There is an Indonesian proverb that goes 'Hendak pergi berotan jangan takut onaknya' which translates more or less to mean  if you want rattan, don't be afraid of thorns. Teachers around the archipelago use it to mean things like 'if you want good grades, don't be afraid of the homework' and 'if you want language accuracy, don't be afraid of the verb declensions'. Good one, right? 

In google translate, there is a little speaker icon that lets you hear what a word or phrase sounds like. 

Now, on the assumption that you don't speak Indonesian, you can use this function to compare how you say this proverb with Aunty Google's perfect Indonesian rendering. Try it out (Apart from your obvious foreign accent, my guess is that you got it pretty much right.  

How was it possible for you to do that? Two reasons – one is that Indonesian has a shallow orthography, which means that what you see on the page is pretty much what you say. Second, you are really good at decoding letter into sounds. You identified, for instance, that berotan has 7 sounds, what each of these might be, and how they can be smooshed together into a single word. You did it lightning quick and without too much thought. The ability to read written language in this way is the focus of phonics. You read  berotan with little effort, but for children (or beginner readers), it's no easy feat to decode text. 

Because phonics has been shown to speed up children's literacy, it is rather common to see it in a young-learners' classroom. Some schools have full-time phonics teachers, almost all kindergarten and early primary course books have a focus on phonics in each unit, and even if you aren't a YL teacher, you've probably had to do something with phonics somewhere. 

Despite its importance, however, phonics instruction is not often covered thoroughly in TEFL courses, and schools have differing ideas of what exactly a phonics program involves. In discussions with teachers, head teachers, and school directors, Sunee (who you have met in previous blogs) and I have come across some ideas about what phonics is and how to teach it that I'm going to call 'myths' in this blog. What follows is what I consider to be the most common of these myths, in no particular order.

1. Phonics focuses on pronunciation 

When asked to talk about what they do, phonics teachers sometimes say their program helps students with pronunciation. This misconception could be a result of confusion over the terms phonics andphonetics? Phonetics uses a specialised script to represent the spoken language: /ɪt lʊks laɪk ðɪs ænd ɪts ə gʊd weɪ tə help ˈlɜːrnərz/. So when a learner (or anyone, actually) comes across a new word they don't know how to pronounce, let's say a word like archipelago, a phonetic transcription helps them to get the pronunciation right: /ɑːkɪˈpelɪgəʊ/. There you go!

Phonics, on the other hand, is about learning to read: it aims to help readers decode written language. Now inasmuch as reading leads to some sort of sounding out of the words, there is pronunciation involved, but the goal of reading is to decode and understand, not necessarily to sound out. So in a phonics program we want students to be able to identify that a certain set of letters put together represents a particular word: for instance, the letters d, o, and g written together represent that animal (which, yes, is sounded out in a particular way too). 

2. Phonics is about getting students to sound out letters

Okay I concede that this is not a myth – phonics is about getting students to sound out letters. The mistaken belief some teachers have is that phonics is only about sounding out letters. In fact, there is much more to phonics than sounding out. This preoccupation with sounding out letters is possibly another reason why some teachers think phonics is about pronunciation (and so back to point 1 above).

In a phonics program, children learn the sound that is represented by a specific letter. This is called letter-sound correspondence, and it's important. The mistaken importance of letter-sound correspondence is probably reinforced by the myriad of videos available everywhere that focus exclusively on it (like this one). However, learning that 'b says buh' and 's says ssssss' is only the beginning of learning how to read. 

To get a sense of why letter-sound correspondence on its own is inadequate, try this out for yourself. In Khmer, the symbol ចcorresponds to our English 'j'. The letter រis our 'r', but if it's the second letter of a word, like after a ច, then it looks long and backwards, like this ច្រ. The symbol ឡis our letter 'l'. A little circle over a letter adds an 'om' sound to it. Now you know the letter-sounds associated with these 4 symbols in Khmer, you might be able to piece together the word ច្រឡំ. Can you do it? You probably can, but it's not easy. Simply knowing the sound attached to each symbol isn't all you need for the process of putting together a complete word.

So the letter-sounds are a start, but only then can the real work begin. There are two other skills a beginning reader needs: blending and segmenting.

Segmenting is the skill in identifying the sounds within a word. Since you can already segment successfully, you'll know that my name (Steve) has 4 sounds – the 's', a 'tuh', a long 'e' and the 'v'. You'll also be able to tell that the 's' at the beginning of my name is the same as the sound at the end of the word kiss and in the middle of ask. Helping young learners identify the presence, absence and position of sounds in words is something that helps with sounding out new or long words. It's also phenomenally useful for helping learners with spelling.

Blending is the skill of putting together a string of sounds to make a word. So learning that d+o+g makes dog is a big step for beginner readers. It's not really intuitive that 'duh', 'o' and 'guh' smoosh together to make a word, especially if you aren't sensitive to the fact that 'dog' has three separate sounds in it (and hence why segmenting is an important skill).

So, learning letter sounds like 'duh' and 'sss' is important, but it's only the first step in the road to proficient reading. The skilled phonics teacher embarks on fun segmenting and blending activities that force young readers to split up and join letter sequences as part of the process of becoming a successful reader.

3. Phonics is alphabet sounds.

The idea that phonics is the alphabet is perpetuated in many course books: page 13 is M, page 14, N etc. To be fair, the alphabet is a big part of phonics since it's the basis of reading. But the alphabet is a poor platform for teaching the letter sounds. Firstly, the alphabet doesn't actually cover the complete set of letters we have in English. Just considering the consonants, the alphabet has no dedicated symbols for the sounds 'th', 'sh', 'ch', or 'ng'. So if we only teach the alphabet, we miss these sounds which are so important in words like thing and shush. Things get more complicated with our measly 5 vowel symbols, which are somehow required to represent 20 vowel sounds.

Secondly, our alphabet isn't organized well. If you learn the first 5 letters of the alphabet, there are only a few words available for you to read: bed,bad,dad,cab,dab,cad. Any more? Jolly Phonics has a different approach – they sequence the letters according to their frequency. So 's' is the most common sound in English. In their system, then, the first 5 letters (s, a, t, i, and p) give you plenty of words to read: it,is,as,at,sit,sat,pip,pit,pat,tap,tip,sip,spit,spat,taps, and so on. You can see that this approach allows the teacher to start blending and segmenting activities right from the beginning of the program. This allows letter-sound correspondence, blending and segmenting to be taught concurrently, creating a useful synergy that gets children reading almost immediately. Following the alphabet just doesn't have the same oughmph.

4. Phonics requires specialised and expensive material

Many teachers believe that in order to teach phonics, you need a lovely classroom and a massive budget. Indeed, there is a lot of specialised and expensive material out there for teaching phonics, but you don't have to have it to have a successful phonics classroom. Once you know your overall goals are letter-sound correspondence, blending, and segmenting, you can create a lot of fun activities from stuff you have lying around. For example, look at DadLab's idea for blending using flipbooks. You can get more ideas on how to make your own cool phonics material from trash (or rather, recyclables) from this really cool article by Sunee and her friends.

5. Phonics is a complete reading program

Some teachers are really sold on phonics, and believe it's everything that a beginning reader needs. To support this view, there is a lot of research to show that phonics speeds up children's ability to access written words.

Unfortunately, it's not true: phonics isn't everything a beginner reader needs. Phonics really helps, but knowing the rules of phonics isn't enough to deal with the eccentricities of the English orthographic system. Words like it, sit, spit, and split fit very well with a letter-sound decoding system, but vicissitudes, aunty, and sew don't. In case you haven't seen it, watch this hilarious Thai classroom spoof to see how using a phonics approach to teaching orthographically opaque words can go delightfully wrong. 

If you consider that common words like we, have, and do don't follow phonics rules, it is easy to see why it is not possible to read very much in English if we rely solely on a phonics approach. As a result, a phonics teacher needs to include a sight-work component so that the learners can identify words that don't fit the system. Back to Jolly Phonics: their first few sight-words are the rather important words I, the, he and she.

So, there they are – my favorite myths about phonics. If you hold one of these myths and my commentary didn't dispel your belief, feel free to add a counterargument. You can probably tell I'm I'm a fan of Jolly Phonics: have a look at this to find out why their system works, and read their published research. If all of the ideas about blending and segmenting are new to you, more on that and how to teach them can be found in Sunee's article in the HLT magazine.

Did I mention that Sunee has an awesome article on phonics?

Steve has been a teacher and teacher trainer for over 30 years, and is currently a lecturer on the Master’s in TESOL program at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Bangkok.