Phonics & Decoding

What are phonics and decoding and why are they important?

Unlike phonemic awareness which focuses on the sounds in a language, phonics involves pairing the sounds with the letter symbols. Sounds in English are made by individual letters, letter teams, and letter groups or clusters. Where phonemic awareness tasks are oral, phonics tasks incorporate the print. (Blevins, n.d.)

Good readers use many strategies to solve unknown words, and one of those important strategies is using phonics knowledge, which is the sound-spelling relationships. (Blevins, n.d.) Phonics is important because we all encounter words that we do not know by sight and it is a helpful strategy to read the words and though not all words can be read with phonics knowledge, many can. When students use their phonics knowledge to read an unknown word, they are applying the decoding strategy. The more they know and understand phonics, the easier and faster it is to decode unknown words, increasing their reading fluency. Reading fluently is important for comprehension because the less mental energy needed to figure out the words, the more mental energy there is available to understand the words and text as a whole. (Blevins, n.d.) Phonics knowledge also supports spelling as the phonics rules can be used to encode or put the letters together to spell the word (which is the opposite of decode.)

Phonics is generally learned in a progression, beginning with learning the letters, then their corresponding sounds, then individual phonics rules, gradually becoming more complex. Phonics skills can be learned and practiced using words in isolation, but for meaningful decoding to occur, they need to be practiced while reading books or passages.

Helping your child at home with phonics and decoding depends on where your child is along the progression. It is helpful to have a conversation with your child's teacher to find this out.