Opinion: How English makes it tough to teach reading by phonics alone

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As a retired professor of elementary education, I often get questions from teachers about the best way to teach reading to primary school children. This issue is receiving renewed interest given the current controversy about the UCP’s language arts curriculum revisions.

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The question about the best way to teach children to read English has been a controversial one for many years. In fact, this question is often referred to as “the Great Debate” or the “reading wars.” On one side are researchers and educators who believe the best way to teach reading is through direct instruction in phonics (sound-symbol relationships), while on the other side are those who believe that phonics has only a limited usefulness, and that early reading instruction should focus more on recognizing words in meaningful contexts. A third way is to provide a balance of instruction between these two approaches. I am in favor of this third approach, but with a greater emphasis on meaning making over “sounding out” words.

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It is true that English writing (and reading) are based on an alphabetic principle. This means that the letters used in written English do represent, in some fashion, the sounds that make up spoken English. But there is a major problem. Spoken English has about 40 different sounds (which linguists call phonemes) that have an influence on meaning.

But the English alphabet has only 26 graphemes (letters) to represent these sounds. Thus, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the 40 sounds and the 26 letters that are meant to represent these sounds. Some letters in the alphabet must represent more than one sound. For example, the letter c as in cat and cent, and gas as in get and gem. Often, two or more letters are written together but represent only one sound, eg, ea as in fear.

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There are also written words with silent (unpronounced) letters, eg, the p in psalms, the first c in science, the k in knee and knight, the gh in words like night as well as the e at the end of many English words eg, cove. (This so-called “silent rule making the medial vowel long is frequently broken in words like love, above, et cetera).

Often two similar-sounding words (homophones) are spelled quite differently to signal different meanings. So, the words beat and beet and great and grate have identical pronunciations but, the different spellings signal different meanings. And it’s not always true that when two vowels are written together, they stand for the long sound of the first, as, for example, in the word heat. Contrary examples: great, bear, does (unless it refers to female deer).

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Here is another example of how difficult it is to read English if one thinks that the letters stand for specific sounds. A common spelling pattern in English (also known as a phonograph) is the group of letters ough. Here are a few English words containing that spelling pattern: though, thought, bough, enough, through.

Notice that the sound value of ough changes in each of these words. So, what does one teach children about how they should pronounce ough when reading? And that’s the problem with relying heavily on phonics to teach children to read.

In English, the relationship between how words are written and how they are to be pronounced is very complicated. This is especially true for vowel sounds. The vowel a, for example, has as many as seven different phonemic values ​​depending on the word in which it is used. So, while some familiarity with the sound-symbol relationships (phonic) in English may be useful, it’s not something that should have the greatest emphasis in teaching children (or adults) to read.

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Memorizing all kinds of phonics rules and trying to apply them while reading will slow down the process so much that the meaning of what is read* will suffer greatly.

Thus, while teaching children some sound-symbol relationships (especially as they relate to consonants) may be warranted, a general exhortation to “sound it out” is likely to cause a great deal of confusion at the expense of making meaning. As the Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland suggested, “take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

*Pronounced as red and not as reed (unless it’s in the present tense). And, oh yes, there is also the homophone redd (pronounced as in red) that refers to the nest of certain fish.

Robert Bruinsma is a retired teacher and professor of elementary education from The King’s University in Edmonton.