Teaching Phonics is NOT Rocket Science

When I worked in the Air Force as a scientist and a statistician, I met plenty of very smart rocket scientists, and they made me feel stupid in comparison.

A recent informative post about Reading First stated "Louisa Moats' comment that "Teaching Reading is Rocket Science" is not to be ignored."

Having met actual rocket scientists and seen what actual rocket scientists really do, I can tell you that teaching reading with phonics is definitely NOT rocket science. I have also tutored students in Algebra and Trig, and tutoring with phonics is easier!

However, it is hard for teachers who have not learned about the phonetic structure of the English language and have only been taught whole language and sight words techniques which not only contradict basic phonics principles, I believe they make it harder for the brain to learn phonics because of sight word picture overshadowing.

I have posted before, here and here, about sight words and guessing. You really have to see the guessing to believe it for yourself. Without nonsense words and teaching words in isolation, it is hard to break the habit. In Rudolf Flesch's 1955 (and republished in 1985!) "Why Johnny Can't Read," he has an entire chapter titled "Word Guessing--its Cause and Cure." He states on page 114 of this chapter,

"To begin with, let's try to isolate Johnny from his word-guessing environment....Let him stop all reading--all attempts to read. Explain to him that now he is going to learn how to read, and that for the time being, books are out. All he'll get for several months are lessons in phonics."

(There are easy to use phonics lessons in the back of this book.) One warning about Flesch--he is very sarcastic, he fought unsuccessfully for years with schools and teachers and it shows in his writing.

Guessing and its cure is discussed in this RRF thread.

Now, this might seem to make it sound like teaching phonics is a hard thing, as well as facts like "There are 166 letter-sound correspondences, which are too many to learn." promoted in whole-word oriented linguistics texts.

However, it really is not, if you start with an open mind, have no whole word teaching practices to overcome, and use a good phonics book that is designed to take the rocket science out of teaching reading.

I can't find the quote, but either Adams or Chall in their review of different reading methods found that when teachers made the switch from phonics to whole word or vice versa, they retained much of their old teaching methods. This seems to be happening in many Reading First classrooms.

Toe-by-Toe, a good remedial phonics program used in the UK that uses syllable division and nonsense words (but too many sight words, they need to read my sight word page to find out how to teach them phonetically!) has this tidbit:

Q: Is this book solely for the use of teachers or other professionals?
A: No! Teachers are often restricted by classroom procedures. Parents have no such procedures to inhibit them; they start with a 'clean slate'.

With my first student, I made several mistakes and taught her some sounds incorrectly at first, but she still made amazing progress--just learning that all the letters had sounds and that all words could be sounded out if broken up into syllables was a revelation and a motivation for her, she learned rapidly despite my initial errors--in fact, she was relieved that I made mistakes--it actually gave her more confidence that she could learn to read.

I had started with whole word teaching for a month, and was very excited about it after hearing its praises sung by the literacy organization I was tutoring with. However, she only learned 3 words in the 3 months I worked with her using whole word methods. In her first phonics lesson, she learned to sound out around 30 words she had never seen before, including three 3-syllable words.

When teachers used phonics in one room schoolhouses, there were not many problems learning to read, and the teachers were often girls as young as 16 (Laura Ingalls Wilder was 15, but she's obviously an exceptional person) and they taught everyone the 3R's while keeping order with boys often bigger and older than them in the classrooms.

In 2003 and 2004, I visited a nursing home with my daughter and met a then 94-year-old woman who had taught for a while (11 years?) in a one-room-schoolhouse in Texas. She said she used phonics and ALL of her students learned to read. She also said she never had any discipline problems. (She was a small lady, too!) She didn't think it was any big deal what she did, and changed the subject rapidly when I tried to get her to go into more detail. Two of her 4 brothers died fighting for our country, and all 4 went to war. She didn't think she had done much in comparison, and thought nothing of the fact that all her students learned to read.

I'll post later about the nuts and bolts about teaching phonics and how easy it actually is if you do it right and have the proper tools. In the meantime, if you're interested, you can find good resources for that here:

My free online spelling lessons (2 hours total, teaches all the phonics you need to teach someone to read.)

Don Potter's Education Page (lots of free good phonics programs and instructions on how to teach phonics--including Remedial Reading Drills, the method used to teach Flesch's Johnny how to read.)

My list of good phonics and spelling books

How to teach with Webster's Speller (syllables!)

How to teach a remedial reading student

How to teach a beginning reading student