Chapter 4. Phonics: Breaking the Code to Words

“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” – Walt Disney

Iowa Core State Standards (Please check your state standards)

Phonics falls under the foundational standards of literacy.

Iowa Core Standards for Literacy

Phonics and word recognition. RF.K.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.

• Demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary or many of the most frequent sounds for each consonant.
• Associate the long and short sounds with common spellings (graphemes) for the five major vowels.
• Read common high-frequency words by sight (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does).
• Distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying the sounds of the letters that differ.

RF.1.3 Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.

Decoding

A critical component in word recognition is the ability to decode them. For children to accurately perform this skill, they must understand the alphabetic principle and know letter-sound correspondences. When students make the connection that letters signify the sounds that we say, they are said to understand the purpose of the alphabetic code, or the “alphabetic principle.” Letter-sound correspondences are known when students can provide the correct sound for the letters and letter combinations. Students can then be taught to decode, which means to blend the letter sounds together to read words. Decoding is a deliberate act in which readers must “consciously and deliberately apply their knowledge of the mapping system to produce a plausible pronunciation of a word they do not instantly recognize” (Beck & Juel, 1995, p. 9). Once a word has been accurately decoded a few times, it can be recognized without conscious thinking, which is a more efficient kind of word recognition.

Phonics

The instructional practices teachers use to teach students how letters (e.g., i, r, x) and letter clusters (e.g., sh, oa, igh) correspond to the sounds of speech in English is called phonics (not to be confused with phonemic awareness). For example, a teacher may provide a phonics lesson on how “p” and “h” combine to make /f/ in “phone,” and “graph.” After all, the alphabet is a code that symbolizes speech sounds, and once students are taught which sound(s) each of the symbols (letters) represents, they can successfully decode written words, or “crack the code.”

Why decoding and phonics?

In 1997, the U.S. Congress asked the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), in collaboration with the Secretary of Education, to bring together a national panel of reading experts, now known as the “National Reading Panel.” Their mission was to assess the existing research-based knowledge about the effectiveness of various approaches for teaching children to read. The Panel’s findings were presented in a report entitled Teaching Children to Read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. You can read the entire report of the National Reading Panel for more details.

The Panel reviewed hundreds of research studies. One of the clear findings was that in order to become strong readers children must develop:

• phonemic awareness,
• phonics skills,
• the ability to read words in text in an accurate and fluent manner, and
• the ability to apply comprehension strategies consciously and deliberately as they read.

The Panel found that many difficulties in learning to read were caused by poor phonemic awareness, and that systematic and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness directly improved children’s reading and spelling skills (you learned about phonological and phonemic awareness in Chapter 3).

The evidence for the importance of phonemic awareness is so strong that the Panel recommended that systematic and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness should be taught to all children starting in preschool. Importantly, the Panel found that preschool children could easily learn phonemic awareness when the instruction was presented in an age-appropriate and entertaining manner. It is important to note that the Panel found that children in preschool and early elementary school who had difficulty understanding that the words in oral language are composed of smaller speech sounds that are linked to the letters of the alphabet were highly at risk for reading disabilities. These children often had trouble with tasks like counting the number of syllables in words or finding rhyming words (Reading Rockets).

Basic phonics terms

See the link in the call-out box for a comprehensive glossary of phonics terms. Here are some of the big ideas:

Phonemic awareness is about the INDIVIDUAL SOUNDS of words.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in spoken language. For example, the word “cat,” can be broken up into the sounds /k/ /a/ and /t/. Each of those 3 sounds is a phoneme, so phonemic awareness = awareness of phonemes (the individual sounds). Some phonemic-awareness skill examples are:

• Hearing the word top and saying the beginning sound: /t/.
• Hearing the word dog and breaking it up (segmenting) into these three sounds: /d/ /o/ /g/.
• Hearing the word pan and substituting the /f/ sound for the /p/ sound to get fan.
• This does not include linking these sounds to their written form, which is phonics.

Graphemes are written letters that represent one sound. The m in man is a grapheme. The ch in beach are also a grapheme.

Morphemes are the smallest parts of a word that have meaning or influences the meaning of a word. The word beautiful has two morphemes (beauty) and (-ful). Adding the suffix -ful) to the word (beauty) changes the meaning of the word, yet the new word is still related to the old one.

Consonants and Vowels

As you know, the English alphabet has 26 letters, which can be divided into two groups: consonants and vowels. The letters are often represented by C or V for consonant or vowel.

In English there are 5 vowels: a, e, i, o, and u. Vowel sounds are considered LONG VOWELS when the sound matches the name of the letter (e.g. the a in cake). SHORT VOWELS are harder to define. For example, the short a’s in hat and can could sound different, depending on the speaker. These sounds are also pronounced differently in different parts of the country!

Any alphabet letter that is not a vowel is a CONSONANT.

Each school district will most likely have selected curricula which will include phonics instruction, or word-study methods. However, here are some basics on how to teach decoding and phonics.

Teaching decoding and phonics

Explicit and systematic instruction

Research supports instruction that is explicit and systematic. Explicit means that letter-sound relationships, or phonics skills, are taught directly to students (instead of being presented indirectly through reading aloud). Systematic means that teachers follow a sequence of skills from simple to more complex, including frequent reviews of those skills.

For more information, read the brief from the International Literacy Association: Meeting the Challenges of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction [PDF].

Phonics strategies

Students need many opportunities to work with words, including letter and word sorts, decoding games, read-alouds and shared reading, and their own reading. Success with phonics is enhanced whenever children can attach meaning to the words they decode, such as during supported comprehension activities like read-alouds and shared stories. The more opportunities children have to encounter and manipulate letter sounds and words, attaching meaning to them, the more pathways they can develop for knowing words.

Word-decoding skill begins with explicit phonics practice. As the video above explained, the 26 letters in the English alphabet make 44 sounds for words. Not all sounds are spelled in the same way, as in the example of the /s/ sound, which can be spelled with one s as in sand, 2 s’s as in class, a c as the first sound in circle, or ce as in face. It gets even trickier when we start thinking about combinations of consonants, such as ph, which makes the /f/ sound in phone; or combinations of vowels and consonants, such as ough, which can be long o in though, short o in ought, or short u plus /f/ in tough. If you are curious about why we have so many spellings for sounds, you can check out this video: Why is English Spelling So Weird?

Beginning phonics

Reading standards at each grade level provide a specific sequence for teaching the letter combinations that make up the sounds in words. This is called a “scope and sequence,” and it is the guideline you follow to make sure your instruction is based on the progressive development of skills that addresses the children’s gaps in knowledge.

Here are some examples of scopes and sequences for phonics instruction:

• Keys to Literacy [PDF]
• Reading Street [PDF] (Pearson)
• New Jersey Department of Education [PDF]
• University of Florida Literacy Institute [PDF]
• Reading Universe [PDF] (Barksdale Reading Institute)

Phonics instruction in kindergarten starts with learning letter-sound correspondences for consonants, and for the sounds of short vowels and the most common long vowels.

Lessons will typically include the most common digraphs (ch, sh, th, wh, and ck). Because kindergarteners may be losing teeth and still developing articulation, they may not be able to produce these sounds perfectly – but they can still learn them.

Phonics activities can start with basic letter sorts – separating consonants from vowels, for example. Magnetic letters are very useful for this, and are readily available in many schools, but letter tiles or even paper cut-out letters can be used for all of these activities. The point is to provide letters the children can move around, rather than relying on writing alone. Being able to actually move the letters in a concrete way is an important way to establish early learning, before proceeding to the more abstract act of writing (Clay, 2005).

If purchasing sets of magnetic letters or letter tiles, be sure to examine the ways the letters are formed. If they use stylized letter forms that are different from the fonts in most reading series, they may be confusing for young children. For example, the letter g may be written as g, or the letter a may be written as a.

Early sorts for young children

Provide an assortment of letters and a tabletop or surface to sort on. Baking sheets from home can also work. Before teaching, pre-select groups of letters based on what sorts you will ask the children to do. Re-mix the letters between sorts. The following sorts progress from easier to more challenging:

• For children still working on letter recognition, ask them to separate letters with tails, such as y, g, p, from letters without tails, such as c, o, e, s. Ask them to separate tall letters such as k, l, t from short ones such as c, o, e, s.
• Separate capital letters from lower-case ones.
• Match capital letters with their lower-case forms.
• Separate consonants from vowels.

In kindergarten, children learn consonant sounds, short-vowel sounds, and the most common long-vowel sounds. Once the children are familiar with these basic sounds, they can begin to build words.

Building words with moveable letters:

Before teaching, pre-select letters based on the words you will ask children to build.

• Guide the children to make the simple word at: (short /a/, consonant /t/).
• Ask them to add a letter to the front of at and guide them to read the new word they have made.
  • Example: “Find the s. Add it to the beginning of at to make a new word. What word did you make?”
• Ask the children to take off the first letter and replace it with a new letter, making a new word.
  • Example: “Now break off the s so you only have the word at again. Find the m. Add it to the beginning of at to make a new word. What word did you make?”
• Continue removing the first letter and replacing it with new letters to make new words like cat and bat.

In 1^st grade students learn the common consonant digraphs sh, ch, and th. The sh digraph makes a consistent sound as found in the words she and shoe. The ch digraph can make different sounds, such as in the words chair, character, and chef. The digraph th is a little tricky, because in some words it is voiced (the vocal cords are vibrating) and in other words it is unvoiced (like whispering). Try this: Place your first two fingers lightly on your adam’s apple. Say “the.” Notice that your throat vibrates slightly as you make the th sound: it is voiced. Now try the same experiment while saying “thumb.” This time there should be less vibration, because the th in thumb is unvoiced. Try other words containing th to see which ones use the voiced th and which ones use the unvoiced th.

Students in 1^st grade also learn common vowel combinations and the sounds they make, such as ea as in team, ee as in seed, oa as in boat, and ay as in play; and they learn the silent-e pattern as well as the common inflectional endings –ed, –ing, and the plural -s.

2nd and 3rd grade and beyond

When students are in 2^nd grade and above, they should be learning to decode multisyllable words. Phonics lessons on decoding longer words should emphasize common syllable-division patterns and point out rules about syllables in English.

To decode long words with multiple syllables, children need a strategy for dividing them into manageable parts. They can then apply their knowledge of syllable types and letter-sound associations, and blend the decoded syllables back into whole words. This is where fluency is important – children need to be able to say these syllables quickly to understand what they are reading.

References

Bear, D. R., Invernizzi, M., Johnston, F., & Templeton, S. (2008). Words their way: Word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction. Pearson Higher Ed.

Beck, I. L., & Juel, C. (1995). The role of decoding in learning to read. American educator, 19(2), 8.

Blevins, W. (2019). Meeting the Challenges of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction. Literacy Leadership Brief. International Literacy Association.

Clay, M. M. (2005). Literacy lessons designed for individuals: Part two teaching procedures. Heinemann.

Williams, C., Phillips-Birdsong, C., Hufnagel, K., Hungler, D., & Lundstrom, R.P. (2009). Word Study Instruction in the K-2 Classroom. The Reading Teacher, 62(7), 570-578.