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Phonics
- Phonics teaches children the relationships between the letters (graphemes) of written language and the individual sounds (phonemes) of the spoken language.
National Reading Panel (NRP) Conclusion: "The meta-analysis indicated that systematic phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning to read and that systematic phonics instruction is significantly more effective than instruction that teaches little or no phonics." (p. 9)
"Systematic phonics instruction is significantly more effective than non-phonics instruction in helping to prevent reading difficulties among at-risk students and in helping to remediate reading difficulties in disabled readers." (p. 2-94)
| Further NRP Findings | How My Reading Coach Gold Meets NRP Research |
|---|---|
| "Systematic phonics instruction typically involves explicitly teaching students a prespecified set of letter-sound relations and having students read text that provides practice using these relations to decode words." (p. 2-92) | My Reading Coach Gold directly teaches a complete set of letter-sound relations and has students read text that provides practice using these relations to decode words. |
| "This supports the conclusion that systematic phonics instruction is effective when delivered through tutoring, through small groups and through teaching classes of students." The effect size was most effective in a tutoring situation. (d = .57 (individual) vs. d=.43 (small group) vs. d=.39 (class) (p. 2-93) | My Reading Coach Gold teaches and remediates each student individually. It also provides teachers with lessons to help struggling students. |
| "Systematic phonics instruction produced much growth in spelling among the younger students, that is, kindergartners and 1st graders but not among older students." (p. 2-94) One factor sited by the NRP, "as children move up in grades, remembering how to spell words requires knowledge of higher level regularities not covered in phonics programs." (p. 2-95) | My Reading Coach Gold teaches phonics and remediates spelling in the Writing Activity to ensure improved spelling performance. In addition to the 44 phonemes and phonemic blending taught in My Reading Coach Gold, students are taught spelling patterns including word structure needed by older students to spell longer words. |
| "Programs that focus too much on teaching of letter-sound relations and not enough on putting them to use are unlikely to be very effective." (p. 2-96) | My Reading Coach Gold helps students apply learned phonic skills to reading, beginning with lesson 7. |
| "Some of the phonics programs showing large effect sizes are scripted in such a way that teacher judgment is largely eliminated. Although scripts may standardize instruction, they may reduce teacher interest in the teaching process or their motivation to teach phonics." (p. 2-96) | My Reading Coach Gold directly teaches and remediates each student. It provides equity of phonics instruction to all students, frees teachers from performing this monotonous task and enables teachers to help students put these skills to use in text reading. |
| "A key feature that distinguishes systematic phonics instruction from nonsystematic phonics instruction is in the identification of a full array of letter-sound correspondences to be taught. The array includes not only the major correspondences between consonant letters and sounds but also short and long vowel letters and sounds, and vowel and consonant digraphs (e.g., oi, ea, ou, sh, ch, th). Also, it may include blends of letter-sounds that recur as subunits in many words, such as initial blends (e.g., st, sm, bl, pr), and final stems (e.g., -ack, -end, -ill, -op). Learning vowel and digraph spelling patterns is harder for children; therefore, special attention is devoted to learning these relations. It is not sufficient to teach the alphabetic system." (p. 2-99) | My Reading Coach Gold is not restricted to the alphabetic system. It also addresses: short vowels, long vowel sounds, vowel signals that make a vowel say its long name, blends, consonant / vowel digraphs, sight words, high-frequency words, spelling rules, prefixes, suffixes and decoding multisyallable words. |
| "Systematic phonics programs teach phonics explicitly by delineating a planned, sequential set of phonic elements and teaching these elements explicitly and systematically; some systematic phonics program also use controlled vocabulary (decodable text) to provide practice with these elements." (p. 2-102) | A 25-year veteran speech pathologist developed My Reading Coach. The program presents an orderly progression of sounds based on ease of production and ease of fusing or blending sounds together. In the early lessons, the student is presented with controlled vocabulary. Thereafter in My Reading Coach Gold, story passages are presented to motivate the reader. |
| "Finally it is important to emphasize that systematic phonics instruction should be integrated with other reading instruction to create a balanced reading program." (p. 2-97) | My Reading Coach Gold integrates text story passages beginning at lesson 30 to transfer phonics skills to text comprehension. |
