ABSTRACT
Phonics is a very important component of reading. The National Reading Panel report (2000) concluded that through examination of numerous studies that systematic and explicit phonics instruction makes a bigger contribution to children’s growth in reading than alternative programs providing unsystematic or no phonics instruction. John Hattie (2009, p. 134) further reinforced through his meta-analysis of research the importance of phonics instruction, “Overall, phonics instruction is powerful in the process of learning to read – both for reading skills and reading comprehension.” There are many books for educators that dive into all of the aspects related to phonics. For the purpose of our book, we want teachers to understand that phonics is a critical component, to identify phonics skills mastered and not mastered by students, and to understand that to remediate phonics skills, students should receive an intervention that has a strong scope and sequence taught in a systematic and explicit way. The National Reading Panel report (2000) states the following:
For children with learning disabilities and children who are low achievers, systematic phonics instruction, combined with synthetic phonics instruction produced the greatest gains. Synthetic phonics instruction consists of teaching students to explicitly convert letters into phonemes and then blend the phonemes to form words.
Moreover, systematic synthetic phonics instruction was significantly more effective in improving the reading skills of children from 48low-socioeconomic levels. Across all grade levels, systematic synthetic phonics instruction improved the ability of good readers to spell.
(p. 5)