A commentary on and the role of phonics instruction in reading

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• Simple View of Reading (e.g., Gough & Tunmer 1986) and its expression in reading instruction (Savage 2020).

• models show that in order to deal with a written input (spelling of words in an alphabetic language), the models initially use an orthographic to phonologic to semantic pathway. With training, the direct pathway from orthography to semantics becomes more prominent, but the orthographic to phonology pathway continues to contribute. Models that train the orthography to semantics pathway take much longer than models that involve phonology

• We agree with Bowers’ recognition of the limited evidence in support of a specific scope and sequence in which the child has to learn grapheme-phoneme rules as a prerequisite for decoding. As Morris et al. (2012) demonstrated, there are many ways to teach decoding, and the level of systematicity is related to the needs of the learner.

• Whole language and its current iteration, balanced literacy, mean different things to different people and are difficult to define. These approaches often stem from the misunderstanding that skilled adult readers do not explicitly use sublexical strategies to identify words. Therefore, beginning readers should not break words apart. Instead, they should focus on the whole word and its meaning. Instead of “teaching” children to read, the teacher facilitates reading development by providing rich and authentic reading experiences through immersion in age-appropriate literature. Phonics instruction, if provided at all, should be minimal and incidental depending on children’s needs as they encounter text (Fountas & Pinnel 2012–2013). Although some balanced literacy programs are shifting, they do not clearly embrace explicit phonics instruction (Student Achievement Partners 2020)

• conclusions reached by the NRP were much broader than those involving the single chapter on phonics. The NRP recognized that learning to read required multiple competencies in phonics, phonological-awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, and considering the role of teacher professional development and the role of technology in six equally detailed chapters.

• phonics instruction can be effectively accomplished with approaches that would not meet the definition of systematic phonics that he provided, but not with the idea that any approach to phonics instruction will be effective.

• theoretical view, the Simple View is a theory of reading comprehension that shows that children must learn about the form and meaning of the word. These occur in parallel, although children vary in their capacity for learning decoding and language comprehension and the developmental process of dealing with print emphasizes word learning more in early grades and comprehension in later grades.

• consistent with Perfetti’s (2007) lexical quality hypothesis,

• Simple View of Reading

• acquiring and integrating information about both word form and meaning are necessary for on-line reading comprehension.

• computational models of reading

• triangle model

• specifies pathways involving orthography, phonology, and semantics to compute word meanings.

• consistent with Share’s (1995) self-teaching hypothesis.

• orthographic representations are acquired by self-teaching through phonological recoding of new letter strings that becomes increasingly implicit. In all these theoretical perspectives, orthography and phonology serve to access meaning and are interactive.

• “phonics first” question in spelling interventions for children with dyslexia, where similar arguments have been made. Galuschka et al. report an exploratory analysis of the limited number of available studies. This analysis suggested no significant advantage for early phonics over other programs, where RCTs exist. Interestingly, non-significant trends towards declining effectiveness of phonics and rising effectiveness of morphological training were evident with both age and severity of disability.

• need more studies to resolve this question definitively.

• eported robust main effects of spelling approaches based on phonics on both reading (g = .62) and spelling (g = .68), with morphological and orthographic approaches having moderate effects on spelling, but much smaller effects on reading.

• This work both further confirms but also contextualizes the role of phonics instruction in struggling readers.

• rong in denying that phonics is an effective way of facilitating the implicit learning that must occur for the child to become an efficient reader (Seidenberg et al. 2020).