ABSTRACT
Teaching the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences and the contexts they occur in is called phonics instruction. Two phonics methodologies are compared and contrasted before making some general recommendations for including explicit phonics within a Language Awareness Approach to reading instruction. This chapter presents the Strategic Availability Hypothesis: that all reading strategies previously acquired remain available in the Linguistic Infrastructure and transfer to the interlanguage infrastructure. Facilitation will occur if the knowledge and processing strategies learned for L1 are (1) applicable to the L2 and (2) available to the L2 reader. Interference will occur if the knowledge and strategies necessary for reading an L2 are (2) not applicable to the L1 or (2) not available to the L2 reader. Contextual information for grapheme–phoneme recognition is important for another type of reasoning useful for reading vowels in English with maximum efficiency: reasoning by analogy to known spelling patterns. Explicit phonics instruction is an important part of English L2 reading instruction.
