Worth a read

'...phonics programs have been used to explicitly teach alphabetic coding skills to beginning readers. However, these programs generally suffer from two major shortcomings. First, they tend to be strongly teacher-centered and have curricula that are rigid, fixed, and lock-step, with the same skill-and-drill lesson given to every child in the same sequence. Such an approach to teaching beginning reading conflicts with the basic principles of differentiated instruction because it fails to recognize that the individual literary learning needs of children vary greatly depending on their specific levels of development across the set of reading component skills shown in Figure 1. Second, most phonics programs incorrectly assume that children can only acquire knowledge of letter-sound patterns through direct instruction in which the teaching of letter-sound correspondences is explicit and systematic. The difficulty with this assumption, however, is that there are simply too many letter-sound relationships in English orthography for children to acquire by direct instruction, probably between 300 and 400 (Gough & Hillinger, 1980). Much, if not most, of what children learning to read in English come to know about its written orthography is acquired through implicit learning, especially knowledge of context sensitive letter-sound correspondences that depend on position-specific constraints or the presence of other letters (Bryant, 2002; Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011; Venezky, 1999). In contrast, letter-sound correspondences acquired by direct phonics instruction are fewer in number and are largely context free, involving one-to-one correspondences between single letters or digraphs and single phonemes. As the reading attempts of beginning readers who have acquired basic alphabetic coding skills become more successful, the orthographic representations of more words become established in lexical memory from which additional spelling-sound relationships can be induced without explicit instruction. As children continue to develop in reading, they begin making greater independent use of letter-sound information to identify novel printed words in text. Once this point is reached, the most effective way that children can achieve further progress in learning to read is through print exposure, as reading itself can provide practice opportunities for building fluency and for facilitating implicit learning of additional letter-sound patterns (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011). Figure 4. The transition from analytic to automatic processing of words in text as represented in the listening comprehension process model presented earlier. Although children must rely increasingly on induction to acquire the letter-sound relationships necessary for learning to read, explicit phonics instruction plays an important role in helping to “kick start” the process by which beginning readers acquire untaught letter-sound relationships through implicit learning. Phonics instruction is therefore best thought of as a means to an end and not an end itself (Venezky, 1999).

William E. Tunmer & Wesley A. Hoover (2019) The cognitive foundations of learning to read: a framework for preventing and remediating reading difficulties, Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 24:1, 75-93, DOI: 10.1080/19404158.2019.1614081