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Phonics are fundamental again
QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, August 25, 2022 Page 10
Back to the basics with phonics
by Sean Okula
Associate Editor
For one high school English teacher in Queens, the problem is simple: Some students lack the fundamentals of language required for the grade level.
“It’s like putting students in an advanced calculus class and they don’t know how to add or subtract yet,” he said.
While data from the Nation’s Report Card, a subsidary of the National Center for Education Statistics, says reading testing data for city fourth- and eighth-graders were roughly on par with the rest of the nation, the teacher, who preferred to remain nameless, says there are students excelling in his classes. It’s the disparity between those excelling and those struggling that has him concerned.
Channeling a youngster, he said, “If they’re worried about my self-esteem or my confidence, but I can’t handle [the workload], and they put me in an advanced class, how’s my self-esteem going to be when I get a 22 on a test and the guy next to me gets a 95?”
Mayor Adams and city Schools Chancellor David Banks have made it a priority since the start of the Adams administration to offer assistance to those struggling in the classroom, specifically those with learning disabilities. Adams himself struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia during his school years.
Part of their plan is the institution of a phonics-based early-learning program in city schools. Over the course of the upcoming school year, the city Department of Education will require teachers in grades kindergarten through second to have a “phonics-based, proven foundational literacy curriculum,” according to a May release.
Though the city does not track each school’s specific curriculum, it’s estimated roughly 200 of the 700 city public schools do not use phonics-based instruction, and a number of those that do are not implementing the structure as effectively as they should, according to Chalkbeat New York.
The teaching of phonics, which is a style that stresses the association between sounds and letters and letter structures, could help raise the academic floor described by the English teacher. According to a study performed by the National Reading Panel in the late 1990s, “systematic phonics instruction produces significant benefits for students in kindergarten through sixth grade and for children having difficulty learning to read,” according to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Phonics-based instruction stands in contrast to the reading instruction method pushed during the Bloomberg administration, branded “balanced literacy,” which is still used in many city schools, according to news outlet The City. The approach is a version of whole language teaching, which emphasizes teaching children to understand words as whole pieces of language working in context with other words.
Phonics builds reading development from the root, and teaches children to understand how words are formed rather than exclusively what they mean. The method focuses on sounds created by combinations of letters, breaking down reading into something that’s more of a process rather than a memorization of meanings behind combinations of letters than could seem abstract to a developing reader.
An example cited by the National Literacy Trust focuses around sounds for the letters “t,” “p,” “a” and “s.” Teaching students the sounds of letters can help them decode words they come across in their reading; if they know how “s,” “a” and “t” sound, they can sound out the word “sat.” That then leads to the understanding of multisyllabic words, such as “Sat-ur-day.” What the implementation of a phonics-based learning system at an early level could do is help mitigate the academic disparities experienced by the English teacher before struggling students reach his classroom. In the opinion of Jean Hahn, head of Queens Parents United and mother of an 11-year-old with ADHD, such implementation could be a “game-changer.”
“If all kids could read at the same level at an early age in a proper way, that would be the great equalizer,” she said. Q
Mayor Adams and city Schools Chancellor David Banks are putting phonics back in city classrooms.
Improving literacy
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