'Horatio Speaks': Does phonics help or hinder comprehension?

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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'Horatio Speaks': Does phonics help or hinder comprehension?

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

This piece is published by 'Horatio Speaks' via the 'Thinking-Writing' blog - it features the importance of phonics for reading and provides references for this question:
Does phonics help or hinder comprehension?
https://thinkingreadingwritings.wordpre ... rehension/
A recent TES article headlined “Call for researchers to highlight negative ‘side effects’ of methods like phonics” drew a predictable response. Though the article supplied not one piece of evidence to support the assertion that phonics had “negative side effects”, and despite the academic quoted having zero background or expertise in reading science, tweets and comments celebrated this damning of the barbaric practice of phonics in schools.

Both the article and the responses illustrates the strong prejudices that have to be overcome before early reading instruction is universally of sufficient quality to ensure that we really are a literate society – i.e. one in which all school leavers have good, not just functional or non-functional, reading and writing skills. But – does phonics help or hinder comprehension? Is it merely, as Michael Rosen and his followers have characterised it, “barking at print”? It seems to me that this question is at the heart of much resistance to phonics. Many people seem to believe that phonics in reading means that other aspects of reading are not taught, or that phonics will actually interfere with students’ enthusiasm for reading, or that phonics will hinder students’ comprehension.
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