Second view questions study

By Keith Greaney & Alison Arrow

Results from a study reporting on some problems with using phonics beyond the early stages of reading were briefly discussed recently in the local media outlets. The reported study involved researchers from Victoria and Otago universities.  One of the authors, Associate Professor Claire Fletcher-Flinn, noted that “explicit phonics may be useful because children need to learn that letters in words have connections to sounds”.  This is accepted across researchers in literacy acquisition; however, she also notes that beyond knowing about such connections, “they don’t even have to learn all the letter sounds”. The difficulty with this view is how phonics fits in within the process of becoming a fluent, accurate, reader of words.

It would be useful to first define what is meant by phonics. Phonics does involve the teaching of the relationship between letters and sounds, but it is more about providing instruction in the link between sounds in spoken words and graphemes, or letters, in print words. It is the ‘middle’ piece of a three-part set of skills and knowledge required to become a fluent, accurate, reader of words.

The first part involves phonological awareness (the conscious awareness of the individual sounds within spoken words) and is part of a body of skills and knowledge usually referred to as emergent literacy.

The second part (phonics) includes the ability to link the letters in written form (i.e., words) to their respective sounds. While many simple consonant-vowel-consonant words (e.g., cat, dog, hen, pig) may well be decoded using individual letter by letter sounds, this simplistic phonics approach soon becomes unreliable. Even high frequency basic words that appear in the very earliest reading materials (e.g., look, house, car, mother, father) could not be read by sounding out each letter by letter.  The provision of instruction in larger word parts, such as morphemes can also be considered part of phonics, if the student’s reading abilities and knowledge suggest it.

Many commentators wrongly define phonics as simply ‘sounding out words’ and that such a sounding out strategy means sounding out every letter. This is not an effective strategy to encourage beyond those regularly spelled words and it is not a strategy that effective teachers would encourage.  We suspect that Fletcher-Flinn and Thompson have taken this simplistic and incorrect view when they suggest that phonics is not useful beyond the initial period of learning.  Many children require very little explicit phonics instruction but others require longer and more focused instruction in phonological awareness and phonics.

However, the third part of the skills and strategies required involves cipher knowledge and phonological decoding which is, as Fletcher-Flinn and Thompson suggest, an unconscious process that develops through reading itself.  This allows the reader to attempt unfamiliar words by recognising that the spelling patterns within problematic words may be represented by more than one pronunciation, and that the correct pronunciation will be reliant on either the surrounding letters and/or the context of the surrounding words (e.g, wind the clock versus the wind blew hard).

Cipher knowledge is therefore the ability to recognise the flexibility and variability of the likely pronunciations of many spelling patterns within words.  The ability to recognise the flexibility and variability comes with reading practice of more and more words.  However, we suggest that it is equally important to identify what is needed for that initial reading of words.  Active engagement with print from an early age can provide sufficient understanding of print that some children will quickly learn word patterns, and won’t need large amounts of phonics as they start making their own connections between print and speech.  However, our concern lies with the large number of children in NZ classrooms who don’t come to school with active engagement with print, and will need phonics instruction to ‘kick-start’ the act of making their own connections. 

We would be disappointed if teachers believed (as Fletcher-Flinn appears to), that phonics teaching is unnecessary beyond the very early stage of learning to read in the primary classroom.  The main issue we have with this study is that the authors appear to have taken a very narrow view of the role of phonics and have based their interpretations on this.    They needed to include more discussion about the precursor phonological awareness knowledge required before phonics is able to make any sense for the reader.

Finally, we would not advocate explicit phonics-based teaching for every child. However, it is worth noting that two international researchers in reading (Snow & Juel , 2005) state that teaching the letter-sound patterns (e.g., phonics) is “helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some” (p.518). The reported findings in the Fletcher-Flinn study do not appear to make this point clear.

Snow, C.E., & Juel, C. (2005). Teaching Children to Read: What do we know about how to do it? In The Science of Reading: a handbook. UK. Blackwell.