Phonics In The 1970s

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1.5. Definition of key terms:

• Phonics: It refers to a system of instruction used to teach children the connection between letters and sounds (Snow et al., 1998). We do want to warn the reader, however, that this term is entirely abused and has many different meanings to different people. A generally agreed on definition may not be possible.

• Analogy phonics: Teaching students unfamiliar words by analogy to known words (e.g., recognizing that the rime segment of an unfamiliar word is identical to that of a familiar word, and then blending the known rime with the new word onset, such as reading brick by recognizing that -ick is contained in the known word kick, or reading stump by analogy to jump).
• Phonics through spelling: Teaching students to segment words into phonemes and to select letters for those phonemes (i.e., teaching students to spell words phonemically).

CHAPTER 2

Literature Review

2.1 Introduction: The term phonics during the 19th century and into the 1970s was used as a synonym of phonetics. The use of the term in reference to the method of teaching is dated to 1901 by the OED. Phonics derives from the Roman text The Doctrine of Littera which states that a letter (littera) consists of a sound (potestas), a written symbol (figura) and a name (nomen). This …show more content…

Whole language instruction was predicated on the principle that children could learn to read given (a) proper motivation, (b) access to good literature, (c) many reading opportunities, (d) focus on meaning, and (e) instruction to help students use meaning clues to determine the pronunciation of unknown words. For some advocates of whole language, phonics was antithetical to helping new readers to get the meaning; they asserted that parsing words into small chunks and reassembling them had no connection to the ideas the author wanted to