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Phonics is the ability to recognize the proper sounds associated with letters.
Each separate sound is known as a phoneme. There are forty-four phonemes in the English language. Learning phonics requires the student to learn numerous phonics rules and patterns. These rules sometimes prove to confuse students because they are not foolproof. This means that these rules apply to most but not all instances for which they are intended.
For example, think of the short “a” sound in the word “sat”. Then compare that with the “a” sound in the word “what”. For this reason, teaching phonics as a basis of reading has met with criticism from some educators.
There are many segments to teaching phonics. Some of these include consonants, short vowel sounds, and long vowels. Most students learn single phonemes first then learn to combine two or more phonemes into blends.
In many schools today little emphasis is placed on teaching phonics. Instead, these schools utilize a method known as the Whole Language approach. This strategy is built upon the belief that if students receive enough exposure to words and reading, they will eventually learn from context how to pronounce words.
Numerous studies in the past two decades show that teaching phonics provides powerful tools to young readers. In 1998 the National Research Council published the results of their study of how best to teach children to read. In this report they stated that phonics is very effective to the success of young readers - more effective than using the whole language approach.
