Reading Buddy 2.0+ is not a program based on phonics. Its fundamental premises and its application are significantly different.
The term phonics has mistakenly become a catch-all term meaning “the study of all letter sounds.” Phonics is also a method of teaching a child to read by learning the sounds of each letter and sounding them out to form words. The underlying simplicity of phonics as a teaching method is also the basis of its great shortcoming as a tool to teach beginning readers, as we will see shortly.
The word “phonics” is a shorthand term for phonetics. Many languages are phonetic in the sense that one letter always represents the same sound. But written English is not consistently phonetic. This makes written English one of the more difficult languages for people to master.
In written English the consonant sounds are “almost phonetic.” So for that reason, we can safely use “phonics” to begin to teach students to “read consonant letters.” Even then, along the way students will have to learn a few quirky exceptions to the universal application of phonics to consonant pronunciation.
The story is very different for vowel sounds. Vowel sounds are not coded phonetically. That is, each vowel letter can represent the many vowel sounds. The vowel letter “a” is read differently in each one of these words: at, ate eat, ball, ha, ago, etc. Children readily see the visual distinction between at and ate, for example, but are too often stumped by why the letter “a” is read as a short vowel in the first word and a long vowel in the second. Adult readers, proficient in another language, experience similar difficulties when they study English as a second language.
Phonics limitations
It comes as no surprise that using a learning-to-read technique based wholly on phonics (that is, teaching that the sound associated with every letter never changes) dooms beginning readers to unwarranted confusion, stress and frustration when they try to “read” vowel letters phonetically.
There is a better way, one that systematically helps beginning readers to know when each of the different sounds associated with a specific vowel is applicable and when it is not. This is where Reading Buddy 2.0+ shines.
An Alternative Approach
Reading Buddy 2.0+ uses an approach different from phonics. After students have thoroughly learned to read all the consonants and the six main consonant blends, they are ready for the only thing left for them to learn, namely: how to read the vowel letters, a, e, i, o, and u. The secret to reading a vowel letter correctly is in the way the word is spelled…or what Reading Buddy 2.0+ refers to as its secret spelling code. Every word has a secret spelling code that tells the student how to read the vowel letter (or letters) in that word. Reading Buddy 2.0+ begins with the shortest words (one syllable words) because they are the easiest to learn. After students have mastered the secret spelling codes, which enable them not only to effortlessly recognize how virtually any one-syllable word is pronounced, but also able to spell it and to demonstrate comprehension of its meaning, they are almost ready to leap forward to multi-syllable words.
The most common spelling code is what has been arbitrarily termed by many reading professionals as the “VC” code. A word with the VC code contains only one vowel letter and ends with a consonant letter (at, sat, scratch).
The rule for a word that has the VC spelling code is to read the vowel with a short vowel sound. Once students have mastered this rule, they can then confidently apply the rule to any word with the VC code, “sounding-out” all the consonants and vowels in order to “read” the word correctly. Applying the simple rule makes it completely unnecessary for students to guess or to memorize how to pronounce the letters. Isn’t that a remarkable accomplishment?
