As Lida Williams mentioned, virtually 100 years ago: Phonics is not a method of teaching reading, however it is really a required part of every good, contemporary method. It really is the crucial to word mastery, and word mastery is one of the initial essentials in learning to read. A knowledge of the sounds of letters, and of the effect from the position of the letter upon its sound, is an essential means of mastering the mechanics of reading, and of enabling children to turn out to be independent readers. 100 years later, this still holds accurate. Sadly, since the later half in the 20th century, there has been a great debate on what method of teaching is best to teach youngsters how to read: regardless of whether phonics or the whole language approach is much better. The entire language technique became the preferred approach in the education system - unfortunately. The whole language learning to read technique is much more of a "word memorization" plan, exactly where a young child is supposed to memorize the "shape" in the word, and say it. Since then, thousands of studies, have proven phonics and phonemic awareness to become superior in teaching children to read and create, and although many nevertheless like to debate this for what ever reasons, I feel this debate was settled when the National Reading Panel stated that teaching phonics and phonemic awareness produces better reading final results than whole language programs following their study which reviewed and identified 1,962 studies on this topic. It is important to distinguish the difference among phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. Phonological awareness is quite broad, and consists of phonemic awareness as a sub category. Phonemic awareness is very narrow, and it's only focused on the phonemes, which are the individual sounds of letters. There are no shortage of studies which have repeatedly discovered, and concluded that teaching phonemic awareness to young youngsters produces exceptional reading and spelling abilities. You can read more about analysis on phonemic awareness right here. The whole language method merely expects a child to "read" when presented reading material, and by memorizing sight words. The phonics technique is actually a bottom up strategy where you teach children to read inside a logical and sequential order. You first teach kids the alphabet letters and also the sounds they represent; then you teach kids to combine (or blend) numerous letter sounds together to form words; which is then followed by reading sentences and simple stories. This is a logical progression for kids learning to read, exactly where they develop accuracy in decoding words and pronouncing words. This method of teaching also assists the child to spell correctly. There's no doubt that phonics and phonemic awareness instruction will be the superior approach to teach children how to read. We have effectively employed phonemic awareness instructions to Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons our youngsters at age 2 to read words, sentences, paragraphs, and straightforward story books.