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6 Tips for Teaching Phonics to Struggling Readers
The United States is currently experiencing a major crisis. According to a Department of Education study, only 79% of US adults are able to read. Even more alarming, another Department of Education study conducted in 2020 found that 54% of US adults aged 16 to 74 lack literary proficiency. This means that roughly 130 million Americans, over one-third of our country’s entire population, can only read at the most basic level but cannot comprehend complex sentences or grasp the meaning of extended passages after reading at length. These two statistics, taken together, should be setting off alarm bells across our nation. We are fast approaching a future where the average US citizen will be incapable of gaining access to knowledge, learning, or developing basic skills because they are unable to understand the written word.
But instead of rallying together to bolster the skills of our students and help them secure a brighter future, the call to action has largely fallen on deaf ears. As educators, it’s no secret that most states continue to slash annual education spending. Permanent tax cuts for corporations and the highest income brackets have left state budgets with far less funding to allocate, resulting in a race to the bottom to see which bucket of state funding gets the axe first. Unfortunately, the education budget is becoming an increasingly common target for large cuts. According to the National Education Policy Center, 39 of all 50 states are funding public education at levels below where they were prior to the 2007-2009 recession. During the economic crisis caused by the housing crash, many states dipped into the education budget to alleviate other economic problems they were facing at the time. However, these funds were never reallocated to education when the crisis ended, causing many of the budget cuts to become permanent by default.
So, our country is facing a literacy crisis, and no help from the state or federal government appears to be coming soon. But that doesn’t mean all is lost. Teaching phonics to students who are struggling with reading is a tried-and-true method of increasing reading proficiency. As a result, phonics books have become an increasingly important part of the classroom library ensemble. But what can teachers do to successfully teach phonics to students who are rapidly being left behind by their peers in terms of proficiency? In this guide, the experts at Booksource have compiled six trusted methods for giving your struggling readers a leg up using phonics.
What is Phonics?
Phonics is a specific strategy that teaches reading skills by focusing on helping students connect the sounds of spoken letters with their written counterparts. This method of teaching reading skills is far from new. Some historians believe the practice of using phonics to teach language and reading goes back thousands of years. At the very least, we have evidence that phonics was being taught to children over 350 years ago.
There’s a reason the method is so long-lived. It just works. Phonemes are an inherent part of spoken language and represent the smallest units of sound that distinguish one word from another. They are the most basic building blocks that make up spoken words. In theory, if you can teach a child to recognize and understand these phonemic sounds and their corresponding letters or letter combinations (graphemes), they should be able to decode and recognize any written word using them.
Modern phonics instruction is geared towards helping students identify phonemes and their corresponding graphemes so that they can break down text into its constituent parts. By understanding these building blocks, students can reassemble them with attached sounds to produce meaning. In essence, it helps teach kids how to reverse engineer language. Pretty cool, right?
The Most Effective Strategies for Teaching Phonics
Because phonics as a method of teaching has been around for an extremely long time, we have the benefit of many years of experience to pull from when choosing the best methods to help struggling students. There are six strategies which every phonics curriculum should have to help students grasp the basics of reading. These are:
- Learning Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) words
- Learning vowel sounds
- Identifying phonetic patterns (such as blends, digraphs, and diphthongs)
- Training with nonsense words (to reinforce decoding skills)
- Word slides (to practice blending sounds)
- Review and repetition of concepts (to reinforce learning)
Knowledge of Consonants and Learning CVC Words
One of the best places to start phonics instruction is one of the most basic units of the English language: Consonant sounds and Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) words. Instruction typically starts with teaching students simple consonant sounds they are likely to encounter while reading. Then, students apply the consonant sounds by sounding out CVC words. These are words that start with a consonant, have a vowel in the middle, and end with another consonant. For example, the word “cat” is a CVC word.
Focusing on consonant sounds and CVC words is important for a multitude of reasons. First, this allows students to begin learning how to blend sounds together, which is the initial building block upon which reading is built. These simple words require students to first identify the sounds associated with each letter, determine the proper context for the vowel sound, sound everything out, and then put it all together. Second, CVC words are often the first step to understanding syllables. For example, “cat” is part of the word “category.” Teaching students to identify and read these smaller words first is crucial to learning to read multi-syllabic words later. Finally, it gives students a much-needed feeling of accomplishment. This is especially important for students who have struggled with reading. Having students correctly apply their skills to read simpler words shows them they too can learn to read if they follow the strategy they’ve been taught.
Learning Vowel Sounds
Once students are familiar with consonant sounds, and have begun using that knowledge to sound out CVC words, it’s time to focus on another crucial component of reading: Vowels. All words contain vowels, meaning grasping the connection between vowel sounds and written vowels allows students to understand a significant chunk of the English language right away. Additionally, because vowels serve as the building blocks for many words, mastering this concept helps students build a foundation for more complex phonics patterns, making future lessons much easier to grasp.
Make sure to distinguish between long and short vowel sounds. This is one of the trickiest parts of reading for many students because vowels can change their sounds based on the surrounding context of the word they’re a part of. For example, “apple” has a short A vowel sound at the beginning of the word, whereas “plane” has a long A vowel sound in the middle of the word. Teaching students to recognize vowel context is crucial for reading proficiency.
Identifying Phonetic Patterns
Sounding out vowels and reading CVC words is one thing, but many students feel suddenly overwhelmed when handed a page containing a lot of text, even if the words on it are simple. Teaching students that the same rules about letters, sounds, and phonemes they’ve learned so far are universal is an integral next step.
Instead of having students “read” words from a large page of text, have them instead go through and highlight or underline phonic groupings they recognize from previous lessons. This gives them an important guide as they make their way through the text by identifying what’s familiar to them. Not only does this help them to recognize the building blocks of words, but it also helps students visualize how to apply what they’ve learned.
Once your students have finished identifying the patterns they recognize, ask them to attempt to read a few of the words using what you’ve taught them about sounding out the different letters and putting them together. It may take a few tries, but when students finally start making those connections and reading words for themselves, it’s like a key opening a door for the first time.
Training with Nonsense Words
This tactic has gotten a lot of flak recently. There’s some opposition to this idea based on the notion that nonsense words aren’t “useful,” but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The idea is simple. Instead of practicing on actual CVC words, teachers create words using consonants and vowels that don’t spell a real word. The student is then instructed to approach reading out the phonetic patterns like it was a real word.
While it’s true these fake words don’t offer the same usefulness as CVC words, which often form actual syllables that are used in other words, nonsense words provide another key skill to students: Learning to deal with the unknown. When first starting to read, it’s easy for students to recognize phonetic patterns or CVC words they’ve learned before and to simply fill in the context with prior knowledge. While this is also an important skill to have, there will eventually be a point when a student is asked to read a more complex text that contains words with graphemes representing the phonemes they are completely unfamiliar with. To a struggling student, complex, multi-syllabic words may already seem like a bunch of nonsense to them. But by training them to identify and sound out the parts of a word, even if it isn’t real, nonsense words give students the tools they need to approach and overcome reading challenges that are wholly new to them.
Word Slides
Throughout phonics, the common theme is students are asked to sound out the letters they’re reading on a page, and then to put it all together to successfully form a word. Eventually, students should be asked to do this process in their head. But when they’re first starting out, physical motions accompanying verbal intonations have proven to be an effective device to help students visualize the word in their mind.
We’re of course talking about “word slides.” This fun process asks students to tap out the letters and sounds of a word on either their arm or fingers, making a motion to “slide” all the sounds together while saying it out loud. For students who struggle to assemble combined sounds on their own, this technique can help them work through the word until they can sound it out for themselves.
Repetition and Reminders
Like any concept taught in school, it’s important for students to be reminded of what they learned and asked to apply it. This is especially true when introducing new concepts that build on older ones. It’s highly encouraged to frequently reference previous phonics lessons to keep them fresh in a student’s mind.
Start each new phonics lesson with a brief review of the concepts learned in previous lessons. Ideally, the review should take the form of an engaging activity that encourages students to participate. Games like phonics bingo, word sorts, or matching games that require students to apply both new and old phonics skills are a great way to reinforce prior lessons and get students excited for the new knowledge. Choral reading and flashcards are also great ways to include all students and help them refresh what they know.
It's also a good idea to create stylized charts that illustrate key concepts of phonics. Place these charts around the classroom and refer to them during lessons. The charts serve as a constant helpful reference to students as they learn new phonics concepts.
Improve Literacy with Phonics Materials from Booksource
While many groups have brushed off the shocking illiteracy rates present in our country's schools, Booksource has decided to take action. We know that the key to helping our kids become more proficient readers begins with the encouragement and instruction provided by dedicated educators like you. That’s why we’ve created carefully curated collections of phonics and decodable books for classroom libraries. From basic phonics books that teach letters and sounds to those covering rhymes and homophones, we provide a wide range of resources. We even offer phonics books to help Spanish-speaking students better understand how to read in English.
Moreover, Booksource has introduced the Phonics Take Home Practice Pack. This resource provides K-3 students with packs of decodable texts matched to the phonics skills required for successful reading and supports any phonics curriculum. The included workbook engages students and families with five hours of activities designed to build phonological skills and phonemic awareness, strengthening decoding skills and fostering parent engagement.
Additionally, Booksource offers custom-curated collections that align with foundational skills programs, such as UFLI Foundations, Wilson Fundations, LETRS, and many more.
Together, we can address the literacy crisis plaguing our nation and open worlds of possibilities for our students. Speak with one of our classroom library experts today to build the perfect custom phonics learning package for your students.
