As summer swiftly passes, stores are beginning to restock school supplies to offer the newest and latest items for helping children get ready to return to school.  Unfortunately, most schools are not planning to offer new approaches or methods for teaching reading.  Most schools will continue to use whole language teaching methods, even though whole language has been completely and totally proven to be a failure.  The National Reading Panel studied over 100,000 reading programs and published a nationwide report in 2000 that states that whole language and other methods following whole language principles simply do not work (Nation’s Report Card (NPC).  Why must we sentence children to another year of failure?  It’s not because we do not have methods that work, because we do (Keller & Just, 2009).

To reinforce the need for a new approach, a change in how we teach children to read, I just read an article on the Internet by Jeanne Caudill, a first grade teacher encouraging others to use whole language memorization of sight words to help at-risk students learn to read.  (No, I am not blaming reading failure on teachers! There are many wonderful teachers.)

Her “research” only says that children improved on a memorized list of sight words.  (She does not include scientific research data or facts.)  If you read carefully from what she does present in her article, she is basically having children memorize a list of words and then testing to show that they have finally, eventually learned that list of words.  Well of course, if you keep flashing the same word at children over and over and over, most children will eventually learn that word, but unless you can memorize the whole entire unabridged dictionary, simply memorizing a list of sight words will never be enough to help a child really learn to read.  She’s claiming victory from a child improving a few points in memorizing a set list of words.  She does not tell whether the child has actually improved in true reading ability. 

In my spring research data, using scientific pre-and post-testing, following all university research protocols, two first-graders moved up four grade levels in reading—not just a few points, but entire grade levels.  They were both below kindergarten level when they entered my program.  By the end of the year, these two first-graders were able to read not only the designated sight words for first grade; they were also able to read designated words above and beyond anything they had been introduced to in first grade.  Do my students memorize sight words? Absolutely never! All of my programs teach children phonemic and phonological awareness.  The children learn to decode and encode letter sounds, so they can read not only a designated sight word list but words not included on a designated first grade sight word list.

It’s time that we stop punishing children by using the failed whole language system and all of its derivatives.  It is not enough, as I pointed out in a previous post, merely to attach phonics to a whole language program.  The word phonics has become distorted and can just as easily describe a disastrous program that does not work as it can a sufficient and worthwhile approach to teaching children (see my July 9, 2017 blog about phonics).

For children to learn to read, they must learn that letters represent sounds (phonemic awareness) and they must learn how to decode and encode those letter sounds (phonological awareness) (Shaywitz, 2013).

My suggestion is for parents and educators to go and read some REAL research on the ineffectiveness of whole language (Yoncheva, Wise, & McCandliss, 2015).  We have teaching methods for teaching children to read; so why are we so stubborn about using them?  Why do we keep using a failing system--whole language?  Why do we refuse to help children learn to read?  

Today, we turn our attention to a letter that I received from a parent.

Parent:
You use the phrase phonemic awareness, but the school uses the word phonics.  What is the difference?
 
Phonics describes a teaching method that focuses on letters as sounds.  Phonemic awareness explains a child’s ability to hear a phoneme or letter sound and then to use that phoneme to sound out words. Phonics and phonemic awareness are not the same (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2001).  The word phonics is being used by so many people in so many different ways that you must be careful.  The phonics method that your school is using may be helpful or it may not be.

The National Reading Panel (2000) identified six different methods for teaching phonics:
 
(1) Systematic phonics instruction entails the direct teaching of letter-sound relationships and uses a specific sequence or learning pattern.  Systematic phonics instruction has been shown through research to be the most effective of the phonics methods, but be careful.  There are many different approaches for teaching systematic phonics.  To be effective, systematic phonics must teach decoding and encoding instead of memorization or a list of rules.

(2) Analytic phonics instruction does not teach breaking sounds down into isolated phonemes (sounds); instead, the analytic approach concentrates on the first letter of the word.  For example, if your child is given a list of words to memorize that all start with a T, then the instructor is using an analytic approach.  Unfortunately, analytic phonics has been proven not to be effective (Johnson & Watson, 2004).  It simply doesn’t work.

(3) Analog based phonics instruction uses word families.  Children are taught to look for similar word families:  can, cantaloupe, canary, canine.  As you can see from my list of words, this method is very confusing for children because words that start with c-a-n do not always use the same vowel sound.  Again, the National Reading Panel stated that this method does not work.
 
(4) Learning phonics through spelling teaches children to segment words into phonemes, but all words are not spelled phonemically:  phone, whose, earth. 

(5) Embedded phonics is what many whole language advocates contend that they teach.  In other words, they are teaching children to look for letter relationships within a story which means that children may encounter a host of different vowel and consonant sounds on just one page of a beginning reader.  The brain cannot process and assimilate that many different sounds at one time. The brain does not learn new sounds when they are jumbled together.

(6) Onset-rhyme phonics instruction is where teachers try to help children identify words by matching similar sounds that appear at the beginning of a word before the first vowel:  train, try, trash.  With this method, you are asking children to learn three different vowel sounds at the same time.  It’s impossible for children who struggle in reading. 

From their evaluation of over 100,000 different studies, the National Reading Panel concluded that a systematic method of phonics instruction had the greatest impact on reading and comprehension and even works with children from low socioeconomic neighborhoods.  A systematic method, if introduced early, can reduce reading failure.  For a systematic approach to be successful, though, it must teach letter shapes and sounds.  For a systematic method to be effective in correcting reading failure, it must teach how to write alphabet letters, words, sentences, and stories.  It is especially important that a systematic phonics approach teach lowercase alphabet letters, since we primarily use lowercase letters in reading.  To be effective, the systematic phonics teaching approach must also teach decoding and encoding word skills.

Vowels are crucial, and an effective program needs to focus on letter sounds, not whole words.  Children need to be taught to sound words out letter-by-letter (Yoncheva, Wise, and McCandliss 2015).  Phonemic awareness requires that children recognize that letters represent sounds and that words are composed of letters that systematically represent sounds (sometimes even blended or new sounds).  Children must have phonemic awareness or letter sound knowledge in order to learn to read. 

For both Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club, I use a method of instruction that focuses on phonemic (learning to recognize letter sounds) and phonological (learning to work with letter sounds) awareness. The method that I use is called  vowel clustering (Clanton Harpine 2010, 2011 & 2013). 
The word phonics has become so misunderstood and distorted that I simply do not use it.  You can never tell exactly what the word phonics is being used to describe.  I prefer the terms phonemic awareness and phonological awareness. 

So, to answer your question, systematic phonics can be effective.  It depends on how the word is being used and the actual program it describes.