True or false?
- Speaking is natural. Reading is not.
- All students learn to read differently.
- Kids in early grades should receive explicit phonics instruction.
- About 2/3 of US fourth graders can read proficiently.
(The answers are at the end of this blog.)
How kids learn to read, how reading should be taught, and how teachers of reading should be taught are still controversial in the US. This is despite an 18-year-old exhaustive study of research on reading—the National Reading Panel— authorized by Congress in 2000 which found that phonics should be the basis of reading instruction.
Even with overwhelming research, many teacher training colleges do not teach would-be teachers how to teach phonics. And so the graduates of those schools do not teach their students through a phonics-based approach. As a result, 60% of US fourth graders are NOT proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Students who don’t read well by fourth grade
- Are more likely to fall behind in other subjects.
- Are less likely to finish high school.
- Are more likely to be poor readers their whole lives.
- Are more likely to be poor.
- Are more likely to be imprisoned.
Scientific research shows that a phonetic approach to reading is crucial. Our brains are wired to learn to speak and walk without instruction, but we cannot read without instruction.
Yet in 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, after reviewing the syllabi of US teacher training programs, found that only 39% are teaching their would-be teachers how to teach reading based on phonics. This is 18 years after the US study was published!
In other words, teacher training school are either ignoring the research about how children learn to read or are willfully disregarding it. And as a result, many students are not learning to read.
When I studied for my master’s degree in education in the early 1990’s, I took a reading course in which the instructor belittled the role of phonics in learning to read. She said it was one of many factors, all about equal. I thought phonics was fundamental, but I didn’t have the scientific research to back up my position.
But for the past 18 years we have had overwhelming research that shows that a phonics-based approach to teaching reading is what works best.
If your child is struggling to read, find out if his or her teacher is teaching reading using a phonics-based approach. If you are taking your child to a tutoring center to learn reading, make sure the center is using a phonics-based approach. If you are teaching your child to read, use phonics.
What do I mean by phonics?
- Identifying the sounds of English. Sounds, not ABC’s, come first.
- Matching those sounds with symbols (letters) which represent those sounds
- Merging those sounds and symbols to form words.
- Identifying patterns among the symbols (for example, an “e” at the end of a one-syllable word) which change or influence the sounds letters make.
(The answers are true, false, true and false.)
comicphonics for early readers 