||Methods and brief TATRAS comment:
||Teaches word "families" (words with
similar endings.) Because this method tends to be limited to
a certain word groups, not all phonograms are taught.
Reading a list of rhyming word is not efficiently teaching phonics.
Because of the need for similar "rhyme" (or
"onset") these words are not the most often occurring words that beginning
readers must learn to
read and spell. Linguistic phonics primary readers are easy to spot and
boring. They sound like: "Sam took the ham and slammed
the lamb. Bam!"
||Reading Mastery, 100 Easy Lessons, Int'l
||Because some letters have more than one sound,
these systems devise special symbols so that each of the sounds of English
can have a unique symbol. These symbols are then taught and the students
will initially read text that utilizes these symbols. Quick acquisition of
the phonics habit, necessary for reading new text, is delayed because the student is
not being prepared to deal with the alternate sounds of many of our letters and
||Hays-Wingo, Jolly Phonics, Phono-Linguistics
(proto-type reading program.)
||Also referred to as spelling-phonics.
Starts by teaching beginning readers a sound
(phoneme) and then being shown all the ways that that sound can be
spelled (which is the information we seek when spelling a word.)
Spelling-phonics would seem to be of little use in decoding a word..
The logic of Spelling Phonics is explained by
Prof. Diane McGuinness, on p.162 of Early Reading
Instruction. She says a student, looking at a word, will "sound out each
phoneme" of a word and then blend the sounds to arrive at the word.
Is she saying "sound out each sound?" ("phoneme"
means "sound.") If a student had not studied letter-sound
associations and did not have the word previously memorized, from
where would the student get the "phonemes" of the word to
||New England Primer and newer programs
based on the New England Primer.
||Students are taught the sounds represented by
combinations made when most possible initial word spellings of
English are followed by the most common medial spelling of
English. These combinations could be represented on a spreadsheet
(or matrix) with medial spellings (a, e, i, o, u, y, ar, er etc ) on
the x-axis and the vowels sounds----b, c, d, f, g, ch, on the y-axis.
Students are taught ba, be, bi, bo and so on. (Few such
programs actually show the spreadsheet view.)
||Used by many reading program publishers
from the 1930s until recently. Used by some "neuro-specialists"
working in home school circles. Also the method used in Glen Doman's
Teach Your Baby to Read. and Robert Titzer's Your Baby Can
||For many years systematic, direct phonics
advocates have called "whole word" memorization techniques
"phony phonics." This method has students memorizing printed words with little
reference to their knowledge of the sounds of the word's individual
letters (which theoretically will be taught later.) Sometimes called
"indirect phonics." Advocates sometimes
rationalize this approach by saying, for example, that when a child
has memorized the words mountain, mother, and maybe
he will automatically recognized the "m" in moon. Therefore
they feel they are teaching letter-sound associations. This
method is often considered a "natural" method of teaching
reading. Tragically it is often forced on students who were understandably
having problem learning to read by any one of the many other
inefficient methods being used by schools.
||Incidental Phonics methods are
used in many (but by no means, all) public and Christian schools that
assure parents they are teaching "phonics."
1. Teaches 100-200 words as sight
words before the student has adequately learned the sound/symbol
representations used in those words.
2. Doesn't teach sound-symbol relationships
for an adequate set of letters/letter combinations.
3. Doesn't teach letter-letter combination sounds to automaticity.
4. Drags out the teaching of phonics, sometimes not completing what
phonics is taught until the 3d grade.
5. Undermines the use of phonics by such strategies as:
a. Using beginning texts that have many irregular words,
b. Discouraging use of phonics by slower students (and their parents) trying to use phonics to decode words.
c. classifying large numbers of words as words that have to be
memorized because they "are not phonetic." d.
Minimizing the value of phonics and talking about "phonics
6. Teaching decoding "rules" that are not
i.e. "When two vowels go a walking, the first one does the
7. First and second graders are overburdened with worksheets and
"reading" assignments that they have not been prepared to
handle. Parents who do not understand phonics instruction either
simply do the work for the student or cut short their work with the
student leaving the parents with a feeling, later, that they
themselves are to blame for their student's failure