PHONICS

PHONICS:  A literacy-teaching method that trains learners to use certain regularities and signals in the English spelling system to help them DECODE words in reading (to decode a word is to match the letters in the word to sounds in the language, thereby recognizing which word the letters spell). Phonics was developed in the 19th century; it has gone in and out of fashion in schools. It is currently experiencing a resurgence of interest; it is being combined with current knowledge about children's learning processes and included in language arts materials nationwide. Phonics is often contrasted with the approach known as 'whole language', but 'whole language' is hard to define. Phonics does include some holistic teaching strategies (see the discussion of phonograms below). Many modern literacy-training packages (including those approved by the state for use in California public schools) integrate phonics instruction with the plentiful reading and writing activities that whole-language approaches favor.
Letters are used to represent sounds in phonology, spelling, and phonics instruction (a letter is a printed or written character that represents a speech sound). However, each of these uses letters differently. The same letter may have a different value in a book on phonetics vs. a phonics book vs. the way it is used in English spelling. For instance, the vowel sound of the word seat is called 'long e' in phonics; it is spelled with /i/ in phonetics/phonology, and English spelling has a variety of ways of representing this sound: me, see, seat, receive, machine, people.
In phonetics/phonology, letters are used to represent sounds directly and uniquely: in phonetic alphabets, a letter has one and only one pronunciation (although there are numerous phonetic alphabets in use, e.g. in linguistics textbooks vs. in dictionaries). The letters have names, some of which are the same as the names in English spelling and phonics ('see' for  / c /  'kay' for / k /; some are different ('schwa' for the upside-down and backwards 'e'; 'angma' for the tailed-n symbol that represents the 'ng' sound.). In this text, I will always enclose phonological or phonetic letters in either slash brackets / / or square brackets [ ].
In phonics, letters are also used; they vary slightly from program to program. They have names such as 'long a', and there are names for classes of symbol types, e.g. 'digraphs' (a combination of two different letters used to represent a single sound, such as {sh} the first sound in the word <shoe>). Here, I enclose phonics symbols in curly brackets { }.
In English spelling, the letters have names ('ay', 'bee', 'see'). They are used in certain conventional ways to signal certain information about pronunciation. For example, consonant letters appear single, as in fill, and double, as in stuff. (there is some more detail on this below). English spelling is much more systematic than most people realize. We will enclose English orthographic symbols in angle brackets < >.
 / /, [ ] = phonology/phonetics symbols
{ } = phonics symbols
< > = English spelling letters

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