| Article Index |
|---|
| Phonics Phacts |
| What is Phonics? |
| Phonics as Method |
| How Much Phonics? |
| Further Reading |
| All Pages |
Page 2 of 5
What Is Phonics?English, together with many other European languages, is written with the Roman alphabet. Each language that uses this alphabet modifies it to fit the particular nature of that language. Spanish and French use accent marks over vowels, for example. Scandinavian languages add some vowel letters. English uses some letter combinations--th, sh, ch, ph--to represent single sounds.
In alphabetic writing, the letters and patterns of letters relate to meaning as well as to the sounds and sound patterns of the oral language. Phonics is a term that is only appropriate to use with an alphabetically written language because it refers to the system of relationships between the sound system and the writing system. Phonics is not the relationship between letters and sounds, but the relationships between systems. The relationships are much more complicated than letters to sounds.
Sometimes, it may seem like the relationship is between letters and sounds. In writing the word man, for example, the letters m, a, and n each relate to a sound of the oral word. But consider the word mane. The change in vowel sounds from man to mane involves the addition of an extra letter as a marker. The writing system uses the vowel-consonant-E pattern to differentiate two sets of English vowels. So we have pan/pane, can/cane, van/vane. There is another pattern in spelling that contrasts man/main, pan/pain, ran~rain. This illustrates that phonics really involves relating patterns to patterns, not individual sounds to individual letters.
But now consider other words, main and Maine , which sound the same as mane ; they are homophones. All languages--not just English--have homophones, words that mean different things but sound the same. Having different spellings for words that sound the same may help a bit in reading. For writing, however, one must remember which which/witch is which , which pair/pear/pare is the fruit. And, of course, words which sound different may be homographs, sharing the same spelling. Read/read , lead/lead , and desert/desert are examples.
English tends to have such complexities because of the multiple language roots that contributed to the language. The letter N seems to be a stable spelling of the last sound in man. But from our Danish roots we get kn as in know , knew , knee , knight , knife , etc. From our Greek roots we get gnaw , gnat , gneiss . We also get the pn spelling in pneumonia and pneumatic . A variant of the n sound can be spelled gn at the ends of words, as in campaign , reign , and sign/resign/design . That comes from our French roots.
But notice that when sign becomes signal , the g and n represent separate sounds. That happens also with designate . But if the affixes are grammatical, like s , ed , or ing , there is no g sound: signs , signed , signing .
Here's another problem with our n sound spellings. That sound is what linguists call a nasal. It kind of goes up our noses. In many dialects of English, it all but disappears up our noses before certain consonants, particularly t and d . Examples are want , went , band , bend . The spelling keeps the n even though it's a fairly weak sound in these words.
This is not a unique complexity. A unit like man may represent a different sound pattern depending on the word it is a part of (for example, manic and maniac ). In oral language, sounds change in regular ways depending on other sounds preceding and following them. That's partly due to the changing positions of mouth parts for each sound; as tongue, lips, teeth, and vocal chords change position, they change the sounds. The spelling, however, often does not change. An example is site . Add an affix and that becomes situate . The t of site is still there but the sound is not t but ch . When situate becomes situation , the second t stays in the spelling but the sound goes from t to sh . By keeping the spelling, we preserve the meaning relationship which would be lost if we
kept the phonic relationship constant.
Add one more common complexity of English phonics. Several hundred years ago, the sound of all unaccented vowels shifted to a common sound, usually called schwa by language scholars. So the vowel in the unaccented second syllable of woodsman is not the vowel in man but a schwa. Function words like to , can , was , were , and or are usually unaccented. That means that at least the second most common sound of any vowel is this very common sound. Think of the sounds of the vowels in this sentence: Can I have a ticket to the game? Five of the vowels shift to the schwa in ordinary usage.
By now you may be thinking, if phonics is so complicated, how come people can read at all?" The answer is that people don't depend on phonics to read. In meaningful language contexts it is easy for a reader to sort out the complexity because the meaning and the grammar, or language structure, clarify the phonics complexities. Here are some examples:
The main feature of the male lion is his redmane . I read about that in a book I got in the mail last week. I like to read such books. In this sequence, telling red from read or the past tense from the present tense of read is no problem. The context makes it clear.
Readers never rely solely on phonic relationships as they read. Their preoccupation is with meaning, as it should be. They predict what will be in the text and only need a little of the phonic information to make sense of the whole. So they are rarely stopped while they figure out what a word might be from its spelling. They have plenty of other cues to tell them what the meaning must be and what part of speech they need. Furthermore, the way we eventually learn the alternative spellings of the same sound sequence in words that are homophones is through our reading.
