The Science of Reading and Phonics Instruction

If you have children, work with children, or spend any amount of time with children, then odds are you've heard of something called "The Reading Wars".

No, this isn't a cool epic series similar to Star Wars. It's a much more mundane and silly thing. It's the long battle between two camps of educators:

Those who believe that phonics instruction is essential for strong reading skills.

Those who believe that children learn through a "whole language" appproach to develop context and literacy.

One of these methods has quite a bit of scientific backing, along with a solid history of use, and one of these methods was based on observation of children and opinion.

I have a strong opinion on this matter, and a great deal of experience both as a student learning how to read, and a home educator teaching my dyslexic children how to read.

But first some of my background:

My mother was a reading tutor in the late 70's and 80's for college students who were struggling to read. She helped to pay her way through college with her tutoring services. She taught struggling adults how to use phonics to decode words to understand a text and begin to extract its meaning.

She was very good at what she did, and helped many struggling students achieve academic success with her help. One thing she noticed after several years of tutoring was this: None of the students she worked with had a background in phonetic decoding instruction. They had all been instructed in some kind of "whole language" model, which focuses on teaching individual words as a whole and memorzing it, rather than doing the work of decoding an unfamiliar word.

During this time my adoptive father was finishing his engineering degree and working with a team to design something called a "dual purkinje eye-tracker". This machine he helped to design was used to track the movement of the eye as it looked at images on a screen. Tests would include images, text, and flashing lights.

This machine was used to help build our understanding of how the brain processes information coming in through our eyes, and his machine is used in universities across the globe. The tracking system is so precise it can tell which side of a period the test subject is looking at.

You've probably never thought about whether you're looking at the left or right side of a period, but research shows that when we're reading text we absolutely do. In fact, when we read text efficiently we actually process each individual letter in that text so we can extract the correct meaning.

One of the most common tests that my father's machine is used for is a logic/reasoning test, based on a segment of text. The text will contain some sort of misspelled word, or the wrong word for the context, or a repeated word, and the test subject must read the text and find out what is wrong (if anything is at all, some texts are left unaltered).

The machine tracks the eye movement of the test subject as they go over and over the text to find the mistake or mistakes. Every letter is taken in by the eye.

What do these two stories have to do with each other? Well for one, we have known for years now that the strongest readers are those taught with a phonics based system. People who have a strong foundation in phonics rarely need reading help later in life. My mother's tutoring experience bears true to this. She never needed to tutor someone who knew phonics.

For two, from research done with my father's machines we know that each individual letter is taken in when we are reading and that we must process each part of the word to understand it.

A whole language model can never meet these two criteria, because it treats the written language as type of pictographs rather than what it actually is: a structured code.

Pictographs use images to convey meaning. Whole Language reading models teach reading as a type of pictograph - memorize the shape and look of the word (typically modeled with an image beside it) until you remember it and can call it up when you see it.

But the English language is NOT based on images. Its root is in code. Far more complex than binary coding of computers, we use 26 symbols(known as graphemes), each with their own sound(phonemes), and mix them together to create words. Many of the symbols we use can also change their sound when combined with others (aka digraphs).

When reading instruction is approached with a pictograph centered mindset, students must memorize and retain each individual word in a memory bank to be used. When unfamiliar words are presented the meaning and pronunciation must be entirely guessed at, rather than meaningfully decoded.

In a coding based instruction students are given the systematic tools to learn any new word that may cross their path. If it is unfamiliar, phonetic understanding will help them to break the word down into smaller chunks so they can gather the meaning.

I'll demonstrate how this is done with a word I just learned in the writing of this article:

Abibliophobia.

I had never seen or heard this word before, because I'm not super into reading about various phobias. To read this word I broke it down into parts:

A (prononunced with the Name of the letter, the Long Vowel "AY")

bib (the "i" is pronounced with the short sound, "ih")

lio (the letter i followed by an o is most frequently pronounced "ee-oh", so the segment is leo)

pho (ph makes the "fff" sound, and because the o is separated from the i by only one consonant is is a long "O" sound)

bia (similar to the "io" combination above, ia makes the sound "eee-ah")

From the components of this word - biblio likely is a Latin root word meaning book, and phobia meaning fear, I can surmise that this word must have to do with some sort of fear related to books.

Now I can go to a dictionary at home or on the internet and look it up. When I looked it up I learned that my deductions were correct: My decoding was correct, and the word itself means a fear of running out of things to read.

That is how phonetics allows readers to break down new words and decode them in a reasonable fashion. Phonics is based on a logical system, one that gives readers the ability to approach any text, break it down, and utilize the tools to deduct the meaning of a word (or get a close approximation until they can look it up for more context).

Whole Language systems can never accomplish this task. Many people who were taught with a whole language method will struggle their entire lives to read competently, not because they are unintelligent or lack the academic motivation to become good readers, but because their entire ability to read has been based upon false ideas about what makes up a good reader.

We have created decades upon decades of poor readers because educators have been convinced that there is a shortcut to learning how to read. And then these people become parents who struggle to read, and this means their children have less reading in their homes because of it.

Most homeschooling families have utilized a phonics centered reading system. In fact, many families found themselves motivated to pull their children out of public school when they saw how their children were being taught to read and how it was damaging their academics.

There are many excellent curriculum choices out there if you're looking for a reading curriculum for your homeschool or if you just want to supplement what is being taught in your public school.

My favorite choice as of today is a curriculum called Reading Better Together, and you can see my review of the system here. This has been an excellent curriculum and method for my neurodivergent/dyslexic children.

If you would like to read my techniques on how to teach vocabulary, comprehension, and more to children, then subscribe to my mailing list so you can always see our updates!

*update: when I initially posted this article I compared Whole Word systems to hieroglyphics, but upon review I have changed the analogy to pictographs because I find it to be a more accurate comparison.