ABSTRACT
Before we get into each standard, I want to talk about the need for a phonics instruction—a certain kind of phonics instruction—at the upper elementary and secondary levels. What we have are long words and strange letter combinations, both of which can be very daunting to students in the secondary grades even though they are fluent readers of everyday language. Decoding (the mechanical process of mentally translating an arbitrary code of squiggles into meaningful sounds that we recognize as words) becomes increasingly demanding as we climb the grade levels and learning becomes more departmentalized. Students entering middle school and even high school still need instruction and practice to read technical language. That is because of a characteristic in the English language that I like to call the Scrabble™ or, if you prefer, Words With Friends™ Rule: The most common words in English tend to be made of, well, the most common letters, the ones with the fewest points in word games that reward the use of rare letters. Once you start making words with letters like X, Z, Q, K, J— you’re getting higher points because the words themselves are rarer, that is to say, requiring more sophisticated word knowledge by the player. The most common words also tend to be short. When we start getting into the four-and-more syllable range, that's where the less familiar, more specific, and/or more abstract words are found. It isn’t that such words are harder to learn, necessarily. It is that inexperienced readers of academic text are not accustomed to seeing them and therefore don’t know how to break them down. That is where the “academic phonics” instruction comes in.
