Teaching with Phonics

Learning to Reading With Phonics

Teaching with phonics is all about reading, recognizing, producing and writing the phonetic values of a language. This is a most important area of study for young children and beginning learners. Teaching phonics is a method for beginners to be able to apply letters, syllables and letter groups to phonetic values.

A given curriculum with phonics-oriented study is targeted towards young and new learners to teach them to write, read, identify and distinguish the various sounds of a language as a single unit or as a group of sounds, and eventually to produce the syllables and words to speak and read fluently. Students establish Phonics skills after careful study and then moves on to study pronunciation and then to create sentences. Teaching with phonics enables young children to learn rhythm and intonation.

An incremental approach is employed in teaching with phonics, where simple sounds and letters are first used progressing into complicated combinations. Learning to read can get rather complicated with the English language. A classic example is “What’s your name?” which is invariably the first thing a child or an adult foreign language learner is taught. How could someone teaching with phonics be expected to adequately explain to young learners the complexities of “wh” and “ou” with the long “a” pronunciation in the word “name.”  The sentence is further complicated with the apostrophe “s” in what’s.

Teaching with phonics and starting with letters and sound values will help students to construct words, but the words themselves will help the students understand how the sound and letter works together. It is best for them to discover for themselves the rules and some exceptions to the rules of usage of certain words and apply their knowledge to construct simple sentences.

Begin with the alphabet and their sequence followed with consonant sounds

Typically a course of learning to reading with phonics study elements beginning with alphabet letters and their sequence, followed with consonant sounds, short vowels and long vowels. After the basic study of the letters and their sounds, consonant blends and consonant digraphs followed by R-controlled vowels or murmur diphthongs and the vowel digraphs are taught. After the basics, the student is then taught progressively more complex things like the parts of speech, prefixes and suffixes, syllables and word stress, tone or intonation, compounds and homophones, synonyms and antonyms, contractions and so on until they grow into fluent speakers, readers, and prolific writers.

Using widely available phonics textbooks in teaching a child to read will help the teacher and parent determine the elements of Phonics to be studied and the degree of study.

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