What do students need to know to understand phonics?

We have mentioned that developing phonological awareness and learning phonics are interrelated. As a student becomes more phonologically aware, he or she will be able to decode letters. With practice a student will begin to recognize letter combinations and patterns that form different words. This pattern-seeking function of the brain is what allows us to read. Children need to be taught which patterns to look for.

In order to learn phonics, children must be able to recognize:

• The concept of like and different
• Letters and how to differentiate between them (visual discrimination)
• How to discriminate between different sounds (auditory discrimination)
• The sounds of the English language (Phonological/phonemic awareness)
• The alphabetic principle (the understanding that letters are symbols that represent sounds)

In addition to the above concepts, children also need to recognize that there are exceptions to the phonics “rules” they are being taught. This is problematic because children need very concrete rules to follow and the exceptions to the phoneme/grapheme correspondence can be quite confusing. In the next section we will look at phonics generalizations and how we can help children recognize the exceptions.