The five "phones" of reading--phonics, phonetic spelling, phoneme awareness, phonological awareness, and phonology--all share the same "phon" root, so they are easy to confuse, but they are definitely different, and each very important to reading education. Phonics is an instructional approach that emphasizes the letter-sound…

It's been heard, again and again, that phonics is the basis for learning to read. The philosophical pendulum swings from one point of view to another. One school of thought attests that readers must learn phonics in order to learn to read; another insists that whole words need to be learned first. This author contends that neither is correct--nor…

Noting that the word "phonics" has become so politically charged that it is probably the most widely misunderstood and misrepresented aspect of language education today, this book takes a fresh look at the debate about the use of phonics in reading instruction. After defining phonics, the book addresses the science, teaching, and…

This paper argues that the ability to rapidly compare phonemes is a primary sensory-cognitive function underlying self-correction in word recognition and spelling and thus, indirectly, reading comprehension. Such phonological defects can be addressed both preventively and remedially using procedures that are fundamentally different from typical…

The educational and linguistic rationales for designing an adult English-as-a-Second-Language literacy program based on phonics are discussed, with specific reference to an Ibibio adult literacy program in Nigeria. An introductory section gives an overview of Nigerian policy and practice concerning literacy education. Next, the phonics approach to…