No Phonics? Know Phonics!

Like many of my classmates, I was raised on phonics. In fact, if anyone had asked me what my favorite part of school was, more than likely I would have said phonics. Every day we would pull out our phonics workbooks and do a page or two, and if we did it right, we got to color in the pictures on the page. (Hey, I was 5!) So why did I love it so much? Because it was, for me, a painless way to put together words and their meanings. I related a story in my literacy narrative where I was reading some comic books out loud with some friends and I mispronounced the word stomach because I was only looking at the letters…. I hadn’t learned to decode the word yet. Once my friends stopped laughing at me, they said the word for me and I realized that I already it, I just hadn’t seen it in print before. This is what phonics is all about…combining a child’s spoken vocabulary with their printed vocabulary.
That lesson was monumental because it taught me that there are words that I was already using but when I saw them in writing, I didn’t recognize them. This is a problem shared by all struggling readers; they can read the words, but they can’t put the meaning with the word they are reading. How many times does a child read a passage only to have a teacher ask “so what does that mean?” The child won’t have a clue because they were merely reading the words. Phonics gives the student the tools to be able to answer this question. By learning the way words look on a page AND its meaning, the student can begin to understand what the whole sentence is about.
So after all that, you have a good idea as to how much of an advocate of phonics I am! However, I do thing that there are benefits to the whole language approach as well. As new teachers I think one of the most important lessons we can learn is that all students are individuals and as such will each learn differently. For some students, phonics will work for them as it did for me, while others will be better able to grasp the concept through whole language. The point is, just because we “discover” a new approach doesn’t mean we need to discard the previous one. I was actually relieved that Williams supports a blending of the two.