Dennis Byrne, whom I very rarely agree with, had an excellent column today in the Chicago Tribune on phonics. He discusses a study done by a Yale team that was published in the May issue of the "Journal of Biological Psychiatry." This was a yearlong study that used MRIs to compare good readers to poor readers. Of the 49 poor readers, they used an experimental technique for 37 kids, and for 12 they used their current methods. Surprisingly, the 37 readers far outpaced the 12 readers, and in fact their MRIs showed changes in brain function to be more similar to the good readers.

What did they do? They fashioned a program on how to identify the phenomes (40 in English) that make up spoken words. Apparently the region of the brain that identifies those sounds works with another part of the brain that maps phenomes to the letters that represent them, and with still another region that stores the information. In good readers these 3 regions work well together, but poor readers have trouble accessing this automatic word recognition center of the brain, forcing it to rely on only 2 of the 3 critical areas to read. That means that whenever poor readers see a word, they puzzle over it, as if they were seeing it for the first time.

I have known the effectiveness of phonics for awhile. However, the U.S. school systems often don't embrace phonics; instead many of them use what they call "sight" reading, which means they must learn each word separately, rather than sounding them out.

Perhaps this study will change the teaching of reading here. I will never know why phonics fell out of favor here.

This is certainly not the first study that shows that phonics is the best way to teach reading. Let me find my materials on this at work, and I'll give some more references.

I have never been able to understand the rationale of those who suggest that phonics are a poor way of learning. Of course, once we learn words we recognise them instantly without spelling them out - but because experienced readers do this that doesn't mean that it is the way to learn to read.

We drive instinctively but we need to learn by becoming familiar with with the functions of the various controls and using each one deliberately. When we find ourselves at the wheel of a strange vehicle we take a few moments to familiarise ourselves with the new controls and then, after a few minutes, we drive it instinctively.

And it's the same with words. Providing we know how the component parts of each word are likely to work - their pronunciation, stress, inflction, etc., then any new word we encounter will be, if nothing else, pronounceable. And, from its construction, our knowledge of the mechanics of words will allow us to mave a guess at its meaning.

Let me find my materials on this at work, and I'll give some more references.

CW, I think the point was that this study compared not only reading skills, but also magnetic resonance imaging of brain function.

Richard, I just have no idea why phonics fell out of favor because many of us baby boomers learned to read with phonics. I would love to know what the change was due to.

BTW, does anyone know what the 40 phonemes are?

I can ask my son - he learned to read by learning the phonemes. He got a deck of flashcards and they had certain phonemes they had to know each week. They use the Riggs method to teach the children. It was fabulously successful with my son.

What I can find at work better than home is a sort of history of why phonics went out of style. I don't know all the details, but some of it had to do with the whole language movement. There is some information on the link I just gave, I bet.

John Gatto gives this account of the origin of the whole word method:

quote:

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The first schoolman to seriously challenge what is known today as phonics was Friedrich Gedike, a disciple of Rousseau, director of a well-known gymnasium in Prussia. In 1791 he published the world’s first look/say primer, A Children’s Reader Without the ABC’s and Spelling. The idea was to eliminate drill. Kids would learn through pictures following suggestions the legendary mystic and scholar Comenius set down in his famous Orbis Pictus of 1657.

After a brief splash and three editions, the fashion vanished for an excellent reason: As good as it sounds in theory, it doesn’t work well at all in practice (although here and there exceptions are encountered and infuriatingly enough it can seem to work in the early years of first and second grade). Soon after that the rapidly developing reading power in phonetically trained children makes them capable of recognizing in print their entire speaking and listening vocabulary, while look/say trained readers can read without error only the words they have memorized as whole shapes, a relative handful.

This is devilishly complex terrain. Gedike’s theory held that when enough words are ingested and recognized, the student can figure out for himself the seventy key phonograms of the English language. Indeed this is the only credible explanation which could account for the well-known phenomenon of children who teach themselves to read handily without the use of any system at all. I have no doubt children occasionally learn to read this way.

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The phonemes: in my accent there are about 44 phonemes, 24 consonants and 20 vowels. In some other accents, including American, there are less, because what's a separate vowel in Southern British is formed of a combination of some other vowel + [r] in those.

Consonants: bat, chat, dot, than, jam, fat, got, hat, yacht, cat, lot, mat, not, tang, pat, rat, sat, shot, tot, thought, vat, watt, zap, regime. Some accents have a sound in what distinct from watt.

Vowels: in my own accent the 20 are bid, bead, beard, bed, bay, bear, bad, bout, bud, bard, buy, pot, boy, bore, boat, put, boot, boor, bird, about.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: aput,

The British Council are keen on using Phonics for EFL teaching. I'm not convinced that in EFL teaching the advantages come anywhere near to outweighing the disadvantages.
(Remember I'm teaching adults from another culture who can often speak or read NO ENGLISH at all.)

My objection is that the people I am teaching speak languages with entirely different sets of phonemes which relate in different ways to their written scripts, they already have to learn one completely new set of written symbols which may be written the opposite way across the page to the way their own symbols are arranged (or even down the page instead of up the page !). Many languages lack even the concept of a letter, some write without vowels). The actual ideas of how a written language is organised are not as universal as some people believe.
Teaching these students a second set of symbols to enable phonemic spelling seems to me to be an added burden that they can well do without. I only even consider introducing the concept at the higher levels.

Now if we're talking about demonstrating that the same sound can have numerous English spellings or grouping words by sound patterns rather than by spelling I'm all for it but I'll pass on use of the phonetic alphabet in class.

I learnt to read English by using the system of allocating sounds to letters and vowels - which I thought was phonics. I learnt French by first learning a phonetic alphabet. Learnt Spanish by learning the sounds of the letters and consonents - much as I learnt English.

I don't believe that the use of the phonetic alphabet made much difference but I do believe that the system of learning the characteristics of each letter, or combination of letters, was the best for me.

I was reading quite complex scientific books (my early passion) when I was still at primary school (aged about 9) so the system worked for me.

Learning phonemes is not about learning a phonetic alphabet. It is about learning how the combinations of letters correspond with what you say. Kids (as I saw my son do) learn to sound out whatever they see on the page. If they have a large spoken vocabulary, they can recognize most words they encounter once they figure out how to "decode" the print.

There are some kids who have troubles with this method. For instance, my son has some difficulty pronouncing some sounds (S, L, SH, CH) and those phonemes have presented a problem for him in the past because he will have trouble figuring out which phoneme he needs to use to spell a word. He'll say it in his head, or aloud, and then write what he hears. It's taken some extra practice and good speech therapy to bring him up to snuff in spelling.

The concept of teaching by phonemes is really just finding a way to help kids learn to decode the page. Text is less intimidating because they have learned that, even though words come in large chunks, they can be broken down into smaller sounds. To understand that idea, though, kids need to already have phonemic awareness. Kids need to understand that you can play with the sounds, rhyme, etc.

Phonemic Awareness is one of the 6 skills kids need to already have to be ready to learn to read. As I mentioned in this thread, the others are:
Vocabulary (so kids will recognize the words they're decifering)
Narrative Skills (the ability to tell a story with a beginning, middle, end helps kids make sense of what they're reading)
Print Motivation (they need to want to be with print, enjoy books)
Print Awareness (they need to notice the print all around them on signs, etc, and understand how a book works, opening left to right and so forth)
Letter Knowledge (this is the precurser to learning phonemes - knowing the names and basic sounds of the letters)

This is what most scientists who study how people learn are saying: hereis one. I will probably be seeing this new research with the brain imaging showing up in my journals soon. I've already read and heard the leaders in this talking about the brain imaging. PET scans can show which areas of the brain are active when you're doing different things.

I've seen, for instance, PET scans from one study that show 1. a person hearing a lecture, 2. a person reading a paragraph on a topic that doesn't interest them, 3. a person talking about that topic that doesn't interest them, 4. a person talking about a topic that does interest them. It's fascinating to see those scans! Here is an article that talks about it.

Go to this document and scroll down until you see the PET scans. In this study, you can see which areas of the brain are active while doing specific activities. Being able to use those various parts of the brain effectively together is what makes it possible for us to read. Being able to then speak about what we have read involves even more of the brain.

This looks like what you might have been talking about, Kalleh, or similar.

I don't disagree with any of that.

However remember that those aren't the circumstances in which I'm teaching. I maintain that teaching adults who are already literate in another language with a (sometimes very) different system of writing and sound-symbol correspondence is completely different. Remember in my job I never get to teach anyone who is a native speaker of English and I rarely get to teach anyone who isn't already literate in another language.

The British Council is very keen not just on the concept of phonemes but on using the phonetic alphabet to teach it, on putting up phonetic alphabet charts in all classrooms for example.
When I was learning to teach EFL sample materials that we used included word search puzzles in the phonetic alphabet - to my mind a pointless and confusing exercise.

And Richard, those languages both use an alphabet that is almost identical to English (give or take an accent or two. How do you feel you would have done if, for example, you decided to learn Farsi but in addition to learning their alphabet (and the right to left way of writing) your teacher had introduced another completely new and separate phonetic alphabet to be learned alongside the actual written one?

I'm not supporting the phonetic alphabet concept, just saying that it was the way I learnt French and not the way I learnt Spanish.

Having said which, one of the things I find very easy is pronunciation (as I am a natural mimic). So, once I had heard the word "formidable" pronounced the French or Spanish way I soon could say it without an English accent and didn't really need the help of a phonetic alphabet - providing I had teacher who spoke the language.