Learn Phonics with Free Lessons & Tips

Some people worry that children are being taught phonics to the exclusion of other elements of reading.

“Phonics is essential but not sufficient”, she says. “It must be taught early and well, but always alongside vocabulary and comprehension” – and, she points out, it is.

So I would say the letters.

The letter names are a convenient way to reference a particular spelling, but the sounds they represent are essential to learn, so concentrate on sounds (phonics) first, moving quickly to the sounds of the many digraphs common in English spelling, like "sh," "ch," "ow," "ck," "oa," etc.

Yes, phonics works for native English speakers to learn to read and write English. Phonics is the process of matching the sounds of spoken English to letters or groups of letters. For example, the sound "k" can be spelled as "c", "k", "ck", or "ch". Teaching children to blend letter sounds together helps them decode unfamiliar words by sounding them out.

Yes, the phonics method of learning to read is used for other languages besides English, including Russian, Arabic, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish. Phonics is an effective approach for teaching beginning reading in alphabetic languages where the letter-to-sound correspondence is consistent and predictable. Research shows that phonics instruction is beneficial for second-language learners, but the benefits are less than for first-language learners. This is likely because phonics helps readers translate from print to Verbal language, which can be challenging for non-native speakers.

In teaching phonics explicitly and systematically, several different instructional approaches have been used.

These include synthetic phonics, analytic phonics, embedded phonics, analogy phonics, onset-rime phonics, and phonics through spelling.