What is Phonics?.
The phonetic technique involves teaching "phonological awareness,"" the ability to deal explicitly and segmentally with sound units smaller than the syllable (Stanovich, 1993, cited in .
Sensenbaugh). This method points to the 44 sounds represented by the English alphabetic construct and how the combination of these letters blend together to form individual words .
Phonics and Whole Language Instruction.
(Ponnuru, 1999). The idea is to teach children the written version of what they hear through the use of, 1) rhymes and alliteration, 2) comparing and contrasting the sounds of words, 3) blending and splitting syllables, 4) performing phonemic segmentation (counting the number of phonemes in a word), and 5) performing phoneme manipulation tasks (adding or deleting a particular phoneme and creating a new word from the remainder) (Adams, 1990, cited in Sensenbaugh). Advocates believe reading success is directly related to a child's ability to decode and sound out words one does not know and that the only way to acquire this skill is through instruction in phonics (Bettelheim and Zelan, 1981).
Problems Associated with Phonics .
Teaching phonics involves continuous repetition of words and those sounding similar to them. In beginning phonics classes reading texts consist of passages similar to this: Brad was a lad. Brad was a bad lad. Nan ran. Nan ran from the lad. Although these passages may lead to reading, they do not necessarily lead to literacy. According to Bettelheim and Zelan (1981), the initial pleasure and satisfaction a child experiences when they decode their first written words is diminished if learning to read the word does not quickly lead to the reading of meaningful content. In their research of phonics, they found the following:.