As most readers will know, those of us who recommend teaching young children how to decode—to parse the spoken sound stream, learn letter-sound relationships, blend sounds, sound out words, and practice reading words so that reading them is automatic and fluent—are often dismissed as advocates of boring instruction. Drill-and-kill. Creating rote word-callers. Turning off kids to reading.

Well, I see those critiques as...how to be polite?...pony poop.

If I understand the drill-and-kill critique, it is largely focused on repetitions of the same materials (i.e., the same words or spelling patterns over and over): “Ahh, ahh, apple” or “Nat, a fat cat, sat on a mat.”

That critique’s bogus! There are at least three reasons for saying so:

1. First, simply demonstrating letter-sound correspondences is insufficient instruction. Telling children, “Buh, buh, baby” is terribly disconnected from the terminal behavior we want children to learn. To be successful decoders, learners need to see the letter ‘m,’ ‘say /mmm/.’” To be sure, ‘b’ is not pronounced “buh,” but more importantly, the learner needs to provide the pronunciation, not the teacher. Sure, teachers can demonstrate the correct pronunciation, but the learner has to be the person who generates it. [Pirate: “Arrgh! Misinstrrrrrruction.”]

2. Second, providing instructional materials composed of a host of rhyming words will likely lead some learners to form misrules—guess which learners to whom I’m referring with my emphasis “some”). I’m not a fan of “rules” but I know instructors can induce them in children’s learning, and teaching pattern learning like that would likely cause problems for some children: They’d get the idea that all they have to do is say the sound for the first letter (/n/, /f/, /c/, /s/...and then rhyme with /at/—onset-rhyme taken too far). What a horrible dis-service to learners. They wouldn’t learn to sound out the word and get a much better approximation of its pronunciation. [Pirate: “Arrgh! Misinstrrrrrruction.”]

3. Third, the drill-and-kill critique is mostly aimed at a strawdog. Only very few phonics programs recommend such spelling-pattern instruction as represented in “Nat the fat cat...”. I think the 1960s Lippencot program came close, but that wasn’t the only thing it did. Effective reading programs such as Reading Mastery have students reading connected text very early, not just tediously sounding out words; children are reading multi-sentence passages by December of their first year of instruction. They are not simply calling words! If a program doesn’t have kids reading real (maybe not “authentic”) sentences by the end of their first few months in school, it’s a failing program. [Pirate: “Arrgh! Misinstrrrrrruction.”]

I could go on and on...but let me summarize: Phonics instruction is important in teaching bginning readers, and critics of old-style phonics instruction are right when they criticize excessive focus on spelling patterns and unneeded practice. But some of those who lodge such critiques often miss the instructional subtleties that are incorporated in effective programs.

If any reader wants a master course in teaching reading, study Carnine et al.’s Direct Instruction Reading (any edition, but the most recent would be best). These authors have studied reading instruction for nearly 50 years; they know what they (and other sensisble researchers) are talking about with regard to teaching. [I get no renumeration from posting this recommendation.]

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