Phonics

Phonics

The traditional theory of phonics was established in the early nineteenth century. Up until the early nineties, phonics was the only way that a child was taught to read in a classroom setting. Phonics can be defined as the “association of letters or combinations of letters with their appropriate speech sounds. Phonics also includes the understanding of the principals that govern the use of letters in words” (Cooley, 2003). By using the phonics method the student is able to sound out a word that is unfamiliar to them when they are reading. The student is taught to dissect unfamiliar words into smaller parts and then join the familiar parts back together again to form single words. By learning these letter-sound relationships the student is provided with a “decoding” formula that they can use whenever they come across a word that they are unfamiliar with. Phonics is not only used when learning to read but also when the child is learning how to write. When the child is spelling, phonics helps them to write the appropriate letters for the sounds that they hear.

Phonics can be taught in a classroom two different ways, synthetically or analytically.

In a synthetic approach, a student learns the sounds of each individual letter and/or a combination of letters, before they actually learn how to read. When a child comes along a word that is unfamiliar to them they sound out the word by the sounds that make up the word. In an analytic approach, the child develops a vocabulary of words that he or she knows by sight. One advantage to this approach is that the child understands the sound of the letters and the reasons some letters are used instead of others. When the child applies the knowledge of thi...

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