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Phonics

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Phonics is a necessary method of teaching reading by breaking words up into letters or syllables in order to help children or adults read more easily. If reading is only taught using a whole language method and phonics is not utilized in addition to this, the person learning to read is left without any source to figure out an unfamiliar word or words when the contextual clues (included in the text or paragraphs surrounding the word(s) which give clues to the meaning)are not sufficient. The whole language approach to teaching reading (or decoding and encoding) does not equip anyone with the knowledge of the sounds of different letters, syllables, digraphs, etc. This, in turn, leaves the potential reader lost as far as being able to break up a word in order to understand the individual sounds and put them together to make sense and form a familiar word or words. Phonics, rather than being a hindrance to learning reading, is a method which facilitates learning to read and ensures that the learner has something to fall back on when he or she does not understand words as a whole and cannot use the contextual clues to help.

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