teachers at higher grades spending a week learning phonics instruction from
IMSE and taking 20 minutes of an 8th grade ELA lesson to do a whole class cat/kite rule. While the renewed emphasis on the importance of phonics is welcome, how do we get these bandwagon educators from taking solid approaches and interpreting them in a superficial manner that will cause damage down the road? What makes it even harder some of these supporters have limited classroom experience and training but are in administrative positions.

As a retired educator, I was a firm believer in phonics from grades K-2 (my district actually went up to grade 3 if needed. That said, there was so much information put out there the last couple of decades that phonics didn’t work past that age level. In your opinion, should phonics be taught at any grade level deemed necessary? If yes, boy did I blow it!

As an Orton Gillingham trained Dyslexia tutor I have witnessed many students experiencing success with systematic phonics instruction. Some of these students have been diagnosed with Dyslexia, but we also get students that have not been taught systematic phonics and are not reading in upper elementary school. I also know that most teachers do not have any experience in phonics instruction and they are very resistant because of what they have learned in University and what is promoted in their school systems. I recently worked in a city school system for three semesters and when I tried to encourage the other teachers to teach phonics they were not at all receptive. It seems like we still have a long way to go.

As an Orton Gillingham trained Dyslexia tutor I have witnessed many students experiencing success with systematic phonics instruction. Some of these students have been diagnosed with Dyslexia, but we also get students that have not been taught systematic phonics and are not reading in upper elementary school. I also know that most teachers do not have any experience in phonics instruction and they are very resistant because of what they have learned in University and what is promoted in their school systems. I recently worked in a city school system for three semesters and when I tried to encourage the other teachers to teach phonics they were not at all receptive. It seems like we still have a long way to go.

Debbie-
It would be as terrible for teachers to leave out any feature of research proven to be beneficial to kids’ reading... often however teachers do a lot of activities that they just like or that someone told them were beneficial without any proof. Those kinds of activities can’t be at the same priority level as those research proven practices.

Tim

Paul

Research supports phonics in PreK through grade 2 and with older readers who are particularly low in decoding.

Tim

Learning the code and patterns of our language is thrilling to most students. We tell our teacher trainees that "phonics is as boring as you make it." Once you understand the history and science behind English, it is fascinating. And any child who struggles will gladly learn multisensory and systematic phonics instruction over guessing, memorizing words, or looking at the pictures as a "reading" strategy.

This is great, Tim. One argument (which is not against phonics, but rather against skewing teaching exlusively to phonics) is outlined in this TES article I wrote a while back: https://www.tes.com/news/phonics-essential-alone-it-not-enough

In short, if the levers of government are deployed to ensure phonics is taught in every school (as per England), then we must be careful that other areas of reading - reading for pleasure, comprehension, vocabulary development - are not sidelined. Which is what many teachers feel has happened in England.

Many thanks, Tim, for this post. It's very useful so I've added it to the 'Research and Recommended Reading' forum at the International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction here:

https://iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1344&p=2752#p2752

Best wishes,

Debbie

Thank you for your blog and for bringing clarity by relying on empirical evidence. I agree that directly and explicitly teaching phonics within a balanced reading model serves most kids. Yes, some kids learn to read through osmosis, but most don’t. Interesting that many who do may find spelling multisyllabic words to be challenging when they hit the upper elementary grades, because they do not have a phonics toolbox to rely on. The work of my colleague Judy Cohen is an example of how phonics can be taught in a consistent and engaging way to all learners.

The curriculum is the path followed by the student and therefore a consistent approach to phonics across grade levels seems to yield more success. For example, if R-controlled is called bossy r, r-controlled or something else in every grade, the student may take longer to internalize the rule. However, if across grades we refer to the pattern in the same way it may be easier for students. In my practice I find that silent e is more consistently taught and students seems to know it best. Is that the reason, or is it it’s simplicity that makes it easier to learn. Would you agree that a consistent pedagogical approach is preferable?

The complexities of phonics are a reflection of the complexities of English phonology. As every second language learner knows, English’s sound structure is very complex with many confusing phonemes (44 vs. 28 in Spanish), hard-to-discriminate vowel sounds (16 vs. five in Spanish), and an exceptional array of consonant clusters. This makes English not only hard to speak but results in high rates of reading disabilities.
Since reading problems are phonological in nature developing phonemic awareness, not just phonics, is necessary to grasp sound structure of English. It is phonemic awareness when coupled with letters that is effective remediation for post-primary students.
I know you aren't a fan of David Kilpatrick's concept of phoneme proficiency but having older students perform phoneme analysis, substitution and other manipulation tasks moves learning disabled students quickly from decoding to word recognition/ orthographic mapping -- with the side benefit of fluency gains and self-confidence.

Thank you for crafting this clear and concise post. In the district I’m working with as a consultant, there is a huge percentage (70%) of secondary students who are reading four to five grade levels below a typical student. Nothing is being done to address this deficit. I realize that this stems from Tier 1 issue in the elementary grades, but this group of students will move along without the fundamental skills if something is not being done to improve foundational skills. It is too late to go back and teach phonics to thousands of secondary students. What would you suggest?

Thanks Tim as always for connecting research to instruction in a way that is easy for teachers to understand. And so glad you addressed the 5th argument -- that there is more to reading than just phonics instruction. Too often when someone tries to explain the benefits of phonics (as you are with your first to fourth bullets) there is an incorrect assumption that this person means "only phonics". By including your fifth bullet you addressed that possible criticism. I'm also glad that several folks asked about phonics for older struggling readers, and that you responded by saying it can be helpful for students who still struggle with decoding skills. I'd like to add a bit more to the conversation about older struggling readers, having worked with thousands of them from 1975-1999 at the Landmark School and more recently in my work with public schools. First point - about phonics: Part of appropriate intervention instruction for many older students, especially those with dyslexia, should include phonics instruction, but that instruction needs to be modified to address their needs as older students. The instructional principles are the same as for young children (i.e., multisensory, systematic and explicit, gradual release of responsibility), but the materials used (including the decodable text for developing automaticity) need to be age-appropriate. When older students are asked to use "babyish" materials from phonics programs designed for primary grades, it makes them feel foolish. Also, it is often the case that these students have "swiss cheese holes" in their phonics instruction. That is, teachers need to be careful to not assume that more basic phonics concepts have been learned simply because the student has mastered some more advanced patterns. Second point - about other components of reading: Just as Tim has pointed out that beginning reading instruction for young ones must include vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, etc., intervention educators who work with older struggling readers needs to address these other components of reading AT THE SAME TIME as they provide remedial support for phonics. Unfortunately, I sometimes see schools where special education or reading specialists become trained in a quality phonics intervention program (a good thing!), but because this is what they have been trained to do, they only focus on decoding for intervention instruction. If older students have been struggling for years with decoding, then it is highly likely that their vocabularies are low and they have limited comprehension strategies for tackling complex text. This is because their lack of decoding skills has prohibited them from doing significant reading. What I want to emphasize is that schools need to be sure that an intervention plan for older struggling readers includes explicit instruction in any and all reading components that are weak. Furthermore, research finds that this intervention instruction must be intensive and provided by trained specialists. See Kamil et al., 2008, I.E.S. report "Improving Adolescent Literacy" https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/docs/practiceguide/adlit_pg_082608.pdf The final point I want to make is that it is important for teachers of older struggling readers to continue to teach them reading skills because these kids can make significant progress if they are just given the right instruction. Sadly, too often in middle and high schools any time that is found for intervention is used to give students untimed tests or help them with their homework and organization skills. Intervention time is precious time that can be used to help grow literacy skills!

Hello Tim and others~
I agree... explicit, systematic phonics instruction is critical in nurturing successful life-time readers! I serve as a consutant for Minnesota Reading Corps. The past two years I also served as a master coach for the Family Child Care pilot project... where we put well trained early literacy tutors into family child-care settings. We worked with all the children ... even toddlers were singing the songs and doing the letter names/letter sounds, rhyming, alliteration and even syllables with us. We used the 'repeated reading' model for literacy and did expliscit instruction on vocabulary development. The children in all of the sites flourished... and were delightfully eager to 'do it again' each morning! There are ways to make early phonemic awareness enjoyable... and effective. We, as a team~ gave each child a 'gift of a life-time'!
Lora

Mel-
If high school students are reading at fifth grade and above, I would suggest two things specifically (not phonics). One would be fluency work (repeated reading, paired reading, etc.). Another would be to work with grade level texts and to scaffold success (check my website on teaching with complex text).

Tim

Item 2 (your push back on "English spelling is too inconsistent for phonics to make sense") reminds me of Venezky* and others who, already literate and using sophisticated computer pattern analysis, say "look there are patterns, it's not so irregular". The issue isn't what adult abstract analysis says about the regularity it's about how the complexity within the regularity (and irregularity) exacerbates the challenge of learning to read for children's minds.

Note: Click on any word on this page to experience Interactive Orthography.
How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science DOESN’T Say!
by Learning-Activist on October 14, 2019 in Capital Value Case, Children of the Code, Comments on other sites, Technology for Learning

In this excerpt from his lecture on “How the Brain Learns to Read”, (https://www.learningstewards.org/how-do-kids-learn-to-read-what-the-science-doesnt-say/) Professor Dehaene (starting at 1:24) discusses the effects of orthographic irregularity on the difficulty of learning to read. WHY can children learn Italian in 3 months but require 2-3 years to learn to read English?

*See Paradigm Inertia in Reading Science and Policy: https://www.learningstewards.org/paradigm-inertia-part3/

Thank you for mentioning right away that we have to teach with enthusiasm, even if we are teaching basic phonics instruction. I was inspired to teach with pep and enthusiasm early in my career after attending a workshop with Anita Archer, PhD of Explicit Instruction. I know from experience that you can get buy-in from older kids for phonics instruction if you keep it moving and you help them recognize when they are improving.

Thank you! I appreciate the format of this article and the concise, thoughtful answers. I hear these arguments often and I am now better equipped to have a meaningful discussion with those that argue against explicit phonics instruction.

Hi.
I agree with almost everything you say, but:

When a systematic phonics teaching programme is policy in schools, in my experience many teachers teach it exclusively. Often this results in:
Many other reading opportunities being abandoned.
Rigid teaching practices adopted, moving swiftly through the programme with "Sound of the day/ week" etc.and many children ( particularly those with additional needs, specific literacy difficulties etc.) are constantly moved on before they have secure grasp.
Comprehension skills are not rigorously taught.
Reading for enjoyment disappears from the classroom.
Commonly, many children "voice" breath sounds and as a result have huge difficulty coping with blends, digraphs and then longer words.
Teaching of long vowel sounds doesn't work in some accents. (e.g. here in Northern Ireland).

I currently work privately with children aged 8 to 14, all poor or non readers who have been through the "synthetic phonics" programme. Not one of them could clearly voice even the short vowel sounds.
I take them through a systematic programme based on phonics, spelling, reading and writing, story comprehension, grammar and punctuation, overlearning, constant revision and practice.
This works...it has elements of the old Alpha to Omega programme.
These kids are learning to read, smoothly, quickly and are enjoying it. Their confidence and self esteem is hugely improved after years of "failing" with a diet of phonics only teaching.
I am a retired teacher. I taught in primary schools in England and N. Ireland, SEN schools, as Literacy curriculum leader, Outreach learning support and SEBD teacher.

Kids must have phonics instruction BUT they can’t learn phonics without phonemic awareness first!! Up to 20% lack phonemic awareness: the ability to detect the individual sounds within words. If a child can’t tell what sounds are in a word, how except by memorizing, could they recognize it? Or know what letters to assign to spell it? I have used PA and symbol imaging direct one-on-one instruction with 45 dyslexic students once a week, parents practicing at home, I use a combination of Lindamood Bell’s Seeing Stars and LiPS . Students come up multiple grade levels in six months to one year. I also start them with decodable readers. Kids want to read, but shut down quickly without early success. Students must develop phonemic awareness and the ability to image symbols before they can learn phonics and become fluent readers.

I am a ESL teacher in Hong Kong, and run a phonics website, I completely agree and in fact it is almost a daily battle to prove its worth. The issue I face most often is that it has to be the ''NET'' who teaches it rather than the local teachers, i push for it to be curriculum wide but so far with limited results. I agree with all of your points, and have used some of them to try to combat this. Unfortunately until its part of the testing culture or at least a major part of the curriculum I cant see it happening just yet. If you get a chance feel free to popover to mine and see what you think.

My teaching experience has shown me that a child knowing how to encode (spell) is a more powerful use of phoneme knowledge than decoding (reading). Encoding requires an active application of letter sounds and rime patterns. Encoding focuses on constructing words, rather than dismantling them, an enjoyable activity for most children.

Of these counter-arguments, 3 is a good one: relying on personal anecdote is indeed a poor way to make judgements of this kind.

1. is a poor counter-argument because primary school teachers are very much entitled to carefully consider how engaging and accessible the early experiences of school are, as these help to shape a person's lifelong relationship, not just with learning and formal education, but with all social structures outside the home. Of course, sometimes learning is boring and has to be: teachers know this (suggesting that they don't is itself a strawman argument). But one of the consistent threads in this debate has been a lack of appreciation on the part of narrow instructional specialists for the complex understanding and sensitivities that primary educators develop through their careers, and which are responsive to the total human needs of their students - it is rarely said, but I fear they are usually disregarded on the grounds that these are the judgements and trained intuitions of 'poorly' educated primary teachers, rather than those of the 'genuinely' educated academics and prestigious-degree holding administrators who typically oppose them.

2. is a weak counter argument because the research pointed to is contentious (not to mention pretty old, for the most part - computer based research mostly from the 1960s??). I concede the argument is still very much to be settled, probably because it is so difficult to pin down exactly what consistency of spelling actually is. But the same concession is required from both sides. For what it's worth, it strikes me as significant that huge numbers of English syllables are unstressed, and therefore essentially non-phonemic - there is no clear vowel phoneme associated with them. As English orthography does not mark for stress, there are huge numbers of English words which contain elements which effectively have no GPC (as in the vowels in the second and fourth syllables in 'opportunity', which also, it might be added, contains a consonant 't' with at least three allophonic realisations - 'ch', 't' and 'ty'). Even if the rest of English spelling were wholly regular, the existence of unstressed syllables would in itself render a purely GPC approach to decoding anemic at best.

4 is a very poor counter argument because it flatly contradicts the point made in argument 3: that some people learn to read without phonics. It is irrelevant if the science shows that all good readers do essentially the same thing: the point is that they have arrived at that point in different ways - something that is, as I said, acknowledged in the previous argument.

5. is a poor counter argument because it flattens what is in fact a complex series of questions about time and resource allocation (weighed against issues such as social integration as mentioned previously) into a simple either-or equation. This is something which, to be fair, many opponents of systemic phonics also do, and when they do it it's just as frustrating. The reading war will come to an end only when both sides stop using the word 'phonics', and stop saying 'should we teach phonics', and start saying 'how much systematic drilling of GPCs should happen during which years of schooling?' The answers will then start to be numbers, which could be compared, negotiated and compromised on, rather than 'yes' or 'no', which it seems can't.