There is a lot of debate in certain educational circles over whether phonics is better or sight reading is better. Proponents of sight reading usually point to the fact that kids get off to a quick start and see “success” right away, thus boosting their confidence. Proponents of phonics…well, I’ll get to that.
I am solidly in the camp of “phonics is better” for children who are developing more-or-less normally. (Sight reading was originally encouraged in schools for the deaf, which makes a lot of sense when you consider it’s probably pretty tricky to “sound out” a word if you literally can’t hear it.) Why?
You know that old adage about teaching a man to fish?
“Give a man fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” Sight reading is the reading equivalent of giving a man a fish, while phonics is the equivalent of teaching him to fish.
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Sight reading relies entirely on teaching students to memorize a list of words. This is great – as long as they never have to read any words other than those on the list. Phonics, on the other hand, teaches students to decipher words by their building blocks, enabling them to read any (English) words that are put in front of them.
Why the Debate?
Now, a lot of confusion creeps in because there’s some overlap. Some few children will, through the process of looking at their sight words over and over, subconsciously figure out the basic rules of phonics. And those who learn phonics will decipher the most common English words over and over so often they eventually will actually have them memorized.
But we greatly improve children’s chances of learning phonics if we teach it to them on purpose, rather than simply hoping they’ll pick it up on their own. And just because children eventually have memorized a subset of words through frequent use does not mean we don’t have to teach them how to read. That’s kind of like saying we shouldn’t teach children how to add; we should just make them memorize addition facts.
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