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NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • AUCKLAND • SYDNEY
MEXICO CITY • NEW DELHI • HONG KONG • BUENOS AIRES

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Acknowledgments

Iwould like to thank Terry Cooper, Wendy Murray, and Jeanette Moss for their efforts,
support, and extreme patience. I would also like to thank the following teachers,
colleagues, and students for their feedback and assistance: Erinn Hudson and her
second graders at Ward-Highlands Elementary School in Ocala, Florida, Marissa Noguez,
Joan Conway, Beth Ann Sullivan, Kelly Combes, Lou Ann Kleck, Joyce Nafziger, Renee
Flory, Carla Hartz, Shelley Stalnaker, Julie Small-Gamby, Emily Teresa, and the staff at
Gutman Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Dedication

Iwould like to dedicate this book to Jeanne Chall, Marilyn Adams, M. E. Curtis, and the
many other professors, colleagues, and classroom teachers who have taught me so
much about how children learn to read.

Teachers may photocopy the reproducible pages in this book for classroom use. No other part of this
publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without written
permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc.,
557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

Cover design by Adana Jimenez
Interior design by Holly Grundon
Interior illustrations by Maxie Chambliss
Photographs: cover, 53, 140, 154: © Catrina Genovese; 57: © Margaret Lampert;
101: © Liza Loeffler; 127, 162: David M. Grossman.
All remaining photos courtesy of the author.
ISBN-13: 978-0-439-84511-
ISBN-10: 0-439-84511-
Copyright © 2006 by Wiley Blevins
All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S.A.

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SECTION 1
What Is Phonics? ..............................................

Phonics: What and Why....................................................
Ten Important Research Findings About Phonics.............................
History of Phonics Instruction in the U.S....................................
Stages of Reading Development: Where Phonics Fits In.......................

SECTION 2
Opening the Gate for Reading Instruction:

Powerful Predictors of Success............................................ 20
Alphabet Recognition: What It Is and Why It’s Essential......................
Teaching Alphabet Recognition............................................
Alphabet Recognition Assessment......................................
35 Quick-and-Easy Activities for Developing Alphabet Recognition.............
Phonemic Awareness: Playing With Sounds..................................
Articulation..............................................................
Why Phonemic Awareness Is Important.....................................
Phonemic Awareness Assessment......................................
How to Assess Phonemic Awareness....................................
Phonemic Awareness and Writing..........................................
Teaching Phonemic Awareness............................................
Using Literature to Develop Phonemic Awareness............................
35 Quick-and-Easy Activities for Developing Phonemic Awareness.............

SECTION 3
Learning About Sounds and Letters..........................

Teachers and Linguistics..................................................
The Sounds of English....................................................
Consonants..............................................................
Vowels..................................................................
Word Lists for Instruction.................................................
/b/ as in bat......................................................
/d/ as in dog......................................................
/f/ as in fan.......................................................

/g/ as in gate.....................................................
/h/ as in hat......................................................
/j/ as in jump.....................................................
/k/ as in kite......................................................
/l/ as in leaf......................................................
/m/ as in mop.....................................................
/n/ as in nest.....................................................
/p/ as in pig......................................................
/r/ as in rock.....................................................
/s/ as in sun......................................................
/t/ as in top.......................................................
/v/ as in vase.....................................................
/w/ as in wagon...................................................
/y/ as in yo-yo....................................................
/z/ as in zebra....................................................
/ch/ as in cheese..................................................
/sh/ as in shark...................................................
/zh/ as in treasure.................................................
/th/ as in the......................................................
/th/ as in thumb...................................................
/hw/ as in wheel..................................................
/ng/ as in ring....................................................
/A/ as in cake.....................................................
/E/ as in feet......................................................
/i

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SECTION 4
Creating Lessons for Success.................................

How Phonics Is Taught...................................................
Characteristics of Strong Phonics Instruction...............................
About Scope and Sequence...............................................
What Does a Good Phonics Lesson Look Like?..............................
Phonics Lesson Dos..................................................
Phonics Lesson Don’ts...............................................
Memory Devices: Choosing the Best.......................................
Blending: Teaching Children How Words Work.............................
Controlled Text: What Is It?..............................................
Decodable Text—Does It Really Matter?...................................
High-Frequency Words..................................................
Other Popular Techniques for Developing High-Frequency
and Decodable Word Knowledge......................................
Sample Lessons.........................................................
Consonants.........................................................
Consonant Digraphs.................................................
Consonant Clusters..................................................
Silent Letters.......................................................
Short Vowels........................................................
Long Vowels........................................................
Other Vowel Sounds.................................................
Phonograms............................................................
Teaching With Phonograms...........................................
Phonogram Cautions.................................................
How to Use Phonogram Lists.........................................
Phonogram Word Lists...................................................
Long- a Phonograms..................................................
Long- e Phonograms..................................................
Long- i Phonograms..................................................
Long- o Phonograms..................................................
Short- a Phonograms.................................................
Short- e Phonograms.................................................
Short- i Phonograms..................................................
Short- o Phonograms.................................................
Short- u Phonograms.................................................

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Variant Vowel /âr/ Phonograms...................................
Variant Vowel /ûr/ Phonograms...................................
Variant Vowel /är/ Phonograms...................................
Variant Vowel /ô/ Phonograms....................................
Diphthong /oi/ Phonograms.......................................
Diphthong /ou/ Phonograms.......................................
Variant Vowel /√/ Phonograms...................................
Variant Vowel /∑/ Phonograms...................................
What About Rules?......................................................
Guidelines for Using Rules/Generalizations.............................
Structural Analysis: Using Word Parts.....................................
Compound Words....................................................
Prefixes............................................................
Suffixes............................................................
Homophones........................................................
Syllabication........................................................
35 Quick-and-Easy Phonics and Word Analysis Games.......................
Workbooks.............................................................
500 Picture Words.......................................................
Assessments............................................................
ASSESSMENT1: Nonsense Word Test....................................
ASSESSMENT2: San Diego Quick Assessment.............................

SECTION 5
Meeting Individual Needs.....................................

Types of Readers........................................................
How to Help: Effective Intervention Strategies.............................
Removing Reading Roadblocks—Principles of Intervention Instruction........
14 Phonics Problems—and Solutions...................................
Fluency................................................................
Phonics and the English Language Learner.................................
Professional Development................................................

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he sun beat down on me hotter than I had ever felt it. I could
feel the steam sizzling up from the tarmac as I stepped off the
plane. Here I was in Guayaquil, Ecuador. My charge was to
teach a class of second graders—many of whom had limited English
abilities—to read. It was my first year teaching and I had journeyed
far from Coal City, West Virginia, where I had first learned about
the mysteries of books. As I walked toward the airline terminal, the
enormity of the challenge and responsibility I had accepted struck
me. I suddenly felt even hotter!
Each year millions of teachers enter classrooms across our nation
(and the world) with this same challenge. They have to make key
decisions as they wrestle with the question of how best to teach
children to read. Considerable discussion and debate center around
answering this critical question. The debate rages on not only in
classrooms, but in universities and at school board meetings
everywhere. However, this book is not about that “great debate.” It
is designed to help you better understand our unique and sometimes
complex language and how you can use that knowledge to better
teach children to read. Its focus is on phonics—the relationship
between sounds and their spellings—and how helping children
understand this important piece of the reading “puzzle” can help
develop fluent readers who have a passion for books and who
understand how books can provide pleasure and information.

ccording to a 1992 poll
conducted by Peter D. Hart
Research Associates, 62%
of parents identified reading as one
of the most important skills their
children needed to learn. In 1994
the same polling firm conducted a
survey for the American Federation
of Teachers and the Chrysler
Corporation and found that almost
70% of teachers identified reading as
the most important skill for children
to learn.

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SECTION 1 /ä/

—Alberto Manguel

This is where it all began—my first class on my first day!

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Phonics instruction helps the reader
to map sounds onto spellings. This
ability enables readers to decode
words. Decoding words aids in the
development of and improvement in
word recognition. The more words a
reader recognizes, the easier the
reading task. Therefore, phonics
instruction aids in the development
of word recognition by providing
children with an important and useful
way to figure out unfamiliar words
while reading.

When children begin to be able to recognize
a large number of words quickly and accu-
rately, reading fluency improves. Reading
fluency refers to the ease with which children
can read a text. As more and more words
become firmly stored in a child’s memory
(that is, the child recognizes more and more
words on sight), he or she gains fluency and
automaticity in word recognition. Having
many opportunities to decode words in text
is critical to learning words by sight. The
more times a child encounters a word in text,
the more likely he or she is to recognize it by
sight and to avoid making a reading error
(Gough, Juel, and Roper-Schneider, 1983).

Reading fluency improves reading
comprehension. Since children are
no longer struggling with decoding
words, they can devote their full
attention (their mental energies) to
making meaning from the text. As
the vocabulary and concept demands
increase in text, children need to be
able to devote more of their attention
to making meaning from text, and
increasingly less attention to decod-
ing. If children have to devote too
much time to decoding words, their
reading will be slow and labored.
This will result in comprehension
difficulties.

The Connection Between Decoding and Comprehension

With such agreement on the importance of reading, how do we best teach children to read?
What should be the goals of early reading instruction? The following goals are often cited:

The first goal—automatic word recognition—is the focus of this book. To become skilled readers,
children must be able to identify words quickly and accurately. To do so, they must be proficient at
decoding words. Decoding words involves converting the printed word into spoken language. A
reader decodes a word by sounding it out, using context clues, using structural analysis, or recognizing
the word by sight. In order to sound out words, a reader must be able to associate a specific spelling
with a specific sound. Phonics involves this relationship between sounds and their spellings.
Phonics is not a specific teaching method. In fact, there are many ways to teach it.
However, what most types of phonics instruction do have in common is that they focus on the
teaching of sound-spelling relationships so that a young reader can come up with an
approximate pronunciation of a word and then check it against his or her oral vocabulary.
Approximately 84% of English words are phonetically regular. Therefore, teaching the most
common sound-spelling relationships in English is extremely useful for readers. As Anderson et
al. (1985) write, “English is an alphabetic language in which there are consistent, though not
entirely predictable, relationships between letters and sounds. When children learn these
relationships well, most of the words in their spoken language become accessible to them when
they see them in print. When this happens, children are said to have ‘broken the code.’”
One of the arguments against teaching phonics is that the approximately 16% of so-called
irregular English words appear with the greatest frequency in text (about 80% of the time). As you
will discover throughout this book, these words are not as “irregular” as they may seem. Although
they must be taught as sight words, the reader has to pay attention to their spelling patterns in
order to store them in his or her memory. Some detractors of teaching phonics also contend that
reading develops in the same way as speaking—naturally. Foorman (1995) responds by saying
“humans are biologically specialized to produce language and have done so for nearly 1 million

years. Such is not the case with reading and writing. If it were, there would not be illiterate
children in the world.”
Clearly, then, most children need instruction in learning to read. One of the critical early
hurdles in reading instruction is helping children grasp the alphabetic principle. That is, to read,
children must understand that this series of symbols we call the alphabet maps onto the sounds of
our language in roughly predictable ways. This alphabetic principle is a key insight into early
reading. Phonics instruction helps children to understand the alphabetic principle. And it enables
children to get off to a quick start in relating sounds to spellings and thereby decoding words.
But isn’t comprehension the most important part of reading? How does this ability to
decode words help a reader understand a text? The flowchart on page 8 illustrates that strong
decoding ability is necessary for reading comprehension. However, it is not the only skill a
reader needs in order to make meaning from text. And sounding out words is not the only way
to figure out an unfamiliar word while reading.
When they read, children need to be able to use three cueing systems. These systems
represent signals in text that interact and overlap to help the reader understand what he or she
is reading. The cueing systems are graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic.

We saw the _____ on the road.

All possible words to fill in the blank must be naming words. You
determined this from your knowledge of English syntax.
When children enter school, most of them have an understanding of
the basic syntactic structures of English. However, oral language is
different from “book language.” Written material might pose difficulties
for some children because their oral language patterns differ so much from
the more formal language patterns of text. Reading many books aloud will
help these children gain an understanding of the more formal syntactic
structures used for writing.

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ountless research studies have been conducted on phonics instruction. Much of this
research has focused on the usefulness of phonics instruction and the best ways to teach
children about sound-spelling relationships. Below are ten of the top research findings
regarding phonics.

Phonics Instruction Can Help
All Children Learn to Read
All children can benefit from instruction in the most common sound-spelling relationships in
English. This instruction helps children decode words that follow these predictable relationships.
Phonics instruction is particularly beneficial for children at risk for learning difficulties—
those children who come to school with limited exposures to books, have had few opportunities
to develop their oral languages, are from low socioeconomic families, have below-average
intelligence, are learning English as a second language, or are suspected of having a
learning disability. However, even children from language-rich backgrounds benefit
from phonics instruction (Chall, 1967). As Chall states, “By learning phonics,
students make faster progress in acquiring literary skills—reading and writing. By the
age of six, most children already have about 6,000 words in their listening and
speaking vocabularies. With phonics they learn to read and write these and more
words at a faster rate than they would without phonics.”
Phonics instruction is therefore an essential ingredient in early reading
instruction. The purpose of this instruction is to teach children how to read with
accuracy, comprehension, fluency, and pleasure. The early ability to sound out words
successfully is a strong predictor of future growth in decoding (Lundberg, 1984) and
comprehension (Lesgold and Resnick, 1982). Weak decoding skills are characteristic
of poor readers (Carnine, Carnine, and Gertsen, 1984; Lesgold and Curtis, 1981).
Readers who are skilled at decoding usually comprehend text better than those who
are poor decoders. Why this is so can be gleaned from the work of cognitive
psychologists. They contend that we each have a set amount of mental energy to
devote to any task. Since decoding requires so much of this mental energy, little is left
over for higher-level comprehension. As decoding skills improve and more and more
words are recognized by sight, less mental energy is required to decode words and more
mental energy can be devoted to making meaning from the text (Freedman and
Calfee, 1984; LaBerge and Samuels, 1974).
In addition, successful early decoding ability is related to the number of words a
reader encounters. That is, children who are good decoders read many more words than children
who are poor decoders (Juel, 1988). This wide reading results in greater reading growth.
Phonics instruction also helps to get across the alphabetic principle (that the letters of the
alphabet stand for sounds) by teaching the relationships between letters and the sounds they
represent. Beginning readers learn better when their teachers emphasize these relationships
(Chall, 1996).

Explicit Phonics Instruction Is More
Beneficial Than Implicit Instruction
According to Chall (1996), “systematic and early instruction in phonics leads to better reading:
better accuracy of word recognition, decoding, spelling, and oral and silent reading

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Three Golden
Rules
Becoming a Nation of
Readers (Anderson et
al., 1985) makes the
following three recom-
mendations regarding
phonics instruction: