There’s a new debate over phonics instruction bubbling up in the “science of reading” movement—one that demonstrates the intricate challenges inherent in making large-scale instructional change.
More than 40 states have passed laws requiring schools to use evidence-based approaches to teaching reading. The legislation almost always mandates teaching phonics: showing children how to connect spoken sounds to written letters so that they can decode words.
The directive to teach kids phonics seems simple enough. But in practice, it’s raised big questions related to classroom implementation: How much time should teachers spend on this one piece of literacy instruction? And what programs are best?
Now, a growing conversation around these two different approaches to phonics instruction brings to the table these questions.
One method is the Orton-Gillingham approach, designed by researchers a century ago to help kids with dyslexia learn to read. Children learn letter names and the sounds they make, and then learn the many rules that govern English word structure.
The other method is known as “linguistic” phonics, which also frequently goes by the name “speech-to-print” phonics. It’s newer, developed by researchers in the 1990s. Instead of starting with letters, linguistic phonics starts with sounds. Teachers show students how spoken sounds are represented by different combinations of letters in real words, and there’s less of a focus on teaching rules about word structure.
Education Week recently covered how linguistic phonics works and what it looks like practiced in classrooms. The story elicited some strong reactions from commenters on Facebook. Some of them praised the approach; some of them felt it was faddish; still others took issue with the description of it as a linguistic approach; and finally others pointed out that the method is commonly used in other countries, notably Australia and the United Kingdom.
“Linguistic phonics is the ONLY reason my child can read … after years of struggling with structured literacy print-to-speech-like programs,” wrote one. “I was angry when I found out there was a simpler method to teaching reading that I hadn’t found in all my years of teaching.”
“Linguistic phonics is just the next fad,” wrote another, with a third warning readers “not to get sucked into the hype and marketing.”
Still another commenter said positioning the two types of phonics instruction in opposition presented “a false choice.”
“Many of us have been arguing against dubious syllable rules and oversimplified phonics conventions for years, while also rejecting the idea that English spelling is best [organized] from speech outwards,” the comment read.
Responses to the story, and the debate around linguistic phonics in general, touch on some of the ongoing controversies in the field and the pain points schools have felt in putting evidence-based approaches into practice. Read on for three ways this new phonics debate sheds light on the current state of the science of reading movement.
1. Emerging concerns about ‘overteaching’ phonics
Recently, big names in the reading research field have raised concerns that after decades of neglecting explicit phonics instruction, some schools may have overcorrected.
At a reading conference in March, Mark Seidenberg, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, warned of “overteaching” phonics, spending too much time on extended explicit teaching of increasingly obscure phonics rules. Any time spent going over these rules is time that’s not spent working with a variety of different texts, he said.
Once they’ve mastered foundational phonics, Seidenberg said, many children pick up on the nuances of language through what’s known as statistical learning—the ability to generalize patterns from lots of exposure to text.
“There’s this concern that there’s this endless explanation of rules, and it feels like you’re just giving kids all this extra stuff that’s not necessary,” said Devin Kearns, a professor of early literacy at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, and the chair of the International Dyslexia Association’s scientific advisory board.
Linguistic phonics is more streamlined, said Kearns, who is familiar with the linguistic phonics program EBLI.
The method’s boosters say it can get kids reading faster, a claim that some teachers echo—but there isn’t much research evidence to back that up generally.
For their part, curriculum providers of Orton-Gillingham-inspired products say the detailed teaching of different word structure rules is necessary to make sense of an opaque language.
2. The specter of balanced literacy looms large
The science of reading movement gained momentum as a reaction to balanced literacy—an approach to early reading instruction that did include some phonics, but not always taught in an explicit or systematic way.
In many classrooms, students were instructed to rely on context clues or pictures in stories to guess at words on the page. Popular curricula emphasized immersing children in books, even if they didn’t have a firm grasp of decoding words.
This approach failed some students who struggle to crack the code of written language, including many with dyslexia. “For a long time, Orton-Gillingham tutors and Orton-Gillingham clinics were seen as the only alternative,” said Marnie Ginsberg, a former reading teacher who founded a linguistic phonics program, Reading Simplified.
At least seven states specifically mandate that intervention programs for students with dyslexia are grounded in Orton-Gillingham methodology, or that educators who support these students are trained in the method. (Evidence on Orton-Gillingham approaches is mixed. A 2021 meta-analysis found that they don’t significantly improve reading outcomes over other interventions for students with reading disabilities.)
Because linguistic phonics relies more on statistical learning, some observers have said it’s not explicit enough to get kids to master the code—a similar critique to those leveled against balanced literacy programs. Ginsberg understands where that fear comes from, but she says it isn’t an accurate understanding of the method.
“When we talk about getting kids rapidly into real texts and giving them things they haven’t seen before, and having them try out sounds, that sounds dangerous to someone who has had this massive change in their thinking,” she said.
Linguistic phonics isn’t haphazard or incidental teaching, she said, it just uses a different approach and sequence from Orton-Gillingham inspired methods.
Still, said Kearns, linguistic phonics relies on a more “implicit view of how learning works.”
3. There’s not much research comparing reading programs on the market
The science of reading movement exhorts schools to follow the research. But that’s often easier said than done.
As states have required schools adopt evidence-based programs, companies have taken up the term as a marketing tool, often including touchstones from well-known studies in their marketing materials—like pictures of the “reading rope,” a researcher-developed schematic that shows how skilled reading develops.
But while decades of studies have definitively shown that phonics instruction helps beginning readers figure out how to read words, there isn’t much research that compares the nuances of specific approaches or individual curriculum programs against one another. Most publishers cite evidence of their curricula’s effects, but those are typically small-scale studies with limited generalizability rather than controlled studies by external researchers.
Educators have called for more research that puts programs on the market head-to-head, with the goal of getting actionable information to school and district decisionmakers.
“We need to change our focus in education [to] actual outcomes in real classrooms,” wrote one Facebook commenter in response to Education Week’s linguistic phonics reporting. “Curriculum creators should be able to prove that their programs are shifting students and continually updating with that objective in mind.”
