LackOfPhonics
From LiteracyTentWiki
Adults plateau at GE 2 or 3 because of a lack of phonics skills
Add your insights to support or refute this hypothesis.
I REFUTE
I think it's more often the other way around: In my experience, phonics skills are sometimes over-emphasized by teachers, often over-emphasized by tutors, and almost always over-emphasized by students. I would propose that relying to heavily on phonics will KEEP someone at a beginning level.
Fluent readers use phonics very little. It's other skills such as context clues, sight words, understanding the conventions of different texts, and applying background knowledge which make me a fluent reader.
Bruce Carmel
I agree that sometimes there's too much emphasis, Bruce, but so much of the research shows that phonemic awareness is critical to learning to read. Our stuck students generally have difficulties with decoding. They'll use any word that begins with the initial consonant, and guess. They often can't hear rhymes or distinguish sounds. I'm working with a gent now who can't tell me that "church" and "dog" begin with different sounds. I've abandonded word families with him now since he's generally guessing at the words. I'm not sure he's ever going to understand phonics, which I suspect is going to hamper him.
Jean Marrapodi
YES BUT :)
I know that people who don't know how to read don't have great phonemic awareness. But which comes first, phonemic awareness or learning how to read? Do nonreaders need to develop phonemic awareness to learn to read OR must they learn to read before they can develop phonemic awareness OR does it all happen at the same time? Phonemic awareness may be a precursor to reading OR it may be a skill one has once one learns to read. Just because people who can't read don't have much phonemic awareness, that doesn't mean that increasing their awareness will turn them into readers. Maybe but maybe not. I can't help but think of a writing analogy: People who are poor writers usually have bad penmanship. Will improving their penmanship turn them into good writers? I don't think so.
Bruce Carmel
December 10, 2004
As best we remember, at least some adults develop phonemic awareness after they learn to read.
From the Wiki Group which met at the Meeting of the Minds Conference in Sacramento, CA
12/13/04
I hear you on this. I am a visual learner and I will often tell if words begin or end the same or differently not by sound, but by seeing the words in my head since I've automated the process. This lexical approach is supported by ESL research on having a verbal lexicon for each language and one meaning lexicon that initially services the primary language and eventually gets to both.
Is it a chicken and egg debate then? So much of the research supports that lack of phonemic awareness is a critical sign for reading difficulties. There was a study done with preschoolers using a puppet that had trouble making words, and the children needed to blend the sounds for the puppet, which they could do. These were non readers performing a reading skill orally.
Some of my students can't do that, an indicator of phonemic awareness issues.
Jean Marrapodi
Another thought -- maybe this falls into an inherent weakness in linguistic intelligence, one of Howard Gardner's Eight Multiple Intelligences and there is strength in other areas.
Jean
12/16/04
In this discussion of which comes first, phonemic awareness or learning to read, it's important to define the terms phonemic awareness and phonics skills, because there is a difference. Phonemic awareness is the ability to perceive discrete speech sounds, i.e., the difference between the short "e" sound and the short "i" sound; the difference between /j/ and /ch/, etc., and then the ability to link those speech sounds to letters. Phonics is related to how letters combine into words, i.e., the rules that define word construction. That's knowing the letter patterns for short vowels (c-v-c) and long vowels (v-c-e, and c-v); and knowing spelling patterns, i.e., how to spell the /k/ sound (there are 3 options) and "i before e except after c", etc.
In my observation, a lot of poor teaching masquerades as "phonics". The old drill and practice, which is what is perceived by many as phonics, is not effective teaching. Bruce, that type of "phonics" teaching CAN be counterproductive to learning to read.
I agree with Jean that current research into the reasons children fail to learn to read (and every adult who failed to learn to read as a child) is the lack of phonemic awareness. And by "read" I mean the ability to effortlessly decode and therefore fluently process text. That's the print awareness piece of reading. The meaning-making part of reading depends on vocabulary and prior knowledge and depends on a language-rich environment (both verbal and written).
Bruch's research found that the phonemic awareness of good readers increases as they learn to read. On the contrary, struggling readers who lacked phonemic awareness as children did not acquire that ability as they grew older. In other words, phonemic awareness does not increase as struggling readers increase in age. This, then, IS a root cause of the GE 2/3 plateau. If you can't "get the words off the page", you can't read beyond the GE 1 or 3 level, despite strong meaning-making skills.
Anne Murr, M.S.
Drake University Adult Literacy Center
Des Moines, IA
Feb 27, 2006
I agree with the argument that without some basic mastery of phonemic awareness reading level is invariably stymied at a fairly low level. Whether or the extent to which one gains such mastery and the extent to which one can work in this area in a systematic and rigorous way is another matter; perhaps more profitable for some rather than others.
Mastery of other cueing systems is also important, without which progress in reading fluency can be easily stymied. Perhaps one can say with reasonable certainty that, all else being equal, a high degree of decoding ability is a good indicator of reading fluency, though not necessarily comprehension and meaning making; what some might refer to as literacy.
Stating this is not to belittle the importance of phonemic awareness, but seeking to put this sensibility into context.
George Demetrion
Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford
www.lvgh.org
Hartford, CT
When I talk with my new ABE students, I usually ask them how they define phonics. Usually I get something referenced to 'Hooked on Phonics.' My definition for them is something like: Phonics is a tool we use to help us figure out words we don't know by putting the sounds the letters make to help us figure the word out. The problem is the English Language. In English, you can never be sure what sounds the letters will make for sure. We make sounds all kinds of different ways, especially with vowels. They make all kinds sounds, and sometimes, they don't make any sound at all. So you can never be sure of anything when trying to figure out words you don't know in English. So what's the sense in Phonics? Well there are some rules. They don't work all the time, but you have to have something. Phonics gives you the tools to help you make the best guesses about what sounds should be in a word. Once you know the word, you no longer need to use phonics, because those words have become sight words. This is our last goal in reading; adding more words to our sight word list.
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