Phonics is a method of teaching a child to read by learning the sounds of each letter and sounding them out to form words. The method has been widely adopted in the United States for decades to teach beginning readers. The term phonics has mistakenly become a catch-all term meaning “the study of all letter sounds.”
The simplicity of phonics as a teaching method is also the basis of its greatest problem as a tool to teach the reading of English, as we discuss in a moment.
The word “phonics” is a shortened term for phonetics. Many languages are phonetic in the sense that one letter always represents the same sound. Unfortunately for beginning readers, written English is not consistently phonetic. This makes written English one of the more difficult languages for people to learn to read and spell.
In English the consonant sounds are mostly phonetic. As a result, we can generally use phonics methods to begin to teach students to read the consonant letters. Even so, students will have to learn a few exceptions to the wholesale application of phonics to the pronunciation of consonants.
The situation is substantially different for vowel letters. In English, vowel sounds are not coded phonetically. This is because every vowel letter can represent several vowel sounds. For example, the vowel letter “a” is read differently in the words at and ate. Students (both children and adults) can readily see the visual distinction between at and ate, but are too often at a loss about why we read the letter “a” as a short vowel in at and a long vowel in ate.
Using a learning-to-read technique based entirely on phonics presents beginning readers with unwarranted confusion, stress and frustration when they try to “read” vowel letters phonetically.
There is a new and innovative way 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. It’s called Reading Buddy 2.0+.
Reading Buddy 2.0+ uses an approach substantially different from phonics. When students have mastered reading all the consonants and the six main consonant blends, they are ready for the only thing left for them to learn: 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 clearly tells the student how to read each vowel letter in that word. Because they are the easiest to learn, Reading Buddy 2.0+ begins with the shortest words (one syllable words). After students have mastered the secret spelling codes, which enable them not only to recognize how virtually any one-syllable word is pronounced and spelled, 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 experts as the “VC” code. A word with the VC code contains only one vowel letter and ends with a consonant letter. For example, consider the words at, sat, and 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.
