A whole new language

It is possible to learn to read this way. There are countries where the written language is not phonetic, like China. Many children learn second languages at school. This shows that learning 5,000 new associations is not impossible for normal kids.

Not impossible, but nor is it easy. It is particularly hard for disadvantaged children.

Now consider a child learning to read using phonics. Here the idea is not to learn a whole new language, but to learn a relatively small number of rules which will allow the child to decode from an encoded form (written English) into it’s “clear” form (spoken English).

First you have to learn to break down spoken English into its phonetic components. It is a matter for debate how many separately identifiable phonemes are used in English. The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies 107 basic sounds, most of which are not used in English. In fact it is usually assumed there are about 40 phonemes in American English.

These 40 phonemes then have to be associated with letters and letter groups. There are only 26 letters, but there are many commonly encountered letter groups which have quite distinctive pronunciation in English. Phonics programs usually assume up to about 120 commonly encountered letters or letter groups.

Learning these associations gets you only so far. Written English is basically phonetic, but the rules are very context dependent. Each letter group can have several different ways of being pronounced, and each sound can have different ways of being spelled, all depending on context. This increases the complexity of the task, meaning that the child may need to learn not just 120 new associations but maybe several hundred new associations. And and top of that, there are still individual exceptions which have to be learned as well.

That’s not easy, but it’s still a lot easier than learning 5,000 essentially unstructured and unrelated pieces of information, which is the problem faced by some whole language learners.

Based on the information processing principles outlined above, phonics should help the beginning reader make more rapid initial progress than would be possible with whole-language. The beginner has many fewer pieces of information to learn in order to make a probably correct translation of simple written English into spoken English. And because of the emphasis in phonics on a simple, standard method, we should expect it to have a higher success rate with disadvantaged students, provided of course that they have the basic letter and sound recognition abilities required to use the method.

This kind of analysis is not new, and is widely accepted by cognitive scientists who study language acquisition. It appears to be supported by the best available scientific evidence. Rigorous explications of an information processing model of phonics have recently been developed and tested experimentally by researchers.

This is why most people who study literacy from a cognitive science perspective conclude that phonics should be used as the foundation technique for beginning readers. Phonics gives them the quickest possible start, by leveraging all they already know about spoken English, and giving them some easily learned rules they can use to decode written English. And “quick” wins bring the confidence that reading is something they can make progress on and eventually master. As any parent or teacher knows, confidence is a vital element with young children.

It also seems pretty clear that once reading is well established, motivated readers will start to outgrow the phonics based strategies that got them started in the first place. The “decoding” method works, but it is too slow for experienced readers, who will soon start using whole word recognition anyway.

Therefore some elements of the whole-language approach may be useful in taking children with well established phonics skills to the next levels of achievement.

For all that, the clear conclusion, warranted by both theory and empirical evidence, is that phonics should be taught first, as the foundation technique. This is especially important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, provided of course they already speak English. There is evidence that it is precisely these children who have been most badly affected by the shift away from phonics during the 1980’s and 1990’s.

It is a sad irony that whole-language educators, while professing their concern for equity, are in practice limiting opportunities for some of the most disadvantaged.