Phonics First - Or Bust

I wrote the following article with the help of Case Vanderwolf, Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario.

When I was a reading tutor, I succeeded in teaching all of my students to read, but not all of my students learned to read as well as I would have liked. As a broad generalization, the younger kids were when I started teaching them phonics, the more fluent readers they became.

The youngest student I ever taught to read was my daughter, who was four at the time. She rapidly became a voracious reader. I have taught no kindergarten students and only one grade 1 student. That grade 1 student soon could read as easily as he could breathe. As far as I know however, none of my grade 4-and-up students has ever gone on to read for pleasure. 

When it came to my grade 2 and 3 students, the ones who did best were the ones who had come to me with almost no skills. Although these kids had been exposed to reading instruction at school, very little had penetrated. As a result, I was able to more or less introduce these students to reading, starting at the very beginning, and usually they went on to become pretty good readers. In other words, the more instruction my students had received at school, the worse their chances of becoming comfortable with print. I found this frustrating, and I wondered what was going on.

Then I came across the research of Geraldine E. Rodgers, a former primary teacher. Ms Rodgers claims that the way children are introduced to reading has a permanent influence on their later fluency. There are two basic approaches to teaching reading: whole-word, whereby the students are taught to look at words as a whole; and sound-based, whereby students are taught to process words letter-by-letter on the basis of the sounds the letters represent.

I used a purely-sound-based approach, but most public school teachers use an approach called “Balanced Literacy”, a whole-word method. Balanced Literacy, like most whole-word methods, incorporates some elements of a sound-based approach (phonics), but never enough to qualify as a sound-based approach. According to Ms. Rodgers, children who are started off with a whole-word method tend to do worse than children who are started off with a sound-based approach (phonics).

At this point, I must caution that this principle does not appear to apply to about 25%-40% of children – since some children manage to figure out the alphabetic principle more or less on their own. These children go on to become very good readers and are in a category of their own.

Geraldine Rodgers believes that the way children are introduced to reading establishes irreversible brain patterns. Sound-based readers develop the ability to process words automatically and instantly, in about one-sixth of a second. Whole-word readers, on the other hand, are forever destined to read words as a whole, like a series of pictures, and this creates a drag on their reading fluency. It’s like a hard-of-hearing person who has to strain to understand what people are saying.

The evidence is overwhelming that training of various kinds produces real anatomical changes in the brain. Since this has been demonstrated with many different kinds of experiences, it is probably true of any training. This means that we can be fairly confident that teaching children to read will produce changes in their brains. Training involves changes to the detailed structure of the pyramidal cells of the neo-cortex. These calls are large neurons that have a bush-like structure growing up out of them. The branches of the bush are called dendrites, and training elongates these dendrites, produces more branches, and results in changes to their synaptic contacts with other cells. Changes like these last a long time and are very hard, if not impossible, to eradicate. Early training really counts.

When children are introduced to reading via a method that looks at words as wholes or pictures, they are unlikely ever to become totally comfortable with print. Although it is possible to superimpose sound-processing (phonics) later on, most readers who were started via a whole-word system can never lay down new neural patterns that will completely over-ride the old whole-word patterns. It’s like a child who develops rickets as a toddler because he didn’t get enough calcium. No matter how much calcium he absorbs later on, permanent damage has been done to his bones and he will never be able to run as fast as he should.

If you are responsible for introducing a young child to reading, please make sure that the student is introduced to reading via a sound-based (systematic phonics) method. It is true that some children will do fine no matter how they are introduced to reading, but the odds are not in their favour.