CREATING LITERACY INSTRUCTION FOR ALL …

CREATING LITERACY INSTRUCTION FOR ALL CHILDREN, 4/E

? 2003

Thomas G. Gunning 0-205-35539-0 Bookstore ISBN

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4

Teaching Phonics, High-Frequency Words, and Syllabic

Analysis

140

ANTICIPATION GUIDE

For each of the following statements, put a check under "Agree" or "Disagree"

to show how you feel. Discuss your responses with classmates before you read

the chapter.

1 Before they start to read, students should be taught most of the consonant letters and their sounds.

2 Phonics rules have so many exceptions that they are not worth teaching.

3 Phonics is hard to learn because English is so irregular.

4 The natural way to decode a word is sound by sound or letter by letter.

5 Memorizing is an inefficient way to learn new words.

6 Syllabication is not a very useful skill because you have to know how to decode a word before you can put it into syllables.

Agree Disagree

USING WHAT YOU KNOW

The writing system for the English language is alphabetic. Because a series of

twenty-six letters has been created to represent the speech sounds of the language, our thoughts and ideas can be written down. To become literate, we must learn the relationship between letters and speech sounds. Chapter 3 presented techniques for teaching the nature and purpose of writing and reading, concepts of print, the alphabet, awareness of speech sounds, and a technique for presenting initial consonants. These techniques form a foundation for learning phonics, which is the relationship between spelling and speech sounds as applied to reading. This chapter covers high-frequency words, some of which may not lend themselves to phonic analysis. In addition, the chapter explores syllabic analysis, which is applying phonics to multisyllabic words, and fluency, which is freedom from word identification problems. This chapter will be more meaningful if you first reflect on what you already know about phonics, syllabic analysis, and fluency.

Think about how you use phonics and syllabic analysis to sound out strange names and other unfamiliar words. Think about how you might teach phonics, and ask yourself what role phonics should play in a reading program.

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Chapter 4 Teaching Phonics, High-Frequency Words, and Syllabic Analysis

RATIONALE AND APPROACHES FOR PHONICS INSTRUCTION

As you read the following sentence out loud, think about the processes you are using.

In Palampam Day, by David and Phyllis Gershator (1997), Papa Tata Wanga offers sage advice to Turn, who refuses to eat because on this day, the food talks back, as do the animals.

s Phonics is the study of speech sounds related to reading.

As adept readers, we apply our skills with lightning speed and process words by patterns of sound. Having read words such as papa and tango, you may have grouped the letters in Tata as "ta-ta" and those in Wanga as "Wang (g)a" and pronounced the a's in Tata just as you have the a's in papa and the ang in Wanga just as you would the ang in tango.

In addition to thinking about what the sentence is saying, did you find that you had to use phonics and syllabication skills to read Palampam, Gershator, and Tata Wanga? Phonics skills are absolutely essential for all readers. Most of the words we read are sight words. We've encountered them so many times that we don't need to take time to sound them out. They are in our mental storehouse of words that we recognize automatically. However, we need phonics for names of people or places or events that we have never met in print. Without phonics, we would not be able to read new words.

As adept readers, we use phonics occasionally. Because of our extensive experience reading, we have met virtually all of the word patterns in the language. Although you may have never seen the word Palampam before, you have seen the word patterns pal and am. Chances are you used these patterns to decode Palampam. You probably decoded the word so rapidly that you may not even be conscious of applying your skills. For novice readers, phonics is a key skill. For a period in their development, novice readers may be using phonics in a conscious, deliberate fashion to decode many of the words that they read. In time, after they've had sufficient experience with a word, that word becomes part of their instant recognition vocabulary.

The purpose of learning phonics is to enable students to decode words that are in their lis-

tening vocabularies but that they fail to recognize in print.



Stages in Reading Words

143

HOW WORDS ARE READ

Words are read in one of four, often overlapping, ways. They are predicted, sounded out, chunked, or recognized immediately. Predicting means using context by itself or context plus some decoding to read a word. Seeing the letter w and using the context "Sam was pulling a red w ____ ," the student predicts that the word missing is wagon. Sounding out entails pronouncing words letter by letter or sound by sound (/h/ + /a/ + /t/) and then blending them into a word. As readers become more advanced, they group or chunk sounds into pronounceable units (/h/ + /at/). In the fourth process, the words are recognized with virtually no mental effort. Adept readers have met some words so often that they recognize them just about as soon as they see them. These are called sight words because they are apparently recognized at sight (Ehri & McCormick, 1998).

How High-Frequency Words Are Learned

According to Ehri (1998), learning words at sight entails forging links that connect the written form of the word and its pronunciation and meaning. Looking at the spelling of a word, the experienced reader retrieves its pronunciation and meaning from her mental dictionary or storehouse of words instantaneously. Beginners might look at a word, analyze it into its component sounds, blend the sounds, and say the word. At the same time, they note how the word's letters symbolize single or groups of sounds. Over time, the connections that the reader makes between letters and sounds enable the reader to retrieve the spoken form and meaning of the word just about instantaneously. The reader makes adjustments for irregular words so that certain letters are flagged as being silent or having an unusual pronunciation. "Knowledge of letter?sound relations provides a powerful mnemonic system that bonds the written forms of specific words to their pronunciations in memory" (Ehri & McCormick, 1998, p. 140).

P. M. Cunningham (1998) notes that "words we have not read before are almost instantly pronounced on the basis of spelling patterns the brain has seen in other words" (p. 199).

STAGES IN READING WORDS

Logographic Stage

Students go through stages or phases in their use of word analysis skills. Young children surprise their elders by reading a McDonald's sign, soda can and milk carton labels, and the names of cereals. However, for the most part, these children are not translating letters into sounds as more mature readers would do; instead, they are associating "nonphonemic visual characteristics" with spoken words (Ehri, l994). For instance, a child remembers the word McDonald's by associating it with the golden arches and Pepsi is associated with its logo. At times, teachers take advantage of the nonphonemic characteristics of words. They tell students that the word tall might be remembered because it has three tall letters and that camel is easy to recall because the m in the middle of the word has two humps.

In the logographic (prephonemic) stage, students learn a word by selective association, by selecting some nonphonemic feature that distinguishes it from other words (Gough, Juel, & Griffith, 1992). For the word elephant, it could be the length of the word; or in the word look, it could be the two os that are like eyes. The prob-

Most children in preschool and early kindergarten are in the logographic stage.

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