Phonics And You Essay Research Paper PHONICSBYDestiny

Phonics And You Essay, Research Paper

PHONICS

BY:

Destiny Abshire

.Phonics isn.t a method of teaching reading; it.s a body of knowledge consisting of 26 letters used to symbolize about 44 English speech sounds. There are 70 most common spellings for these speech sounds..(National Right to Read Foundation). Phonetics is .the science dealing with speech sounds..(Gans). .Studying Phonetics means studying a phonetic alphabet, diacritical marks, technical terms, and many other scientific tools and techniques..(Heilman). Phonetics would be really difficult to teach small children to read. In the early 1900.s those who believed in using the phonetic method invented a way of doing so without using any special symbols or special terminology; now phonics is used all over the country as an aid to help people to read and understand the English language.

The method of phonics is this: First, ones teacher will make him aware of the individual sounds he makes when he talks. Second, the teacher will show him the letter symbols that represent each of those sounds. Third, the teacher will teach him how to write these symbols and combine them into words and at the same time how to read them. In Linguistics of Reading Charles C. Fries says:

.The major spelling patterns of present-day English are fortunately few in number, but for these the reader must develop, through long practice, high-speed recognition responses. These responses must become so habitual that practically all the clues that simulate them eventually sink below the threshold of attention leaving only the accumulative comprehension of the meaning..(Fries)

Charles Fries tries to get people to understand how to read at a rapid rate without stopping to comprehend the meaning of the word. The method of phonics attempts to get people to, slowly but surely, read at a rate that they would not have been able to without the use of this method.

Dr. Frank C. Laubach, famous for his work in teaching half the world how to read and write, always starts by working out a phonetic alphabet for the language he deals with, and then teaches the natives in very short order how to read and write it. In his book Teaching the World to Read he writes of the relevance of the method to the most widely spoken dialect of the Philippines. He says it becomes easy, for a man with average intelligence to learn to read in one day by using these lessons. Many people have learned to read all of the letters in two hours, some even in one hour. This turns out to be possible if you have a language with a perfectly phonetic alphabet where teaching to read and write is no problem at all.

.The superior way to advance children.s ability to blend speech sounds, as they decode written words, is to begin to develop their conscious awareness of speech sounds (phonemic awareness) as early as preschool..(Dr. Groff). How many sounds are there. Scientists do not fully agree on that point; not everybody speaking English makes the same sounds. There exists a way to arrive at a mean: .Count the items in the pronunciation key of an ordinary desk-size dictionary or hand book of English and see how many different sounds have a special symbol assigned to them..(Flesch). From these two sources you get forty-four sounds that can be distinguished in English. There is only twenty-six letters in the English language; three of them are extra, C, Q, and X. That

means there is actually twenty-three letters to represent forty-four sounds. That is why there is a problem with whole reading.

One learns by learning the letters or letter combinations that stands for each of the forty-four sounds. Twenty-five of the forty-four sounds are consonants. Eighteen of these come in pairs, soft and hard; They consist of:

.B and p as in bib and pup.

D and t as in dad and toot.

G and k as in gag and kick.

V and f as in valve and fluff.

Z and s as in zig-zag and Sis.

Th (soft) and th (hard) as in thither and thistle.

W and wh as in wayward and whistle.

J and ch as in jam and choo-choo-train.

Zh and sh as in treasure and trash.

Then there are six consonants often called semivowels: l as in lull, m as in ma.m, n as in nun, r as in rare, y as in yo-yo, and ng, which is not a combination of n and g but an altogether different sound.. (Dr. Christman)

Now let.s look at the remaining nineteen vowel sounds and the symbols that represent them in writing. These sounds consist of five groups: First, there are the five so-called short vowels, as in bag, beg, big, bog, and bug. Second, there are the five so-called long vowels as in mate, mete, mite, mote, mute. Next, we have three diphthongs: au as in Paul and crawl, ou as in spouse and cow, and oi as in noise and boy. Next, a long and a short oo, as in Rube and Boob, and whoosh and push. Next, the sound of ah as in pa and ma, bar and car. Next, two r vowels: air as in fair heirs dare swear, and er as in girls prefer fur. Finally, the muttering vowel we use in unaccented syllables regardless of the spelling: the in drama, the e in item, the I in devil, the o in button, the u in circus. That makes all forty-four sounds of the English language; it is not a perfect system, but can be explained and taught.

There are two main things wrong with our alphabet and our system of

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