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The limits of
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Vol 5.5
phonics teaching
School Leadership Today
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How should we teach young children to read? According to
Sue Lyle, the answer is not phonics. Here she unpicks the
case for teaching children to read using phonics, arguing that
decoding words has nothing to do with the whole purpose of
reading – making meaning.
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T
eachers all over the UK are systematically teaching reading through phonics.
I say systematically, because the majority will be following a step-by-step,

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commercial scheme that the school has bought in – at great expense. In his
blog in 20121, Michael Rosen estimated that schools had spent nearly £8million
on government-approved synthetic phonics publications – and governments match-
fund each school to the tune of £3000.
I don’t believe schools are doing this because teachers think phonics is the best
way to teach reading, but because the government has told them to do it, and is also
subsidising it. If subsidy is not enough to make sure schools do as they are told, the
children will be given a compulsory phonics test. Apart from financial inducements,
high-stakes testing and accountability is the government’s strongest weapon to ensure
teachers comply with government diktat.
But the case for phonics is flawed, and I believe, has little to do with the successful
teaching of reading. First though, let us examine what phonics is and why its 69
supporters believe it’s so effective.
Vol 5.5
School Leadership Today
What is phonics? www.teachingtimes.com

Phonics is a method for teaching reading that focuses on the relationship between
sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes) in an alphabetic writing system. A
phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language but not necessarily a single letter,
for example, ‘oo’ in look is a phoneme. There are 44 phonemes in the English language.
Synthetic phonics is the chosen form of teaching phonics by the English
government. It assumes that simple decoding is all that is required in reading and aims
to teach the sounds of individual letters and the 44 phonemes of English. Children are
taught to sound out the letters in words and ‘blend’ them together.
If the letters and combinations of letters used to represent the speech sounds
(phonemes) of a language were based on systematic and predictable relationships
between written letters, symbols, and spoken words, then teaching reading using
phonics would make sense. The key words here are ‘systematic’ and ‘predictable’.
Not all languages are as systematic or predictable as others. In Welsh, for example,
the letter-sound correspondences are much more regular than in English. English is
actually characterised by its irregularities and when learning to read in English, an
overemphasis on phonic approaches can be particularly problematic.
Let us consider some of the irregularities in English that would have to be
addressed if we are to teach reading using phonics. The following analysis of English
has been greatly assisted by the painstaking work of Steven Strauss.2

CVC words
Teachers will be familiar with so-called CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant, as
in ‘cat’). Even I was taught, ‘The cat sat on the mat’ almost 60 years ago. However, the
alphabetic principle (phonics) doesn’t work for even the simplest CVC words, as all
teachers will know. While it may work for fit and sit, it doesn’t work for fir and sir, both
CVC words. The sound of ‘i’ is controlled by the ‘r’ – these can be called the r-controlled
words. Try it out! The ‘i’ sound changes in the presence of an ‘r’.
That’s OK you might say, we can teach this rule, but what if r-controlled is just the
tip of the ice-berg? Let’s think about y-controlled words. Try pronouncing the following
‘a’ in bay, day, hay – did you notice that to pronounce these words properly, the ‘a’
needs a long sound. But in our example above, ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ the letter ‘a’ has
a short sound. So there isn’t a single sound for a single letter – there are long and short
sounds. Sounding out letters cannot teach us when to apply the correct one.
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Magic ‘e’
What about another phenomena known as magic ‘e’? Magic ‘e’ is magic because
its presence can change the pronunciation of vowel sounds from short to long by
remaining silent! So pan becomes pane, can becomes cane, ban becomes bane and so
on. This adds another rule we must teach that also challenges the notion that there is
an alphabetic principle of letter-sound correlation.
We can teach magic ‘e’ – most teachers do – but wait a minute, magic ‘e’ isn’t that
simple! If there are two consonant letters, the sound of the vowel changes. The vowel
is long when the two letters are ‘ng’, ‘th’ and ‘st’, as in range, bathe and taste, but short
 when the two letters are ‘nc’, ‘ng’, ‘ns’, ‘rc’, ‘rg’, or ‘rs’, as in dance, dunce, hinge, tense,
farce, barge and purse.
But we can just add these exceptions to our teaching, can’t we? Not so fast, we
also have to remember that if the word contains the sequence ‘ie’, which is otherwise
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pronounced long, this long pronunciation takes precedence over the short vowel
pronunciation before two consonants, as in pierce and fierce. We also need to
remember that if the word contains ‘e’, ‘i’ or ‘u’ immediately before ‘r’, the r-controlled
pronunciation takes precedence over the long vowel pronunciation, as in hearse.
Getting confused? Let’s try and sum this up.
A vowel letter is pronounced short in CVC words, unless:

1) The vowel is immediately followed by the letter ‘r’, in which case it is r-controlled
and then it is long – for example, ‘i’, ‘e’, or ‘u’ in fir, her or fur; ‘a’ in car or far; and ‘o’ in
for.
2) The vowel is immediately followed by the letter ‘y’, in which case it is long – for
70 example, ‘a’ or ‘e’ in say or hey; ‘u’ in buy or guy; and ‘o’ in boy or toy.
3) The vowel is immediately followed by the letter ‘w’, in which case it is pronounced
Vol 5.5
School Leadership Today as ‘uw’, as in new, grew; ‘or’, as in paw, saw; or optionally ‘au’ or ‘oh’ (as in how versus
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low, and bow [bau] versus bow [bo]).

And it gets worse…

Teachers are also expected to teach letter combinations as one sound, as in the most
common combination, ‘th’. This combination can be pronounced with either a voiced
‘th’ as in the, this or that, or a voiceless ‘th’ as in thin, thick and thank. How does phonics
help children know, when faced with sounding out a word, whether the ‘th’ sound is to
be voiced or voiceless? More important, in a phonics system of teaching, how does the
teacher teach this?
Letter-sound correspondence simply won’t work. And unfortunately, voiced and
voiceless pronunciation does not only apply to ‘th’. Consider as, is, and was in contrast
to bus, pus and yes. Will small children being taught how to read find it helpful to know
that ‘s’ is voiceless when house is a noun, but voiced when it is a verb? Try it: ‘Look
at the house’ (noun), ‘The cattery housed the lost cat’ (verb) – to say nothing of the
confusion caused when the same word can be both a noun and a verb depending on
the sentence.
And we haven’t even discussed homographs (words that are spelled alike, but
have distinctly different pronunciations – for example ‘he likes to read’, ‘she read the
book’) or homophones (words spelled differently but pronounced the same – such
as their, there and they’re). Or even more confusing, the mixing of homographs and
homophones as in bow (and arrows), bow (to the queen) and bough (of a tree). And
while we are on ‘ough’ – how about cough, hiccough, dough, drought, fought, plough,
thorough and so on?
…Oh, but we can just teach those as exceptions to the rule, can’t we?
Phonics is not for the faint-hearted. As the few examples included here
demonstrate, the rules that are needed to generate pronunciations for even the most
simply spelled words quickly become very complex and massively overwhelming.

A meaning-making process
I could go on, but let us return to the assertion that if children are taught the alphabetic
principle, they will learn to read. Such an assertion has assumptions that we must
identify and challenge. The first assumption is that children must turn the written word
into sound before the word can be recognised. Following this, the second assumption
is that the letters of the alphabet systematically represent the sounds of the language,
which as I have just demonstrated, they do not. There are other assumptions – phonics
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has to be learned if you are to become a reader, and phonics must be taught if children
are to learn to read.
You might expect there to be strong, scientific, research evidence to support these
assumptions, since the government has decided to impose a phonics approach to
teaching reading on teachers and children – but the fact is, as Strauss claims, there isn’t.
So what do we know about reading? The most important thing that I know about
reading is that it is a meaning-making process. Have a go at reading the following
sentences:
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) The solder decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

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5) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the
present.
6) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
7) They were too close to the door to close it.
8) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
9) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
10) Upon seeing the tear in the painting, I shed a tear.

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School Leadership Today
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How is it that we are able to make sense out of these sentences? The answer is because
when we read, we care about meaning and not decoding – we want to understand
what we read, not merely to decode words.
It is true that we can learn to decode through phonics – in fact I can read Welsh, a
language with very regular letter-sound correspondences, quite well, but the problem
is, I don’t understand any of it. I have taught many Muslim children who have learnt to
decode the Koran, but they don’t understand the Arabic they are reading. There is a
world of difference between decoding and reading. We may be able to teach children
how to ‘bark at print’ – and given the irregularity of English, that can produce some
hilarious results – but this must not be confused with reading.
When we read, we read for a purpose. We are focused on meaning, not on the
sounding out of letters or the identification of single words. Ingrained on my memory
is the experience of my eldest daughter who was being taught to read in the 1970s,
when a whole word approach to reading was fashionable. Each night she would come
home from school with a pack of ‘flash cards’. The words, all printed on individual
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cards, corresponded to all the words that would appear in her next reading book. My
homework as her parent was to ‘flash’ each card to prompt sight recognition. When
she could recognise them all (the teacher had to check of course), she was allowed to
have the next reading book from the (not so) memorable series, ‘The Village with Three
Corners’.
Unfortunately, she constantly got mixed up between the words ‘was’ and ‘saw’
and because of this, she was not allowed to have a reading book. I pointed out to
her teacher that when she read those words in a book, she never got confused. The
sentence, ‘She saw Roger Redhat in the park’ would never be read as, ‘She was Roger
 Redhat in the park’ – that would not make sense. But the teacher refused to give
her the book until she ‘had sorted the words out’. This experience started my own
particular journey into understanding the process of learning to read.
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The Storytelling Curriculum

The reader who is reading the text is important, as is the author who is writing the
text. The author has an intended meaning that the reader needs to construct for him
or herself. The background knowledge and beliefs of the reader are important as the
reader brings these to the meaning-making process.
Of course, letter-sound relationships are not ignored, but they represent just one
of a number of cognitive resources deployed in the task of creating meaning from
an author’s text. Compared to other resources though, such as knowledge of syntax,
semantics and text genre, letter-sound relationships are relatively inefficient in leading
the reader to meaning. What I have found most successful of all when teaching
children to read is when they have the opportunity to learn to read by reading stories
72 they have created themselves.
I have been working with schools on a project known as the Storytelling Curriculum
Vol 5.5
School Leadership Today (see ‘The Storytelling Curriculum’ in volume 3.3 of Creative Teaching and Learning3
www.teachingtimes.com
– also available in part in volume 4.3 of School Leadership Today4). Using this approach,
children dictate their own stories to an adult who transcribes the stories and reads
them back to the children. Children then read their stories to the class. The key to
success here is that the children understand what they are reading – it is their words,
their meanings and the genre they have chosen to create their own stories. From
reading their own stories to the class, they quickly move on to reading the stories of
their friends and from this, to books. In fact, as shown in the research that we carried
out, the children’s progress in reading over one year was far more than that expected
or achieved in schools following a phonics approach.5
The child who is reading his or her own story to the class has created the story to
convey meaning to themselves and to others and, in reading the story, is concerned
with making meaning for the listeners. As proponents of what was called a whole
language approach to reading powerfully argued, reading is a purposeful act of
meaning construction. Reading is not merely learning how to decode words.

Why is the government ignoring the research?

There is a vast amount of research that supports a pedagogy of reading that
emphasises meaning construction over decoding, however current government policy
ignores this in its quest to put phonics centre-stage. As I have attempted to show
above, the sheer number of English words whose spellings either violate, or render
excessively complex, the supposed rules of letter-sound regularity make phonics an
extremely complex approach to reading that is guaranteed to confuse teachers, let
alone their pupils.
What I find most worrying about this wholesale and enforced adoption of phonics
are the potential side-effects of too much emphasis on phonics, with children being
turned off reading by boring and meaningless activities. When this approach to
teaching is linked to high-stakes reading tests based on phonics and not meaning, it is
a recipe for misery in the classroom.
In 2012, the first phonics screening check was carried out in England. As part of the
screening, children were asked to decode non-words. If my argument that we read for
meaning is correct, then children would find being asked to read such words confusing.
And they did. Evidence for this comes from teachers in a survey conducted by Sheffield
Hallam University for the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA). Teachers in KS1
schools were surveyed to gauge responses to the Year 1 phonics screening check. The
university received 494 responses.
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UKLA report that the vast majority of schools identified that the non-words
confused children, who had been taught to try to make sense of what they read: ‘The
better readers stumble over nonsense words as they expect words to follow certain
rules. For example, “thend” read as “the end”’. 6
Comments in the report include: ‘The test took longer for some able readers who
read for meaning. I felt that words very close to real words were unfair – e.g. “strom”’.
And: ‘Almost all children, regardless of ability, said “storm”’. Interestingly, thirty three
schools specifically cited children’s confusion with the word ‘strom’. One school stated
that: ‘Many sounded out correctly but then in blending it, said the incorrect word’.
Some schools cited children asking why they had to read words that aren’t real.
‘The failures in the test were entirely due to the nonsense words. Most children
could read all the real words using both phonics and other strategies. The children had
had practice in nonsense words but most tried to turn the nonsense words into sense

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(storm for strom etc.) Several commented that the words couldn’t be names as they
didn’t have capital letters. The most able children who did manage the nonsense words
slowed right down from being fluent expressive readers to sounding out every word
phoneme by phoneme, even words they knew.’
Overall, responses to the survey indicated that teachers and headteachers felt that:

■ The phonics screening check is not fit for purpose.

■ The phonics screening check impedes successful readers and has failed a cohort of
the most fluent readers.
■ The phonics screening check misidentifies pupils who are beyond this stage of
development as readers and favours less developed/emergent readers.
■ The nonsense words were very confusing for children. 73
■ The phonics screening check undermines pupils’ confidence as readers.
Vol 5.5
■ There are negative implications for relationships with parents. School Leadership Today
■ There are implications for school organisation. www.teachingtimes.com

We should not be ignoring results from this research about something as important as
the impact of compulsory tests on our children.

Too many tests

The new phonics curriculum is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that serves no-one. The
high-stakes testing that accompanies it will impact on the educational future of
millions of children. It is already pushing out the creative subjects of art, music and
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drama. It does not address the needs and talents of individual children and I predict
will contribute to a rise in incidence of anxiety among our children who are already the
most tested in Europe – constantly weighing the pig does not make it heavier!
According to Whitehead, we already spend far more on testing than we do on
books!7 High-stakes testing turns teachers into machines for producing successful test-
takers. Teachers will teach to the test and the test will define the curriculum. When this
test is based on spurious assumptions about the benefit of teaching children to read
using phonics, we need to ask some series questions about the government’s motives
in spending so much of our education money on resources and testing that has not
 been shown to be fit for purpose.
As Michael Rosen reported via Twitter in early October this year: ‘USA: 4800
elementary schools, 12,000 pupils doing systematic phonics did no better at
comprehension than non-phonics taught pupils.’8
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I want to know why Michael Gove won’t take notice of the UKLA-commissioned
research into the phonics screening test – especially as it meets the government’s
preference for large-scale, controlled, experimental studies. Why isn’t he listening to
the voices of teachers?
I am not saying that all phonics is a waste of time. Some aspects of phonics
teaching, such as focusing on initial sounds, are beneficial for all children, and the
learning needs and learning styles of some children are such that they respond well
to phonics teaching. But to extrapolate from this and give it such prominence in
the teaching of reading to all children and furthermore to insist that all children are
subjected to a phonics screening test, is short-sighted and ignores the considerable
body of research which points to how we learn to read. Learning to read does not start
74 when children are taught sounds.
Vol 5.5
School Leadership Today Sue Lyle is part time Senior Lecturer at Swansea Metropolitan University and
www.teachingtimes.com
Director of Dialogue Exchange Ltd.

References

1. Rosen, M. (2012). A major scandal? - Government approved phonics schemes. Michael Rosen [blog]
11 June. Available at: <michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/government-approved-phonics-
scheme.html> [Accessed 31/10/2013]
2. Strauss, S.L. (2005) The Linguistics, Neurology, and Politics of Phonics. London: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
3. Lyle, S. (2012) The Storytelling Curriculum. Creative Teaching and Learning, Vol. 3.3, pp. 30-36.
Available at: <library.teachingtimes.com/articles/ctlthestorytellingcurriculum.htm> [Accessed
31/10/2013]
4. Lyle, S. (2013) The Storytelling Curriculum. School Leadership Today, Vol. 4.3, pp. 82-87. Available
at: <library.teachingtimes.com/articles/thestorytellingcurriculum.htm> [Accessed 31/10/2013]
5. Lyle, S. and Bolt, A. (2013) [in print] The impact of the Storytelling Curriculum on literacy
development for children aged 6–7 and their teachers. Welsh Journal of Education.
6. UKLA (2012) UKLA Analysis of Schools’ response to the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check. Available
at: <www.teachers.org.uk/files/y1psc-survey-october-2012.pdf> [Accessed 02/01/2014]
7. Whitehead, M. (2010) Language and literacy in the early years 0-7. London: SAGE.
8. Rosen, M. (2013, October 9). USA: 4800 elementary schls [sic], 12,000 pupils doing systematic
phonics did no better at comprehension than non-phonics taught pupils. [Tweet] Retrieved from
twitter.com/MichaelRosenYes/status/387870838575599616.

Knowledge trails

1) Removing barriers to literacy – Summary of an Ofsted report looking at the factors that stop
children from gaining good reading and writing skills, arguing for greater emphasis on students’
communication skills.
library.teachingtimes.com/articles/barriers-literacy_310111

2) Imaginative engagement in learning to read – A counter argument in support of phonics,

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Mike Lake offers some ways to make teaching phonics fun. (Available with subscription to Creative
Teaching and Learning magazine – also available for free in part here)
library.teachingtimes.com/articles/imagination-engagment-learning-reading

3) I want to tell you a story – Jacqui Hatchard explains the benefits of oral storytelling in teaching
children to read and write and sparking their enthusiasm for books and stories. (Available with
subscription to Creative Teaching and Learning)
library.teachingtimes.com/articles/ctl_2_1_i_want_to_tell_you_a_story