PASAA

Volume 48
July - December 2014

Theoretical Review of Phonics Instruction for

Struggling/Beginning Readers of English

Pragasit Sitthitikul
Thammasat University

Abstract
Learning to read is a complex task for
beginners of English. They must coordinate many
cognitive processes to read accurately and fluently,
including recognizing words, constructing the
meanings of sentences and text, and retaining the
information read in memory. An essential part of the
process for beginners involves learning the alphabetic
system, including, letter-sound correspondences and
spelling patterns, and learning how to apply this
knowledge in their reading (National Reading Panel,
2000). Systematic phonics instruction is a way of
teaching reading that stresses the acquisition of
letter-sound correspondences and their use to read
and spell words (Harris & Hodges, 1995). Although
phonics instruction is primarily designed for L1
beginners in the primary grades and for children
having difficulty learning to read, it can be applied to
L2 learners to make use of sound-symbol,
vocabulary, and meaning to decode and comprehend
texts (Bernhardt, 2000). This paper reviews critical
notions in regard to phonics instruction in order to
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provide sufficient background information for those

new in this topic. Some useful pedagogical instructions
are also presented, which could be applied to L2
learners.

Keywords: phonics instruction, struggling/beginning

readers, phonemic awareness, phonological awareness

Theoretical Basis
The recent years’ acrimonious debate about beginning
reading instruction, especially at the first-grade level, is consistent
with a half century of dispute about what works best in developing
young readers (Adams, 1990; Chall, 1967). Much of the current
first grade debate has been between those who favor explicit
instruction of beginning reading skills, especially the teaching of
phonics, and those who favor an approach playing down
systematic instruction in favor of immersion in literacy tasks, the
whole language philosophy. Those who favor a skills instruction
emphasis can point out to demonstrations in true experiments
that intense teaching of decoding skills to children experiencing
difficulties with word recognition increases their performance on
standardized measures of word recognition or reading. In
education, particularly, in the teaching of reading over the years,
the choice of instruction methods has been heavily influenced by
many factors, not only teachers’ own frontline experiences about
what works, but also politics, economics, and the popular wisdom
of the day (National Reading Panel, 2000). Meanwhile, substantial
scientific evidence has accumulated purporting to shed light on
reading acquisition processes and effective instructional
approaches (Adams, 1990; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).
Today, phonics instruction receives much attention when
educators discuss the ingredients of effective programs to teach
children to read. Research of more than two decades has affirmed
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the importance of phonological awareness and its relation to

reading acquisition. Reviews of the literature (Hurford, Darrow,
Edwards, Howerton, Mote, Schauf, & Coffey, 1993) indicated that
the presence of phonological awareness is a hallmark characteristic
of good readers while its absence is a consistent characteristic of
poor readers. In short, difficulties with awareness, coding, and
retrieval of verbal sounds have powerful and long-reaching effects
in reading. However, the most encouraging lines of research give
strong evidence that significant gains in phonological awareness
can be achieved with teaching and that the gains in phonological
awareness directly affect the ease of reading acquisition and
subsequent reading achievement (Smith, Simmons, & Kameenui,
1998).
It is thus important and interesting to review phonics
instruction so that reading teachers will learn more out of it and
determine whether this instruction lives up to these claims. From
this article, readers will identify circumstances that govern its
effectiveness to base the information as a stepping stone to extend
it for possible future research projects. Moreover, there are
additional reasons why phonics instruction is selected for review
in this project. Many studies investigating the effectiveness of
phonemic awareness instruction have contributed to this body of
evidence. Proponents believe that this research holds promise of
placing reading instruction on a more solid footing and ending the
periodic upheavals and overhauls of reading instructional
practices (National Reading Panel, 2000). According to the report
of the National Reading Panel (2000), correlational studies have
identified phonemic awareness and letter knowledge as the two
best school-entry predictors of how well children will learn to read
during their first 2 years in school. This evidence suggests the
potential instructional importance of teaching phonemic awareness
to children. In addition, many experimental studies have
evaluated the effectiveness of phonemic awareness instruction in
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facilitating reading acquisition. Results are claimed to be positive

and to provide a scientific basis documenting the efficacy of
phonemic instruction (National Reading Panel, 2000). Although
these studies are basically related to reading in L1, prior research
shows that when L1 and L2 learners learn a second language,
they use similar strategies when they read (Gass, & Selinker,
2001). To illustrate, they appear to make use of sound-symbol,
vocabulary, meaning, language structure and background and
textual knowledge to decode and comprehend texts (Bernhardt,
2000).
The above information describes the broad concept of the
evolution of phonics instruction. However, more details of the
theoretical basis of the technique will also be discussed throughout
this report.

Definitions of Important Terms

Phonics
Phonics has been called one among many cues used in
reading (e.g., Dahl, Sharer, Lawson, & Grogran, 1999). It refers to
instructional practices that emphasize how spellings are related to
speech sounds in systematic ways (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).
By this definition, phonics instruction is found in many different
types of reading programs (Routman, 1998). Stahl (2001) defines
phonics instruction as any approach in which the teacher
does/says something to help children learn how to decode words.
This may involve teaching sound-symbol correspondences directly,
having children manipulate sounds in written words through
spelling tasks, pointing out patterns in similarly spelled words, or
anything else which helps children learn about orthographic
patterns in written language. Common forms of phonics
instruction in the 1960s included synthetic phonics instruction,
analytic instruction, and “linguistic” readers (Aukerman, 1981).
By the 1990s, there were new approaches to phonics instruction,
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based on constructivist principles. These approaches—spelling-

based approaches such as Making Words (Cunningham &
Cunningham , 1998) or Word Study (Bear, Templeton, Invernizzi,
& Johnston, 1996), embedded phonics approaches (Hiebert, Colt,
Catto, & Gary, 1992), and compare/contrast or analogy-based
approaches—all involved children in active construction of
knowledge about orthographic patterns.

Phonemes/ Phonemic Awareness

According to the National Reading Panel (2000), phonemes

are the smallest units constituting spoken language. English
consists of about 41 phonemes. Phonemes combine to form
syllables and words. A few words have only one phoneme, such as
a or oh. Most words consist of a blend of phonemes, such as go
with two phonemes, or check with three phonemes, or stop with
four phonemes. Phonemes are different from graphemes, which
are units of written language and which represent phonemes in
the spellings of words. Graphemes may consist of one letter, for
example, P, T, K, A, N, or multiple letters, CH, SH, -CK, EA, -IGH,
each symbolizing one phoneme.
Snow, Burns, and Griffin (1998) define phonemes as the
speech phonological units that make a difference to meaning.
Thus, the spoken word rope is comprised of three phonemes: /r/,
/o/, and /p/. It differs by only one phoneme from each of the
spoken words, soap, rode, and rip.
Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and
manipulate phonemes in spoken words. Phonemic awareness is
the insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence
of phonemes. Because phonemes are the units of sound that are
represented by the letters of an alphabet, an awareness of
phonemes is key to understanding the logic of the alphabetic
principle and thus to the learnability of phonics and spelling
(Snow, Burns, & Griffin,1998).
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Phonology/ Phonological Awareness

Snow, Burns, and Griffin (1998) define the terms phonology

and phonological awareness as follows:
The term phonology or phonological refers to the sound
structure of speech and, in particular, to the perception,
representation, and production of speech sounds. As such, the
phonological aspects of language include its prosodic dimensions—
intonation, stress, and timing—as well as its articulatory units,
including words, syllables, and phonemes. Phonological awareness
is the ability to attend explicitly to the phonological structure of
spoken words, rather than just to their meanings and syntactic
roles. This metalinguistic skill involves treating language as the
object of thought, rather than merely using language for
communication. Phonological awareness is a more inclusive term
than phonemic awareness and refers to the general ability to
attend to the sounds of language as distinct from its meaning.

Phonics Instruction with Special Needs Students

There have been a lot of studies on phonics instruction
since 1967. However, not much research was conducted with
students with special needs. The data presented in this article
cover only the major findings of the research over 50 years to
show how little change there has been in research in this area
(Stahl, 2001). The following inquiries will illustrate how little has
been changed in research in this area. For instance, the
experimental study conducted by Foorman, Fletcher, Francis,
Schatschneider, and Mehta (1998), contrasted the effects of four
different beginning reading programs with first and second-grade
struggling readers eligible for Title 1 services. The first treatment,
direct code, involved direct synthetic phonics instruction
combined with practice in decodable texts. Instruction involved
direct teaching of letter sounds, blending instruction, and practice
using small storybooks containing a high percentage of decodable
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words. The second treatment, embedded code, was based on

Hiebert, Colt, Catto, and Gary’s (1992) program involving teaching
of a set of phonograms matched to practice in predictable trade
books. They found that the direct code approach was clearly
superior to the other approaches in measures of phonological
awareness and decoding.
The Foorman, Fletcher, Francis, Schatschneider, and
Mehta (1998) study was not the only large-scale study during this
period supporting the importance of early and systematic phonics
instruction. Studies in the United States (Vellutino & Scanlon,
1988; Vellutino, Scanlon, Sipay, & Small, 1996), in Great Britain
(Johnston & Watson, 1997), and in Ontario (Sumbler & Willows,
1998) have all examined the effects of synthetic phonics
instruction with large numbers of children. The National Reading
Panel (2000) reviewed a large corpus of studies using meta-
analytic techniques. Studies were selected by a carefully
conscribed set of criteria, limiting review to research that was
quantitative and published in peer-reviewed journals. They found
the following:
 Phonics instruction produced significant effects on
measures of achievement. These effects were most
pronounced on measures of decoding and reading non-
sense words, and less so on measures of oral reading
and reading comprehension. However, significant effects
were found on measures of comprehension as well as
isolated word reading.
 Phonics instruction was more effective in kindergarten
and first grade than in the upper grades.
 Phonics instruction was effective for struggling readers
in the early grades, but did not produce significant
effects for older children with reading problems.
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 There were no significant differences between different

approaches to teaching phonics—synthetic, phonogram-
based, or eclectic.

Stahl (2001) suggests that the links between the child’s

development of spoken language and the child’s subsequent
development of literacy are becoming increasingly well understood.
In particular, the child’s phonological development—the progression
in representing in the brain the speech units that make up
different words—is now recognized to play a causal role in the
acquisition of literacy. Stahl further concludes that the child’s
awareness of the phonology of his or her language is one of the
most important predictors of that child’s progress in learning to
read and to spell.
For students with learning disabilities, phonics instruction
procedures are intended to make learning to read easier by
breaking complex tasks into their component skills, teaching
these components, and demonstrating to students how these are
combined. This simplification of complex tasks is particularly
important for instructionally naïve students, but can also
accelerate the learning of instructionally sophisticated students if
used appropriately. It also advocates look to improvements in
teaching methodology. There are three critical components of
phonics instruction—organization of instruction, program design,
and teacher preparation techniques.

Phonics Instruction: Strengths and Limitations

What is the best way to teach children to read? This
debating question has been a critical issue because there is clearly
a need for drastic improvement in the way schools do this
essential job. Phonics approach is a recommended instruction
that I believe can help children to learn to read effectively. There
are many reasons to support why phonics instruction is essential.
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In 1950’s, in Rudolf Flesch’s best-selling book Why Johnny Can’t

Read, Flesch concluded that reading programs that include
systematic, intensive phonics instruction work better than those
that do not. Let’s examine what Flesch wrote in a letter to his
daughter in 1955, after teaching his grandson to read:

“Since I started to work with Johnny, I have looked into

this whole reading business. I worked my way through a
mountain of books and articles on the subject, I talked to
dozens of people, and I spent many hours in classrooms,
watching what was going on. What I found is absolutely
fantastic. The teaching of reading – all over the United
States, in all the schools, in all the textbooks, -- is totally
wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.
Johnny couldn’t read until half a year ago for the simple
reason that nobody ever showed him how.”

One major argument claimed by Flesch is that when

children learn the mechanics of reading, and when they are
through, they can read, look, and say words differently. If they are
taught to read before they have learned the mechanics—the
sounds of the letters, it is like learning to drive by starting your
car and driving ahead. What Flesch meant above is that we should
teach children to read by first learning the alphabet, then the
sounds of each letter, how they blend into syllables, and how
those syllables make up words. By this method, they are taught
that English spelling is logical and systematic, and that to become
a fluent reader it is necessary to master the alphabetic code in
which English words are written, to the point where the code is
used automatically with little conscious thought given to it. Once
a child learns the mechanics of the codes, attention can be turned
to more advanced content. It seldom occurs to teachers to give
children word lists to read, or to make beginning readers
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memorize whole words before learning the components of those

words.
The phonics approach tends to build up the solid
foundation of the sound system in English for beginning learners
to internalize. By this method, children will develop their own
literacy abilities by applying it to construct meaningful literacy
knowledge by their own. This approach subsequently supports
children to learn a language systematically from the smallest part
to the whole. In other words, phonics approach believes that
children will be able to read effectively if they can master the
mechanical skills of the sound system of the English language,
and use that knowledge to construct meaning from the print.
However, phonics instruction is limited in that it does not
support children to expose to interesting reading and writing at
the expense of systematically teaching specific reading and writing
skills. In other words, it does not encourage young children to
recite along with the teachers as the teachers read aloud from
entertaining big-print books. Students may lack motivation and
attention to read and write so teachers must be aware of this
weakness and try to make the instruction more stimulating. By
nature, children need both direct skills instruction and exposure
to interesting reading. Although understanding letter-sound
correspondence is indispensable to skilled reading, effective
instruction should also offer a supportive and tolerant atmosphere
to learn to read. In addition, some people might argue that
sounding out words is too cumbersome for human mind to
process every letter of every word; as a consequence, phonics
alone is not sufficient to promote strong reading skills. This is
because in reality, learning to read and write takes place within a
social and political context (Gass & Selinker, 2001). To clarify, in
addition to the cognitive and linguistic factors, there are social,
cultural, identity, and political concerns that affect the language
literacy development (Hakuta, 1990). When considering how to
 PASAA Vol. 48 (July - December 2014) | 123

deal with classroom issues of ethnicity, culture, gender, and other

differences among students, “teachers must create an
environment that ensures that all learners see people from their
identity group reflected positively in the instructional materials,
pictures, books, and videos used in the classroom and throughout
the school” (Vogt & Shearer, 2003, p. 118). These factors have
powerful effects on self-esteem and motivation that affect the
literacy development (Vogt & Shearer, 2003).

The Author
Pragasit Sitthitikul is Assistant Professor from the
Language Institute, Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand.
He earned a doctorate in Language and Literacy Studies, with a
concentration in second-language reading processes, at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His areas of
interest include Second Language Literacy, and Cognitive and
Sociocultural Factors in Second Language Learning. He can be
reached at [email protected].

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