Phonics are the foundational base for proficient reading. Because of the shift in education toward whole language and balanced literacy, many students did not receive evidence-based instruction that prioritized (or, in some cases, included) phonics. This means that many struggling readers at the middle school level still have large phonological gaps. It is incredibly important that we determine those gaps through diagnostic assessments and that we address the gaps by explicitly teaching phonics. This will allow our students to continue on to higher literacy concepts, and become proficient readers. Without explicitly addressing phonological gaps, students will continue to flounder.
I teach mostly grade nine, so my familiarity with phonics was not high. Last year, I did some structured literacy instruction with two students who are unable to read in grade seven, and I learned a lot about phonics alongside them. I have seen gains in their understanding and literacy over the course of the year. So, I was implementing many of the recommendations, but without knowing why I was doing so. I appreciate having a better overview of phonics and how to best use phonics in my interventions with emergent readers. I definitely saw that breaking reading down into phonics that we then practiced blending was positive in my student’s progression toward reading.
I appreciated that Wiley Blevins explained that phonics allow faster acquisition of reading skills (2025). I see how critical phonics is for reading, and I wish that I took this course a few years ago, when my son entered kindergarten. He just finished grade two. He was taught the three cuing method in kindergarten and struggled with reading for kindergarten and grade one. He had an amazing teacher in grade one and grade two who retaught him phonics, but it took him longer to grasp all of the skills. Now, at the end of second grade, he finally seems to be getting it. I was very worried reading Blevin’s (2025) note that “Unfortunately, children who get off to a slow start in reading rarely catch up to their peers and seldom develop into strong readers (Stanovich, 1986; Juel, 1988). Those who experience difficulties decoding early on tend to read less and thereby grow less in terms of word recognition skills and vocabulary.” I very much hope that this is not my son! But honestly myself and my two sisters all had slow starts for reading (I began reading at the very end of grade one, and my younger sister was even later) and are now all very strong, prolific readers. George, my son, is very confident in his own reading abilities and is increasingly interested in reading. I hope that my own model as an avid reader can encourage him to also become a keen reader, and to disrupt the trend toward being a reluctant reader due to being a late reader. I was also interested to read that phonics instruction improves spelling ability. This was super interesting and possibly useful for me in teaching poor spellers at the middle school level. I am considering whether I might implement some spelling-related interventions in English 9 next year, such as Words Their Way, which I have heard good things about for a middle school level. I will also investigate later years phonics instruction. I wonder if I can find resources where I might support the students in noticing patterns and conducting orthographic mapping when unsure, in an age-appropriate way. I think that Words Their Way seems like it would be a good fit, but I will continue to look to see if I can also find more resources. I really loved the comparison in Flanigan et al (2022) of a teacher as a coach. This has appealed to me previously in readings for this course. I love the idea of giving students more opportunities to practice the phonics knowledge, as I think that I, too, need this practice. I need opportunities to try these ideas out and to apply them on the ground, playing around and making mistakes. Surely, as Flanigan et al state, students must also need this chance to spend time doing.
I definitely felt similar to the newly minted teacher in Flanigan, Solic, and Gordon’s (2022) article, who had no idea how to do phonics instruction, whether she should even be using it or one of another many programs mentioned to her, and how she should be implementing it. I teach middle school, not elementary, but I was trying this year to use structured literacy and phonics in my reading interventions. The questions about fidelity, general structure, and choice also all very much occurred to me and also had me a bit paralysed. I find phonics fairly confusing, and am still learning and figuring out what each concept (like grapheme) means. For me, reading about phonics is not super helpful, though Flanigan et al’s article was especially interesting. I need to use phonics in practice in order to better understand all of the parts of speech. I feel like I am gaining a better theoretical background, and will more fully understand when I get a few more opportunities to apply the ideas.
I am not that knowledgeable about phonemic awareness. I learned nothing about how children learn to read in my Bachelor of Education program—even though it was an elementary education program! Since I have been teaching middle school, my understanding of phonemic awareness has continued to be hazy. This past year, though, I had a few illiterate students, so I have been working to learn more about structured literacy and how to teach reading. Even with some understanding, my knowledge of the distinction between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness was not super clear cut. Now, after watching Dr. Brady’s video, and reading the associated materials, I think that I finally understand the difference between the two. It does feel, especially given what she said in referring to some of the sources she mentions, that many, many people mix up the two terms.
It was very interesting to hear her explain, using a comprehensive overview of the associated literature, that putting instructional emphasis on phonological awareness wastes students time, and does them a “disservice,” especially those students with lower socioeconomic status (Brady, 2022). I feel like early year teachers put lots of emphasis on the phonological awareness that she dismisses. My son’s teachers in his first years of school certainly taught segmentation and rhyming, and focused lots on onset and rime (his kindergarten teacher also used the three cuing method). Presumably, teachers are trained to do so in teacher education programs, when those do discuss how to learn to read at all. This seems to be an entirely new way of thinking that could have the potential to revolutionize the way we teach reading. Right now, teachers are doing their best, but generally did not seem to receive evidence-based training in teacher education programs, and certainly, once teaching, generally do not have a tonne of time to review the evidence themselves. Most fellow teachers I have met in this program did not receive adequate instruction on how to teach reading. How can we tighten reading instruction, especially in the early years of school, to ensure that students learn to read well and therefore learn to love reading?
If we can somehow convince teachers to abandon their long-held notions about phonological awareness, and encourage them to shift right to phonemic awareness, as is supported by the evidence, we can tighten and improve our teaching, and help students learn to read faster. When students have success early on in their reading instruction, they learn to think of themselves as capable readers, and subsequently want to read more (Morgan et al, 2008, qtd. in Brady, 2022). I have been thinking all day about how this early discouragement—being bad at reading makes them not want to read—translates into my grade nines, who are often very shut down about reading and do not want to read at all. How transformational if we can intervene early enough that we create generations of proficient, engaged, joyous readers!
I was excited and interested to hear that spelling errors give you insight into students’ phonemic gaps. I think that this is an important insight that can help teachers to better support and help their students. It was interesting and validating that Brady noted that integrating writing with reading helps accelerate the learning to read process, and that students are “empowered” when they “have the excitement and satisfaction of being able to write a note, being able to read a little book” (2022). I have seen often how, in my young son and in my teenage students, how producing their own writing empowers them. I teach my students to be writers, and believe that it is transformational for them to reflect on and process their experiences in writing.
I will certainly use the phonemic awareness recommendations that Brady suggests, such as skipping segmentation and rhyming, in my resource teaching blocks. I don’t know what my schedule will look like next year for my resource blocks, but, if I have time once again to work with emergent or struggling readers, I will certainly apply some of this. I was interested in the phonemic awareness tool Brady recommended in the follow-up questions linked below the talk, the PAT-2 NU, and I will most likely administer that as a diagnostic assessment for my emergent readers, if I can convince my learner support department to purchase it. It will be great to be able to pinpoint exactly which issues students have. I was also very interested in what she was saying about spelling, and how misspellings give you the evidence that you need to intervene with students. I certainly have had many poor spellers in English 9, and perhaps this will help me to intervene more strategically with those students next year. For me, phonemic awareness isn’t an enormous part of my day-to-day work, since I mostly teach grade nine, but I will work my new understandings into my intervention work.
In “Ending the reading wars,” Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle, and Kate Nation (2018) give a comprehensive overview of the scientific consensus about how children learn to read. They discuss how a consensus of studies show clearly how children progress from oral language skills to fluent reading. Explicitly teaching children phonics is incredibly critical in early school years, and is the essential foundation for reading. It is not the end of the learning journey, however: after learning phonics, children become fluent readers through vocabulary development, making connections with knowledge (some of which is developed through the process of reading), and developing strategies that allow them to become flexible readers. Instruction should thus focus on phonics in the early years but must move beyond that later. The authors suggest that we reframe balanced literacy to emphasise early phonics instruction alongside other activities meant to create a joyous literacy culture, and then a moving on beyond phonics to other literacy activities in the later years. The article aims to summarise the body of research related to learning to read to allow educators to make better decisions about developmentally informed, evidence-backed instruction. The authors note throughout that there remain many areas for further exploration, and that continuing to research specific areas of reading development can better hone our teaching—especially beyond the primary grades.
A better understanding of how students progress into fluent readers will help districts, literacy coordinators, and teachers to strategise reading instruction. Hopefully this overview can help educators to standardise an emphasis on early phonics within a broader framework in the primary years, and an emphasis on moving beyond phonics, except for interventions, in grade three and beyond. I would love to see the boring decodable books pushed less at elementary schools for children who have mastered the alphabetic principle, and high-quality books put into children’s hands, instead. This is shorn up by evidence that decodable books are only helpful in the earliest periods of instruction, and that they actually limit vocabulary exposure and development afterwards (Castles et al 2018, 16). The teaching of comprehension and reading strategies is interesting and, in my opinion, merits further understanding in order to better hone our teaching to be the most effective. I think that this article suggests generally limiting the teaching of general vocabulary, and also suggests that it is very effective to teach technical vocabulary or specific vocabulary before reading something with the words in it. Overall, we can improve the teaching of reading if educators, principals, and school district administration better understand the cognitive science of how children learn to read. I feel like, in my school district, we are shifting toward more structured literacy programs in elementary schools and in literacy intervention programs. I think that this is beneficial and good, but I hope that we do not become too prescriptive through this approach and that we do not discourage students from a love of reading by a laborious focus on phonics and decodable readers, at the expense of high-quality, exciting, interesting texts.
References
Brady, S. (2022). Phoneme awareness research updated. Reading Simplified. https://readingsimplified.com/susan-brady-phoneme-awareness/?psafe_param=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=20429512529&utm_content&utm_term&place&net=x&match&gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw3dCnBhBCEiwAVvLcu6Cv74ti28u3LDrq221IG6s_U5PS8kvthFfJNdDPkNeoAZmyi_ZcxxoC_3MQAvD_BwE
Blevins, W. (2025). Phonics: Ten important research findings. http://www.wileyblevins.com/teacher_and_parents/phonics-ten-important-research-findings
Castles, A., Rastle, K., and Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars. Psychological science in the public interest 19.1.
Flanigan, K., Solic, K., and Gordon, L. (2022). The “P” word revisited: 8 principles for tackling today’s questions and misconceptions about phonics instruction. The Reading Teacher 76.1: pp. 73-83. https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.1002/trtr.2101