ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses explicit phonics instruction that has been advocated in order to help beginning readers learn the predictable consonant grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences and contextual information in English writing so that they can develop probabilistic reasoning. There have always been a number of phonics methodologies. These methods evolved before there was accurate psycholinguistic information about how people process letters and words in reading. Synthetic methods are useful for learning transparent orthographies such as Spanish, Italian, or German, but they are only somewhat useful for English for reasons that will be clarified. In synthetic methodologies, grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are taught directly and explicitly through the use of rules that were called phonic generalizations. Another phonics instructional method is called the Linguistic Method, is based on learning key spelling patterns like at, bat, cat, sat and fat. The chapter presents some ideas of how phonics information can be taught to ESL or EFL learners in the most efficient way.
