Overcoming Phonicphobia: How I Conquered My Irrational Fear of Teaching Phonics

From the time I began formal schooling at the age of 5 until I was about 15, I was completely terrified of going to school. It wasn’t that I was bullied or that I failed to achieve academically; on the contrary, I was generally an A/B student who got along fine with classmates. Yet almost every day I would experience near crippling anxiety during school. Didaskaleinophobia, or school phobia as it is more commonly known, can result in children throwing temper tantrums, excessively crying, complaining of headaches, stomachaches, and sore throats, or even physically refusing to go to school. As a child, I displayed many of these behaviors regularly to the bewilderment of my parents and teachers. Of course, like all phobias, it was completely irrational.

Fast forward to my mid-twenties, and naturally, I’d become a teacher. And though I had managed to overcome my irrational fear of school, I had fallen victim to a far more insidious phobia. Unfortunately, not only did it negatively impact me, but it also adversely affected my young students. I call it phonicphobia, which I define as the persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted fear of teaching phonics explicitly and systematically. As a result of my phonicphobia, I regularly avoided teaching the foundational sound-symbol correspondences of English. In fact, I often intentionally discouraged my young students from utilizing a phonetic approach to read. Instead, I encouraged them to memorize a large quantity of “sight words” and to guess at unknown words by using contextual or meaning-based cues. For example, I would regularly tell students the following: “Oh, you don’t know that word? Can you figure it out by looking at the picture? Can you figure it out by reading the rest of the sentence and guessing the word that would make the most sense?” Rarely did I encourage students to sound out words.

Many will recognize this instructional approach as a mix of whole-language teaching and the three-cueing system. Both are based on the refuted theories of Kenneth Goodman (1967) and Frank Smith (1971). I read much of Goodman and Smith’s work as an undergraduate and credit their ideas as being the catalyst for my acute case of phonicphobia I describe above. According to them, learning to read is a natural process akin to how we learn to speak and understand our native language(s). As such, there’s no need to bother with explicit, systematic phonics instruction; reading will simply emerge naturally given the right conditions (i.e., a print rich environment with plenty of opportunities to engage meaningfully with texts). These influential gurus and their legion of faithful followers were also fond of claiming that the spelling-sound correspondences of English are so replete with irregularities that they are of little use when learning to read.

As you may surmise, applying this faulty theory to classroom instruction did not prove fruitful. Those students who already came to school as readers excelled despite the poor instruction I provided. However, those students at risk for experiencing reading difficulties made painfully little progress and subsequently fell behind.

Although I did sprinkle phonics into my instruction here and there, I couldn’t do more than 5 minutes of it before my phonicphobia would get the best of me whereupon I would immediately revert to teaching students to memorize words or to use context to guess. Worst yet, when students utilized these ineffective reading strategies, I praised them thereby reinforcing bad habits. “That’s what good readers do!” I would ignorantly tell them. But as I will explain in more detail below, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Admittedly, it took too long for me to figure out that whole-language teaching and the three-cueing system approach did not work. Sadly, I blamed my students’ lack of progress almost exclusively on other factors such as their home lives, poverty, their limited access to books, and their classification as English Language Learners (ELLs). Granted, these factors can and do play a role in the literacy achievement of many students. Still, it was much easier for me to blame these other variables, which resided largely outside of my locus of control as a classroom teacher, than to dedicate the time and effort to become better at my craft. It’s funny how we can completely ignore the hard reality of our own failures as educators if we have internalized a narrative that allows us to interpret those failures as the fault of others.

Curing Phonicphobia

The real turning point for me came when my daughter, who at the time was in kindergarten, began experiencing reading difficulties. My efforts to teach her to read were failing, even though none of the other factors I had always thought really produced poor readers were present. In a desperate search for answers, I dove headfirst into the theory and research that has come to be known as the Science of Reading (SoR). One of my first aha! moments was the realization that reading is not a natural process. We rewire our brains in specific ways as we learn to read (Dehaene, 2004). This rewiring process entails the mapping of speech sounds to print. These mappings are stored as representations in memory allowing for effortless and automatic word recognition (Ehri, 2014). As it turns out, using contextual cues to guess words or trying to memorize words as whole units are grossly inefficient strategies to employ when learning to read (Just & Carpenter, 1987; Stanovich, 1993; Seidenberg, 2017).

I was also surprised to learn that although the opaqueness of English orthography does present certain challenges for emerging readers, the English written system is not illogical in nature. With relatively few exceptions, English spelling follows logical principles (Moats, 2005/2006). Informed teachers can help students understand these principles thereby providing clarity and structure to that which may appear to be chaotic and unpredictable. Moreover, the fact that the English system is relatively opaque when compared to other languages such as Spanish doesn’t mean educators should abandon teaching sound-spelling correspondences in a structured way. Indeed, this opaqueness is even more reason to implement an explicit, systematic instructional approach.

Fortunately, when I began enacting what I learned from my study of SoR with my daughter, the results were undeniably positive. After just a few months of consistent phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, she began to effortlessly and automatically read those same words she could only venture guesses at before. This then freed up more mental space allowing her to focus on the meaning of texts. As you might imagine, this greatly boosted her motivation. It’s amazing how actually learning to read can enhance a child’s desire to...well…read.

In closing, please oblige me as I dutifully recite this standard disclaimer. No, phonics is not a panacea, as SoR skeptics rightly point out. To my knowledge, no one argues it is. Phonics instruction won’t completely erase the effects of poverty or magically give students access to print-rich environments at home. In my current role, many students I regularly support are learning English as a second or third language, and if I were to just teach them phonics without the infusion of English language development and rich content instruction, I would be doing them a huge disservice. Of course, comprehension—the ability to extract meaning from text—is the goal. But as Anita Archer rather matter-of-factly states, “There is no comprehension strategy powerful enough to compensate for the fact that you can’t read the words.” She’s right. We must spend the time necessary to teach students how to break the code. Sure, we can have nuanced discussions about how much phonics instruction to provide and for how long. But what we can’t do is continue to put our faith in refuted theories and the faulty instructional approaches that were developed from them. Our children deserve better; they deserve educators who have overcome their irrational fear of phonics.

Resources

Dehaene, S. (2010). Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read. Penguin Books.

Ehri, L. (2014) Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, Spelling memory, and vocabulary learning, Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5-21.

Goodman, K. S. (1967). Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist, 6(4), 126–135.

Just, M.A., & Carpenter, P.A. (1980). A theory of reading: From eye fixation to comprehension. Psychological Review, 87, 329-354.

Moats, L. C. (2005/2006, winter). How spelling supports reading: And why it is

more regular and predictable than you may think. American Educator, 29(4),

12–22, 42–43.

Smith, F. (Ed.) 1972. Psycholinguistics and reading. Holt.

Seidenberg, M. S. (2017). Language at the speed of sight. Basic Books.

Stanovich, K. E. (1993). The language code: Issues in word recognition. In S. Yussen & M. C. Smith (Eds.), Reading across the life span (pp. 111-135). New York: Springer-Verlag.

About the Author: David Burns has worked as an ESL/bilingual teacher, instructional coach, and administrator in Puerto Rico and in various public schools across the US. He recently founded Principia Learning, a company dedicated to translating the fundamental principles underlying language, literacy, and learning into effective instructional practices for educators. Feel free to contact him directly @ David.burns@principialearning.org