What is it?
Phonics refers to the relationships between letters and sounds. Phonics goes hand in hand with phonemic awareness, but they are not the same thing. A child will not be able to understand phonics without first having a grasp of phonemic awareness. A child needs to know the different sounds in words in order to start applying those sounds to certain letters. A child needs to know what sound /c/ makes before they can connect that sound to the letter c. Knowing these relationships between letters and sounds can help a child to recognize familiar words quicker, and also will help them to decode unknown words easier as well.
Research
Research shows that phonics instruction if more effective than ignoring phonics instruction. Some critics of phonics instruction argue that English has too many irregular spelled words for phonics instruction to be impactful. However, research shows that phonics instruction helps contribute to a child's growth in reading than instruction void of phonics instruction. Not only does phonics instruction help a child's ability to read, but it also helps with their word recognition and spelling. Phonics instruction has shown to be extremely beneficial help children who are struggling or are at risk of developing future reading problems.
Strategies
Teaching Phonics requires intentional, systematic approaches. Teachers need to make sure to include the relationships of sounds with all of the individual letters, as well as common letter combinations(th, ph, ing, etc..). There also needs to be plenty of opportunity for children to practice these relationships. Some Methods could include:
- Synthetic Phonics: Have students convert letters into sounds, then blend them together to form words.
- Analytic Phonics: Have students identify letter and sound relationships in previously learned words.
- Analogy Phonics: Have students use parts of familiar words to identify words they don't know.
- Spelling Phonics: Have students break words into phonemes and then write the letter that corresponds to that phoneme.
Resources
Here are some videos with some phonics lessons in use:
Relating specific letters with their corresponding sounds