Phonics Benefits

This article explores the benefits of teaching phonics to children and how important it is in several areas. Not only does phonics help with reading, but it also improves skills in word identification, fluency and comprehension, silent and oral reading, and spelling. The article goes into detail on how phonics is crucial as a building block of reading and how the benefits of phonics are related. Without phonics and the connection between letters and sounds, reading cannot happen. Letters need to be taught in relation to their sounds with consideration that many letters have different sounds with certain words. The article mentions how meaningful phonics is and claims “Phonics gives meaning to the medium, the print, while the meanings of the words and the syntax give meaning to the message.” Phonics helps students pronounce and understand new words through their knowledge of letter combinations and sounds. This knowledge allows students the opportunity for problem solving and discovering things independently. The overall goal of teaching phonics is to help readers use their prior knowledge to determine new words for

better fluency when reading.

The benefits found within phonics are all connected as they rely on each other for successful reading to occur.

Learning phonics and its application in reading is crucial. Within this article, I discovered new information on phonics and phonemic awareness and how the two correlate with one another. I learned all the ways phonics improves not only reading, but every aspect of reading including spelling. My initial reaction to this article is that phonics is a crucial learning piece to understanding language. Without phonics reading and spelling would almost be impossible. It is crucial for adolescents to be exposed to some form of phonics otherwise their ability to read, write, and learn will be greatly hindered. To learn language, you must be able to decipher new words; phonics plays a major role in word recognition and comprehension of new

words.
One thing that stands out to me about phonics is the history of it. Language before the alphabet was pictures or symbols that represented certain things. The word fire looks nothing like a fire, but with phonetics we know that when you spell out the letters f-i-r-e it means that without having to draw a picture, which makes for a more intellectual way of thinking and understanding. Without phonetics, we would have no way to associate the letters to a word. The correlation between word and meaning is truly remarkable.
The relevance between phonetics and teaching today is everything. Without phonetics, I could not be writing this paper. Language and communication is how advancement in society is achieved. When teaching children, they have no concept of exactly what they are learning but developing phonetic awareness is crucial to a child’s intelligence. Putting together thoughts and ideas into properly spelled sentences is the very basis of language and learning. Therefore, we teach phonics.
I find the history of phonetics very interesting. Connecting the alphabet into meaning is something that is hard to process. Luckily it was done many centuries ago; today it is easy, because we are taught phonetics from an early age (whether we know it or not). It is all around us. I would like to know more about the early stages of phonetics, and how it has advanced to where it is today.