january

Phonics instruction teaches children the relationships between the letters (graphemes) of written language and the individual sounds (phonemes) of spoken language.   It teaches children to use these relationships to read and write words.  They learn that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds.  Knowing these relationships will help children recognize familiar words accurately and automatically, and "decode" new words.

Some critics of phonics instruction argue that English spellings are too irregular for phonics instruction to really help children learn to read words.  The point is, however, that phonics instruction teaches children a system for remembering how to read words.  Once children learn, for instance, that phone is spelled this way rather than foan, their memory helps them to read, spell, and recognize the word instantly and more accurately.  The same is true for other irregularly spelled words.  Most of these words contain some regular letter-sound relationships that can help children remember how to read them.

Another criticism of phonics instruction is that it gets in the way of reading comprehension.  Actually the opposite is true.  Because systematic phonics instruction helps children learn to identify words, it increases their ability to comprehend what they read.  Reading words accurately and automatically enable children to focus on the meaning of the text.

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