ABSTRACT
Conflict over the “better” approach for teaching beginner readers persists. Two approaches that are often contrasted are those that include explicit phonics and those that are text-centred, without explicit phonics. In explicit phonics approaches, the common sound for each alphabet letter is taught, and how to use these to attempt pronunciation of unfamiliar words. The successive sounds of the letters making up a word can be uttered, and then blended together to attempt the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word (as in “kuh” – “o” – “tah” for “cot”). This taught “sounding-out” procedure is called explicit phonological recoding, the purpose of which is to assist the children in reading texts without the teacher providing the word responses. The children may also be taught phoneme awareness, which is the skill to reflect on and break up spoken words into their smallest segments of sound. This skill is claimed to be necessary in explicit phonological recoding.
