ILA Makes It Clear: Students Need Systematic, Explicit Phonics via EdWeek

Meeting the Challenges of 

Early Literacy Phonics Instruction

Influential Reading Group Makes It Clear: Students Need Systematic, Explicit Phonics

EdWeek: 7.18.2019 by Stephen Sawchuk

The International Literacy Association has put out a new brief endorsing "systematic and explicit" phonics in all early reading instruction.

"English is an alphabetic language. We have 26 letters. These letters, in various combinations, represent the 44 sounds in our language," the ILA brief released last week reads. "Teaching students the basic letter-sound combinations gives them access to sounding out approximately 84% of the words in English print." 

It's a strong statement from an influential, big-tent organization whose members, which include teachers, researchers, and parents, have traditionally held a wide range of views on reading approaches.

"

It's kind of a refreshing piece," said Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "A lot of people think ILA is an anti-phonics group, but it's a large group."

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This may seem like common sense: Of course students need to be taught letters and sounds. But for any of you who have spent any time in the early-reading space, it gets right to the heart of the decades-old reading wars.

Almost all reading researchers agree that factors like motivation, access to a print-rich environment, and good books matter in a reading program. The reading wars are really a debate on a small—but critical—piece: The relative importance of phonics, sometimes called "decoding."

The pro-phonics folks tend to view phonics as a bridge to meaning, reasoning that they're a necessary step toward being able to read any word. Proponents of whole language or its successor "balanced literacy," which is a common approach used in U.S. schools today, generally emphasize meaning first, mixing small-group reading of literature with lots of student choice of reading materials. Those approaches tend to subordinate phonics, emphasizing learning words through memorization, context clues, and pictures.  READ MORE >>