What do you think of “phonics first” or “phonics only” in the primary grades?

phonics
10 September, 2022
82 Comments

Teacher question:

At my school, the district inservice has made a big deal out of Scarborough’s rope. Nevertheless, when it comes to daily instruction, we (the primary grade teachers) have been told that decoding is the most important thing and that we are to emphasize that. They’ve sent us to LETRS training, purchased instructional programs on phonics, and require testing students’ “nonsense word fluency” frequently. At what grade levels is it appropriate to teach the “language comprehension” portions of the rope?

Shanahan responds:

In 1915, near where I’m writing this, a passenger ship, the SS Eastland sank, drowning 844 passengers – many of them children. It was the greatest disaster in Chicago history and the greatest loss of life of any single shipwreck on the Great Lakes…. But I’ll get back to that in a moment.

I agree with your district that young readers – if they are going to be young readers – need to learn to decode and phonics and phonemic awareness instruction is essential during the primary grades to ensure that students develop proficient decoding ability.

But it seems to me that in your school district’s prodigious and well-meaning efforts to ensure that happens, they are ignoring Scarborough’s rope, Gough & Tunmer’s simple view, Duke & Cartwright’s active view model, the report of the National Reading Panel, $100 million worth of research from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and a slew of other more recent research studies.

They’ve left the “bop out of the bop-sh-bop-sh-bop.” Or, more accurately, they’ve left the science out of the “science of reading.”

Most people would chalk this overreach up to “reading wars.” That could be what’s happening; maybe there’s a “true believer” in your district who thinks that only decoding matters – and is willing to make that happen no matter the costs.

However, I’ve been hearing about this “decoding first” or “decoding only” action often lately – from parents, state department of education officials, and teachers. Reading instruction over my career has tended to follow a pendulum. As interest swings one way or the other, instructional practice gets twisted out of shape.

I remember back in the 1970s and 80s. The federal government invested heavily in research on reading comprehension. That produced a lot of terrific studies, and for a while it dominated the reading journals – both the research journals and those aimed at practitioners.

In 1980, it was nearly impossible to find a contemporary high-quality article on phonics teaching. The comprehension researchers weren’t anti-phonics, they just sucked all the oxygen out of the room. A beginning teacher at that time would have thought the only thing she was supposed to teach was comprehension strategies.

Not surprisingly, publishing companies followed that lead. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t publish information on how to read words or how to teach students to do so. They were just following the market, publishing the shiny new stuff that everyone was interested in right then – rather than trying to make sure that all the important aspects of teaching reading were addressed sufficiently.

That’s what’s going on now. The press and media are emphasizing decoding because of serious gaps in the practices of many schools, so parents are asking questions about it and curriculum directors are making darn sure that they have a good story to tell. Since no one appears particularly concerned about prosody or vocabulary or whether kids are reading enough science text, all hands-on deck are about addressing the decoding gap.

We certainly have work to do to make sure that phonics is taught, that teachers have supportive, high-quality instructional materials aimed at that, and investing in professional development on decoding is wise, too.

But that’s the easy part.

The trick to doing that successfully, however, is to do it without tipping the boat over.

Ah, the SS Eastland, let’s get back to that. The ship that day was loaded with families going out for a excursion on the lake, a Sunday entertainment. Unfortunately, once boarded the ship listed heavily to starboard (it was leaning uncomfortably to the right). The passengers responded as might be expected… they moved quickly to the other side of the boat – which tipped it over.

It sounds like your district is trying to address a real problem. But under pressure and anxiety, they are shifting all the ballast to one side of the boat. Ignoring or delaying language comprehension instruction is not the smart way to correct the decoding problem. In fact, it might eventually sink the boat.

Is there really any reason to believe that teaching phonics first or that only teaching phonics for a year or two is a good idea? If you have phonics stuff to sell, it probably seems like it is. But if you have any interest in the science of reading (that is, you want to base your actions on data rather than sales talks and unintentional media hyperbole), then it’s clear those scorched earth approaches are bad pedagogy.

If you don’t think that I’m right about this, look at this evidence:

1. Jeanne Chall, the Harvard professor most known for her analysis of the research on phonics instruction (Reading: The Great Debate, 1967), promoted the role of phonics more vocally and more articulately than any scientist of her generation. Nevertheless, the phonics instruction that she promoted through her own work never delivered phonics in a vacuum. Her research revealed that students, to become readers, needed to progress in multiple skills area simultaneously.

2. In 1990, Marilyn Jager Adams published the landmark, “Beginning to Read,” her magnificent summary of the research on the early acquisition of reading ability. Not surprisingly, this work – like Chall’s – has been a major pillar of movement to teach phonics explicitly and thoroughly from the beginning. However, this incisive review of research explicitly rejects the idea of either “phonics first” or “meaning first” approaches. It describes such approaches as “misguided” and “simplistic,” and documents the lack of empirical supporting either of those approaches.

3. Hollis Scarborough’s rope, which you mention, treats word recognition and language comprehension equivalently. However, you could read that visual metaphor for reading development two different ways. You could read it left-to-right, which would suggest that both sets of skills develop simultaneously and interactively from the beginning. Or you also might read it from top to bottom, suggesting that language comprehension comes later in the process, built upon a foundation of phonemic awareness, phonics, and sight vocabulary. Recently, Hollis clarified the intended meaning in a Q&A available on YouTube. She said that the publisher of the original graphic left out one important item. There was to be an arrow at the bottom labeled time, and it was to point left-to-right. Her understanding of the research is in accord with those of Chall and Adams – decoding needs to be taught early in the developmental process, along with those comprehension abilities.

4. The National Reading Panel report (2000) is oft cited as the major support for phonics instruction. We found (I was a member of the panel) that explicit, systematic phonics instruction helped students to become better readers – based on a meta-analysis of 38 studies. But most of those studies provided the phonics instruction embedded in or accompanied by a more comprehensive reading program (the same was true of all the other components of reading that NRP examined). If you have any doubts, Linnea Ehri, the scientist who led the alphabetics part of the effort, has focused her research not only on how kids learn to recognize words (ever hear of “orthographic mapping”?), but also on more comprehensive approaches to decoding like Reading Rescue.

5. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that once instruction had successfully raised kids to average levels of decoding ability – levels that should have resulted in successful reading – more than half the students still struggled. Decoding was essential, but insufficient for success. That’s why Reid Lyon, Jack Fletcher, Barbara Foorman, Joe Torgesen, and so many others endorsed more comprehensive approaches to meeting children’s reading needs (Fletcher & Lyon, 1998). They were quite explicit that the teaching of these components takes places simultaneously, not consecutively or sequentially. It would be cruel to put all the emphasis on one part of the process, while allowing kids to languish with the other parts (sort of like providing calcium by taking away the protein).

6. Perhaps you think that what I’m saying may be true for some kids, but not for kids with dyslexia. You’d be wrong there too if you examined the rigorous and well-grounded research of folks like Sharon Vaughn or Maureen Lovett. They must not have gotten the memo that kids only need decoding supports early on; look at the interventions they’ve developed for students with dyslexia.

7. Not long ago, on a listserv where I lurk, someone argued that it was okay to teach phonics to kids who already could decode satisfactorily (“it couldn’t hurt”). Research shows that engaging those kids in comprehension and language activities instead of teaching them again what they already know, generates greater learning progress (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004). Nothing wrong with supporting phonics instruction but being so cavalier about the education of other people’s children is insensitive and offensive. (Yes, unfortunately, I’ve witnessed that same kind of insensitivity and gracelessness from those excusing their own disregard for the decoding needs of kids.)

8. The value or possibility of teaching foundational skills and language skills simultaneously is not just for reading either. Karen Harris and Steve Graham shared some of their recent work with me that shows that first-graders do quite well with a more comprehensive approach from the beginning (Harris, Kim, Yim, Camping, Graham, et al., in review).

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. The scientists who know the most about this are big proponents of teaching phonics, but they don’t buy in to the idea that its phonics first or phonics only. Those ideas comes from folks who are trying to push a pendulum, make a sale, or – perhaps, like your district – who want to respond to community pressure without taking the trouble to examine the science of reading.

How to proceed? The way I handle it is by apportioning time to parts of the literacy curriculum. I follow the research and advocate teaching phonics for about 30 minutes a day (just like in most of the studies summarized by the National Reading Panel). Comparable amounts of time should be devoted to the other important components that reading comprehension, writing, and the ability to read text fluently. Doing it that way, kids get what research says is an effective dose of phonics instruction, and they don’t miss out on all the other things that they need if they are to become good readers.

In Chicago, when I was the director of reading, we began every workshop with an overview of all the skills needed to read. It was explained repeatedly that today’s PD was on ______ but not because that was the most important or the only component of reading. It was important, it mattered, and it was the topic of the day, but it had to fit together with the other pieces (that also were essential and that mattered every bit as much). Worked for our kids.

Please share this article with your administrators. Perhaps we can persuade them to do less tail covering and more to meet the literacy learning needs of our diverse children.

Let’s not sink the boat in our zeal to make it look like we are doing a great job with phonics.

References

Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Chall, J. S. (1967). Learning to read: The great debate. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Connor, C. M., Morrison, F. J., & Katch, L. E. (2004). Beyond the reading wars: Exploring the effect of child-instruction interactions on growth in early reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 8(4), 305-336.

Fletcher, J. M., & Lyon, G. R. (1998). Reading: A research-based approach. In W. M. Evers (Eds.), What’s gone wrong in America’s classrooms (pp. 50-77). Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

Harris, K. R., Kim, Y., Yim, S., Camping, A., Graham, S., & Fulton, M. L. (Under review). Yes, they can: Developing transcription skills and oral language in tandem with SRSD instruction on close reading of science text to write informative essays at Grades 1 and 2.

National Reading Panel (U.S.) & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read : an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Comments

See what others have to say about this topic.

Stacey Sep 10, 2022 01:34 PM

So do we have our high readers work on phonics routines alongside the class or have them do another activity during this time? Our daily decoding routine is modeled after Phonics Lesson Library and matches the skill in Journeys.

Lwj Sep 10, 2022 02:10 PM

This still leaves a lot of room for interpretation and application. So if, for instance, your particular situation has mostly “ worksheet” phonics added on to the rest of the parts of instruction, you may have quite a few Tier 2 students develop. I may have to balance my pull out time with more decoding time for a student, knowing that in 6 months or a year, their instruction will lack decoding. My district, for at least 6 years, has had no spelling instruction, no handwriting instruction and limited to varying adherence to phonic knowledge. Consequently, we have too many in lower tiers than should be there. All parts are important; however, we have to apply this diagnostically.

paul worthington Sep 10, 2022 02:26 PM

Great question, powerful response Tim. Indeed the phonics pendulum has swung again sadly to the exclusion of comprehension. We have professional development going on in over half the states in the Union and most of the DOE's in those states are perseverating on Phonic's instruction, via legislative program approval policies (i.e. Arkansas), to the exclusion of comprehension and vocabulary instuctional practices. Especially enjoyed the reminder references to Chall, Adams, Lyons, Ehri, et al. and the counsel to not shift our weight to the other side of the boat. I'm not optimistic that we'll get through this without a lot of casualties.

Mark Pennington Sep 10, 2022 02:27 PM

The ship analogy is particularly helpful. I'm not sure if "It's a Mississippi miracle or bust!" is necessarily the best approach for districts to make the SOR shift.

Two other ship analogies come to mind. 1. It takes quite a while to turn an aircraft carrier 180 degrees. 2. Even a single degree change in the rudder produces a significant difference in destination.

Robert Femiano Sep 10, 2022 10:45 PM

As an ‘inner-city’ K-2 public school teacher for 30+ years I found the quickest and surest route to teaching reading begins by ensuring each student first understands how writing was devised as a code. This requires the learner (including bilingual, special needs, gifted, and speech-impacted children) to initially recognize that words are composed of individual sounds, because it is these small bits of speech (phonemes) that are encoded using the alphabet and students need to see this connection. Once they understand that their speech can be written, then reading will makes sense to them. (And we’ll never hear that “hey teacher, this book don’t work” cry.)

Starting with phonics (explaining that a certain letter ‘makes’ this sound) creates the impression that the code was created out of thin air and entirely misses the opportunity for the learner to see how reading is based on speaking and writing. But once a student can verbally segment words into sounds, then introducing the alphabet makes sense as a way of putting these spoken sound onto paper, which can then be read by them and others. Further, introducing the 26 letters leave open the possible confusion that English speech typically contains 44 phonemes which means we can make more sounds than there is alphabet.

The most important controlling sound in a word is the vowel. For example: cat, cut, and coat vary wildly in meaning but the medial sound is only what distinguishes their meaning. Unfortunately, it is not so easy for students to tune-into and isolate this important phoneme, but nonetheless, this is where to begin if one wants to help students understand ‘how reading works’. Whether adult or child, this is the key to helping beginning readers see the interrelationship between speaking, writing and reading.

As to the classroom: for say 20 minutes per day, in small groups of 6 or 7 students, I (in late kindergarten or early first grade, or anytime a student is struggling reader) focus on 3-letter words, learning to isolate (and eventually swap) vowel sounds. All work is done orally, where I say a word (e.g., hat, cop, big, etc.) and the students has to repeat the middle sound, given a choice of two sounds. For example, “Your word is ‘hot’. The sun is hot and boiling water is hot. Do you hear /ah/ or /oh/ in hot?” If they say the wrong answer, I substitute it and say it aloud so they hear the difference. “If it was /ah/ it would be hat”. It sometimes helps to stretch the vowel sound, as in “hoooot.” I will always connect it with meaning and allow others to verbally add to it, and of course encourage the other students to silently try to figure it out while waiting for their own turn.

Once students understand that words can be encoded, sound by sound, they are ready for phonics with meaning or comprehension. Showing students the patterns that exist, especially among vowel spellings, greatly speeds up the remainder of phonics, which should be completed no later than 2nd grade in possible. For example, studying “ai” words (fair, paid, wait…) or “ou” words (ouch, sour, pound…) in a grouping allows easy memory access to similar words and decoding unfamiliar words such as “flail” or “doubt”. Each word is discussed then written and often drawn on individual lap whiteboards. They are read back at end of group where maybe 15 words were studied. One follow-up activity include copying and illustrate sentences the next day that reuse these words, along with a few new ones to decode.

Making sense of the English system of writing is a powerful accelerant in launching beginning readers. Yes there are inconsistencies, but once the students feel empowered by recognizing how reading works, these become mere speed bumps, not road blocks. Without it, they can quickly fall “off track” and turn off to reading, while blaming themselves for “not getting it”.

Steve Sep 11, 2022 07:54 PM

I will start by saying I am but a simple caveman parent (hopefully you see the SNL reference and that I am trying to be cheeky here) who worries that sometimes we are spending more time debating terminology than fixing what is wrong in the classroom. I love that you mentioned the baggage associated with "Balanced" and how that word when paired with "Literacy" winds up being something in practice that is anything but.

I worry that phrases like "phonics first" or what I understand to be "phonics first, fast and only" when it was initially coined, may be another phrase where the meaning is also in the eye of the beholder. I suspect most people here would agree that "phonics" (or sound symbol association rules) should be the tools that we give young students to decode and that when they first start reading they should only be decoding (they should not be looking at pictures, guessing based on "word shapes" etc). I had always understood the "only" part of this phrase to refer to that dynamic, that we should not encourage other strategies like guessing and students should be pushed to (slowly if need be) decode based on the rules they have been taught. I don't think the word "only" was meant to mean phonics at the exclusion of other strands of the reading rope. As you note in your answer to Jane and BJK, if this foundations of decoding instruction is not done adequately (and early on) you will have to do it later. I like the way you say or "none of the rest of what you do with reading instruction will make any difference." I've always taken that sentiment to align with the word "first" in the dreaded phrase we are all discussing here. The reality is that without some deep exposure to this code, like the complete absence we see in many "Balanced" Literacy classrooms, more students than not will struggle with "the rest of what you do with reading instruction."

And based on my 3 kids in school now (one with dyslexia) and a pretty good understanding of how kids were taught in the 1970s (when my two siblings with dyslexia went through public school), I would say there is not only no phonics instruction in today's Balanced Literacy classrooms, there is almost no systematic "the rest of what you do with reading instruction." I have seen way too many classrooms across 2 states we have lived in where ELA "instruction" is nothing, no systematic attempt to teach decoding, comprehension, spelling, fluency or anything else that is on the reading rope diagram. The best analogy I have heard is that the approach is akin to making kids read sheet music and listen to recordings and then expecting them to become concert pianists (and like it).

So while I do worry about pendulum swings and that it would be bad for K-5 classrooms to spend their entire literacy blocks on phonics, I think we are still a long way from that being a real risk in the places where my kids have been in public school (WA and CA). I also don't think a phrase is the real risk here- even if we were all using that phrase with the same meaning- and instead have deep concerns that we are missing the need to update and improve teacher training programs. To me the larger problem is the teachers in the districts my kids have been in received almost no formal training in how to teach kids how to read. Not only were they not taught anything about phonics and how to devote a relatively modest amount of time (for many students) to teaching the rules for sound symbol association in a systematic manner in K-2, they were also taught little about how to teach the other elements of Scarborough's Rope like vocabulary and language structure. My kids were in an immersion program and I was dumbfounded how little the teachers would use linguistics to help the kids bridge knowledge in one language to English. And don't get me started on how important background knowledge is, how that is a "social determinant" that probably predicts ability to grow comprehension yet how little that concept is addressed in early ELA programs.

Melissa Graham Oct 28, 2023 08:42 PM

I think this article is a bit presumptive in that just because a district is trying to add balance by being sure that teachers are explicitly and systematically teaching phonics, does not mean that they are communicating to teachers that they should ignore comprehension until phonics skills are mastered. As a literacy coach, I'm offended by this article because it isn't helping teachers to understand structured literacy and how to purposefully teach and facilitate all aspects of reading skills throughout the day. For example, in Kindergarten and Grade 1, comprehension work is best suited within a daily instructional read aloud where all children have access to high level text and the teacher can intentionally engage them in vocabulary, knowledge building and comprehension work that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do on their own unless they've already cracked the code and mastered phonics skills. As children move up the phonics staircase, they are able to take on more and more of the comprehension work in the texts they are reading on their own BECAUSE they have been taught to read the words and have developed a certain level of fluency. Scarborough's Reading Rope regardless of how you read it, if read by a knowledgeable teacher on the science of reading, clearly shows that you are addressing both language comprehension and word recognition in tandem, as evidenced by how the threads from the top and bottom are constantly being woven together. What primary teachers need guidance on is using the instructional minutes they have in the day with a high level of intention. Guided reading, which used to encompass everything and the kitchen sink in one lesson, did not ensure that kids were mastering anything at all. They were simply being guided through a book that a teacher deemed to be at their level based on a running record, that was not research or evidence based, and the teacher taught into whatever challenges that particular book presented to students. There was no guarantee that kids would encounter those very same challenges in the next book that they read, nor that they would be able to apply the haphazard decoding strategies that were reinforced by the teacher during that particular book because too many things were being taught. Instead, small group reading time should be considered as a differentiated reading block where based on data, each child is engaging in reading practice around a skill that is at their highest level of need on the phonics staircase, once they have mastered multisyllabic words (which a teacher would know by post assessing), then students can move into the fluency and comprehension group or vocabulary and comprehension group (refer to Differentiated Reading Instruction by Walpole and McKenna). I don't think anyone who is advocating for a structured literacy approach would not understand or be supporting the need to grow children's comprehension skills throughout their entire reading journey. The question instead is, how are you scaffolding that instruction until children are able to read well enough that they can engage in it on their own. I'd love to see an article instead laying out for teachers how to best use their instructional minutes within a school day.