Phonics Learning and Support Page

Phonics is the study of the relationship between sounds and letters. It is an essential component of reading and writing practice and instruction in the primary grades. Phonics knowledge leads to word knowledge. 

Along with plenty of experience reading, students begin to read words fluently with little effort. Phonics instruction helps students to learn the written correspondences between letters, patterns of letters, and sounds. It should be noted that phonics is one element of a comprehensive literacy program that must also include practice in comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, writing, and thinking.

There are several prerequisites to consider before involving students in a formal phonics program. 

Language development is the first consideration and includes an ability to recognize and produce speech sounds, use language structures (syntax), engage with meaning systems (semantics), and use languageappropriately (pragmatics). Phonics works in concert with all these language systems. 

Phonological awareness is a particularly important language skill to acquire before phonics instruction begins. Phonological awareness includes the ability to separate oral language into syllables and individual phonemes, the distinctive sounds for the language the student is learning to read (English has 44). Phonological awareness is learned through singing, tapping syllables, rhyming, and dividing words into individual sounds. 

When children are read to, and with explicit instruction at home and school, they develop concepts of print that can be expansive, such as learning the purposes of writing and illustrations; understanding what an author is; and identifying text features including the front and back of a book, uppercase and lowercase letters, reading top to bottom, reading left to right, return sweep at the end of a line, and the meaning of punctuation. 

After students have heard stories read to them repeatedly, they try to point to the words as they recite their favorite memorized parts. Students develop a concept of word in text when they point accurately to the words as they recite the text. Concept of word in text develops in parallel with students’ phonics knowledge of letter–sound correspondences (e.g., learning that the letter b makes the /b/ sound by repeatedly seeing b words in a text). 

It is important for students to know the names of nearly all the letters of the alphabet. Knowing the letter names is a first step in phonics instruction and is associated with later success in reading. The names of many letters correspond to their sounds. When students understand that letters represent sounds and have mastered several letter–sound correspondences, they have acquired the alphabetic principle. With this principle, in tandem with the concept of word in text in place, they begin to finger-point read and remember written words.

There are many ways to teach phonics, and there are similarities underlying the various methods used to teach letter–sound relationships and word patterns. Successful programs or methods use explicit phonics instruction that is systematic. They also provide clear examples for students to build on as they develop their awareness of the written code, of how words are spelled.

English Orthography

English orthography is complex and may be confusing even to some teachers. English is described as a deep writing system with three layers:

1. The alphabetic layer, in which basic letter–sound correspondences are learned

2. The pattern layer, where students examine consonant–vowel patterns (e.g., CVCe/cake, CVVC/nail, CVV/say)

3. The meaning and morphological layer, where students learn new vocabulary and make generalizations about the meaning structures of affixes (e.g., prefixes: un-, re- and suffixes: -ed, -ful) and word roots (e.g., Greek: empathy, path, meaning suffering or feeling and Latin: rebel, bel, meaning war)

Although readers always use and learn about phonics, students who have learned the first two layers for single-syllable words have learned the fundamental of phonics. These students can read nearly all single-syllable words quickly and accurately. Most students acquire these fundamentals by the end of the third grade.

Analytic and Synthetic Approaches

Phonics Development Day - Slide Deck and Resources

Handouts 

Additional Resources 

Click here for more information about literacy programs offered in the Evergreen Public School elementary system.