Hallelujah! A light bulb went on in your head. You could produce a string of sounds from a word’s letters, and you would suddenly recognize the word. When you met an unfamiliar word you could “sound it out,” and nine times out of ten it turned out to be a word you already knew. Photo by MEHEDI HASAN ( KΛΛSH ) on Unsplash. Yet, even with all these exceptions, the whole thing hung together and made a kind of sense. For example, sometimes the sound normally represented by the letter f is actually spelled with the two letters “ph,” as in “telephone.” Sometimes the two-letter combination “ch” is pronounced like a hard c or a k, as in “chorus,” not with the soft “ch” sound of “chair.” And so forth, and so on. We were taught that phonics rules had exceptions-quite a few of them, actually. “Y,” also interestingly, can sound like a long “i,” as in “tyke,” or as a long “e,” as in “candy,” or as a short “i,” as in “bicycle.” But sometimes it has a special motive force of its own, as in “Yankee.”

We learned that “c” is sometimes hard, as in “cat,” and sometimes soft, as in “recess.” Interestingly, “bicycle” has a soft c and a hard c, both in one word. We learned that “a” can be pronounced long, as in “bake” short, as in “flag” soft, as in “father” and so forth. I hold no brief for British, ANZAC, or South African speakers who utter tortured diphthongs where we would use vowels.) They leaked the remarkable secret that each letter represents one or more sounds in the spoken English language. When I was a kid in 1951-yes, 72 years ago-our teachers taught us phonics. Other reading curriculums that don’t include phonics have been shown to be less effective for students.”īipartisan? Could peace be at hand in the Great Reading War? “According to, only about 20 percent of school districts are using a phonics-based approach to literacy education. Instead of being taught reading through pictures, word cues and memorization, children would be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on learning to sound out letters and phrases. “A bipartisan bill is expected to be released this month that would change the way most public schools in Wisconsin teach reading,” reported Corinne Hess. A news story stunned my ears last week, courtesy of Wisconsin Public Radio.

A Passing Game by Beverly Sommers