Педагогика / 4. Стратегические направления

реформирования системы образования

Shastova I.V.

Educational centre “Greenly”

The Input of P. Cunningham and J. Cunningham

into Teaching Phonics

In What We Know About How to Teach Phonics, Patricia M. Cunningham and James W. Cunningham arise a hot topic - teaching reading to children - once again. There has been much debate in recent years but now it seems that everyone (teachers, parent, school board members, and legislators etc.) finally agrees that they need to teach phonic. However, they have different opinion about how it should be taught. Previous papers viewed the benefits of this reading approach (in phonics children learn the sounds of the letters and the correspondence between them) but this study summarizes research findings about teaching in general and teaching of phonics, and then suggests research-based activities for teaching phonics and questions for further discussions.

In the introduction the authors mention about importance of teaching phonics and existence of debates around this topic. Supporting this idea the researchers cite Paul McKee and express belief that there is more knowledge on how phonics should be taught.

In the first section P. Cunningham and J. Cunningham point to some principles that apply to teaching in general. The researches state three items: children need to know what they are trying to do and why (cognitive clarity); children need to become engaged with what they are learning; children need to get multifaceted and multilevel instructions. The article suggests keeping in mind these learning principles while teaching phonics, supports the idea of multiple intelligence and reminds that children learn in different ways.

In the second section the authors focus on key principles for teaching phonics: children need phonemic awareness, skills of sequential decoding and abilities of using different patterns and analogy. Phonemic awareness – which is the best predictors of success in learning to read - develops gradually for most children. It has many levels: the realization that spoken words are made up of sounds and ability to manipulate phonemes to form different spoken words. Sequential decoding includes abilities of saying a sound for each letter, blending individual sounds together and associating letters in unknown words with some sounds. Many researchers believe that fluent readers decode unknown words automatically by using patterns and analogy learned from other words. When a child begins to learn to read he uses a limited amount of words to use pattern and analogy that why they lack decoding strategy.

In addition, P. Cunningham and J. Cunningham mention about debates around highly decodable texts and express their beliefs that teachers need to provide different kinds of texts to children so that young learners discover what fluent readers usually decode. Also they comment on studies about teaching different types of phonics (synthetic phonics, explicit phonics, systematic phonics, etc.) and agree with other researchers that any kind of well-organized phonics instruction is better than little or no-phonics.

In the last section the authors describe three phonics instructional activities that are consistent with the research summarized in the first two sections of the paper. The activities emphasize transfer help to learn how to read and develop children’s phonics skills. However, we would doubt possibilities to use them while teaching English as foreign language.

In conclusion P. Cunningham and J. Cunningham stress upon the necessity of wise debates about how to teach phonics and attempts to avoid simplistic solutions. Finally, the authors offer to read some national reports and commercial phonics instructional programs and to discuss three main questions: 1) how was the issue of children’s learning in general presented; 2) how was the issue of learning to decode by patterns and analogy treated; 3) how the approach expressed in the report and the programs differs from presents in their paper.

References

Cunningham P., Cunningham J. What We Know About How to Teach Phonics : [Електронний ресурс] – Режим доступу

http://www-tc.pbs.org/teacherline/courses/rdla155/pdfs/c2s3_7whatweknow.pdf