I thought this article was very interesting. My sister is an elementary school literacy specialist. Not only does she teach kids how to read, she trains other teachers in literacy. I forwarded the article to her and she agreed with the author that phonics is the way to go, not whole language. She gets very frustrated with the Austin school district, because it keeps pushing whole language on teachers even though research shows it’s not the best approach.
Interesting article. My professional work is in health care and early literacy. The six standards of early literacy (skills to develop pre-reading) are:
Vocabulary. …
Print Motivation. …
Print Awareness. …
Narrative Skills. …
Letter Knowledge. …
Phonological Awareness.
With lots of exposure to books, shared reading, talking/reading/singing/playing with a “live” partner (not a screen) most kids will develop a foundation for reading once they enter K and while visual cues may play a role the foundation will be in phonics as you say - a combo of knowing, adopting and understanding things like rhyming, letter sound/recognition, phonological awareness.
My thought is that if children DO NOT have the above foundation in early childhood (prior to K) they are playing catch up and are likely to rely more on visual cues (like picture reading as opposed to word reading) or what this article describes as “crutches” in the reading process. If they are exposed to the six skills above, as their foundation they will continue to master reading by building on this foundation through phonics.
@MaineLonghorn - thank you for posting this. I sent it off to my D who just started her second year of teaching kindergarten yesterday. I know that her charter school is using the phonics approach to reading which my D agrees is the way to go.
Yes, I am so thankful that our mom took us to the library CONSTANTLY when we were very little. I learned to love books as soon as I could read. Doctors would chuckle when they came into the room and saw Mom, Sis, and me all absorbed in books. 
Jolly Phonics was all the rage when I was picking out a preschool for DD. I’d have to say that it seems to have worked, although we read to her A LOT (60 - 90 minutes a night!). She still loves to read and even volunteers at the library. Sadly, the only other high schoolers she ever sees there are a handful of fellow volunteers. So I am incredibly disappointed and heartbroken to see how many 12th graders lack proficiency in reading, but I can’t say that I am surprised.
I did the same things with both kids - one started learning words at 2 and could read words he hadn’t seen before at 3. The other struggled until he was 8 and then could read Harry Potter overnight. Neither seemed to get much out of phonics, but I do think phonics is helpful. The problem is that English has so many ways to spell the same sounds. How do you pronounce GHOTI? Fish? GH as in laugh, O as in women, TI as in notion, or is it just silence? GH as in though, O as in amoeba, etc…
I ended up needing to do hooked on phonics with both my kids when whole language just wasn’t cutting it. I really don’t know why I paid tuition when I look back, I essentially taught them a lot of the basics myself.
I am an administrator in a top-performing school district.
In educational literature, the pendulum keeps swinging, because no one approach manages to catch all students, and there are always students who struggle to learn how to read.
I think most schools are including explicit phonics instruction now as a big part of their instruction, but not the only part. The phonetic rules of the English language have many exceptions, so phonics are insufficient as a sole method. (Try using just phonics to read the word “was” or “said” or to tell how to pronounce the ‘ough’ in words such as “dough” or “enough” or “thought.”) And the reason all-phonics proponents preach the use of special “decodable” books is that students taught to rely solely on phonics can’t read “real” books— beautiful, engaging picture books— such as they can find in a bookstore or library.
In 26 years of education, I see consistently that our very weakest readers OVER-rely on phonics, not under-rely on them. The most important metacognition while reading is, “What makes sense here?”
The three cueing systems— and phonics is absolutely one of them— support the meaning. Reading, after all, is about making meaning, or sense, of what an author is communicating. (It is not about accurate “word calling” without comprehension.)
With students who struggle, the important action is to determine what is difficult for them. Some students will need more intensive, multisensory instruction in phonics. Some will need to go back a step further than phonics and will need phonemic awareness, because they can’t “hear” the sounds. Some will need sight words. Some will need to work on fluency (“flow”- intonation, phrasing, expression— prosody). Some will need to build vocabulary, because they have insufficient vocabulary and do not understand what the words mean even if they can say them correctly. Some will have no trouble whatsoever with decoding (saying the words correctly) but will struggle with higher level comprehension skills and need strategies to help them make sense of the text and make inferences about it. Reading difficulties vary among readers, and interventionists need to be talented at diagnosing a student’s problem and matching the student to an effective intervention for that need. Educators have struggled with this for time immemorial.
As parents, the most important thing you can do for your child is to read aloud to them daily and discuss the book together like you would discuss it with another adult in a book club. (E.g., “Why do you think this character did this?”, “What would you do in her place?”, “I love how the author used [word]. That word really helps me picture…”). This practice will build up your child’s semantic and syntactic knowledge, allowing your child to be fully ready to learn to read once they learn phonics patterns and cueing strategies in school. Enjoy the process. It can be one of the happiest, closest times between parent and child.
“In educational literature, the pendulum keeps swinging, because no one approach manages to catch all students, and there are always students who struggle to learn how to read.”
Almost exactly the words my dad, a reading specialist, used when I asked him about helping my bilingual kid learn to read when I was living abroad. Dad even had a percentage breakdown that I wish I could remember more precisely - XX% of kids will teach themselves to read just by following along while they are read to, XX% will learn to read with whatever the teaching fad-of-the-moment is, XX% will need to be exposed to the previous fad-of-the-moment, XX% will need to work with a reading specialist who knows several other possible interventions. The bigger the toolkit that a teacher has at their disposal, the better.
D’s school used phonics to teach reading. She was a voracious reader from early on and did super with comprehension, story telling, reading, etc… That said, she’s an awful speller, also thanks to phonics and no spelling tests after 3rd grade.
There’s a difference between decoding and reading, and there is strong evidence from a meta-analysis that the effects of phonics-only teaching diminish over time. That is, students taught with phonics seem to do better in the short run, but when retested a year or so down the line, they are no different than the control group in the study that didn’t receive whatever intervention was tested. But students given comprehension-focused strategies show growth over time – a significant increase in effect size - so short-term effects are more moderate, but those students continue to gain. There are enough issues with the studies that underly the meta-analysis that it can’t be used to draw firm conclusions – but the key point is that what seems to be most effective for teaching 6-year-olds in the short run is not necessarily the best foundation for producing capable independent readers in the long run. I think the biggest appeal of phonics is on the teaching end – rather than on the student-benefit end – it provides a clear framework for teachers, it can easily be put into a standardized curriculum, and it’s easier to test in a standardized way. So I think the push for phonics is driven in large part by the educational publishers & testers.
I agree with @TheGreyKing – reading is a complex process, and when kids struggle it can be for all sorts of different reasons. Kids learn in different ways and also follow different developmental trajectories and there isn’t any single curriculum or approach that will reach all learners. The heavy approach on phonics also can create huge barriers for ESL students, because they have not had the opportunity to develop the underlying phonemic awareness and vocabulary. I think providing kids with easily-decodable text as part of a phonics-based curriculum is something of a cheat – because English is not an easily decodable language. Sooner or later those kids are going to need to read and understand text that is not curated to match the chosen curriculum.
I am the parent of a kid who didn’t learn to read until age 11 and another kid who was a self-taught reader who could read just about anything at age 4. Neither learned through phonics. The late reader was probably delayed in part because of the emphasis on phonics - he had an excellent grasp of phonics, but his stumbling blocks were elsewhere. (He told me at the end of 2nd grade that he understood the phonics, and more practice with phonics wasn’t helping – but at the time I didn’t know what I could provide instead). The early reader had a near-photographic memory – so it was easy for her to acquire a very extensive sight vocabulary. It would be unreasonable to expect all children to be able to acquire reading in the same way – but it worked well for her and from what I could learn at the time, it seemed to be a common pattern for precocious early readers. And it would have been a step backwards and a waste of time for her to be given a phonics-heavy curriculum in first and second grade when she was already reading at a middle-school level.
One of my kids learned how to read on his own, without being taught. I assume that he picked it up from being read to – he must have been looking at the print instead of the pictures. He could read reasonably well at age 4.
It was clear that he learned through sight words. He would look at signs and ask me questions such as “Mommy, what does U-S-E crosswalk mean?” A kid who was sounding out words would probably find it easier to read “use” than “crosswalk,” but for him it was the other way around. And he would say things like “You left cookies off the shopping list” at a time when he couldn’t read many of the words on the list – but he could read the word “cookies.”
Somehow, this worked for him. By the time he started kindergarten, he could read any word he could understand when it was spoken. I don’t think the phonics instruction he got later in school helped him at all with reading (although it may have helped him learn to spell).
My other kid didn’t pick up reading on her own. She learned in school with her class, and it was clear that she benefited from phonics instruction. I could see her sound out words – something her brother never did.
People differ. Even kids within the same family differ.
Agree totally @Marian. Both my kids learned to read between ages 3 and 4. We were not very good about reading to them (I LOVE to read but LOATHE reading out loud…) I had pledged to do it more (ok…some) when my older one started reading on her own at about age 3.5. My best friend who is a reading specialist attributed this to a brain that was attuned to symbols relating to spoken language …and the fact that we watched a fair amount of television ( kid appropriate but still horrifying to her)…with the close captioning always on! My second kid also learned to read at age 3 and extremely well way before kindergarten ( also exposed to an embarrassing amount of close captioned tv) The kindergarten teacher was gobsmacked when she was testing the kids one on one at the start of the year and told my daughter to look at the top of the worksheet and tell her what it said . It was “Ball”. My daughter said “Ask the student to read each progressively more difficult word and stop if the student becomes frustrated.”
Which was what was written in teeny tiny type at the very top of the page. Lol.
Some kids don’t need phonics. But most might.
When they were doing K readiness testing they asked my oldest what color a crayon, was. He picked it up, looked at the label, and read, “Light Green”. He was deemed ready.
Different learners learn to read in different ways. Some rely heavily on phonics. Some construct meaning continuously and rely on sight words. The best readers employ a variety of strategies. As reading teachers we have learned over the years that it is not a “one size fits all” approach to instruction.
Family lore was that I taught myself to read at age 4. I never believed that until both of my kids did the same thing. I read to my kids every night from the time they were infants until they started middle school. No phonics taught in their schools.
FWIW - as a kid I read everything I could get my hands on (still do!), and the class I hated in elementary school was phonics.
Mine taught herself all her letters and to read as well. I think it was exposure. I also credit Sesame Street for learning her letters. She would watch while I prepped dinner from her high chair. At 18 months she was playing with an Elmo letter toy and babbling letters. I thought it was super cute until I realized she was actually correctly identifying all the letters. We also thought she had just memorized stories and was not really reading, until grandparents brought new books and it was clear she was reading, reading. We read to her since the time she was born and she turned into one of those kids that had to be reprimanded to stop reading and go to sleep ; )
The worst thing about college for her is she doesn’t have the time for as much pleasure reading as she’s accustomed.
This just reminded me of how We used to watch the weather every night as a family so my kids were exposed to the pronunciation and, because of close captioning, the spelling of the names of places in the state next to ours so she could correctly read things like Oconomowoc and Minocqua. Big fan of close captioning!
I would like to see a cite for this study, please.
My son is dyslexic and took a long time to learn to read. Turns out, like most dyslexics, he didn’t have the necessary phonemic awareness. He couldn’t hear the difference between sounds, so he couldn’t possibly decode words by sound. Eventually a Lindamood-Bell instructor had to start at the very beginning with him.
I just know that my sister has had over 30 years experience teaching kids struggling to read and she’s had a lot of success. If she thinks phonics is the better approach, I tend to believe her. I’m sure she uses different strategies as called for, but they are supplemental.