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A first-grade teacher is working with a small group of students. She begins a phonics lesson by talking about word families the students have been learning, such as ap, an, and ag. She then introduces a new book and completes a picture walk with the students. The teacher explains that the book has several words from the at word family, including the words cat and hat in the title. As she reads the book aloud, she asks the children to be detectives and to find words with the phonogram at. After the read-aloud, the class discusses the story. The teacher gives each child a magnetic board, an at chunk in magnetic letters, and magnetic consonants. She then asks the students to build at words on their boards. When they finish, she asks the children to tell her the words they have made. Zach says "bat," Crystal says "pat," and Julio says "sat." Pleased with their responses, the teacher asks the children to select an at word and make up a sentence using it. The children dictate their sentences aloud, and she writes them on sentence strips. She then cuts the sentence strips into individual words so the children can work in pairs to re-sequence the sentences for practice. She continues the lesson by asking the students to complete a phonics practice page that features common short a phonograms, including many at words.

The above anecdote illustrates a segment of an exemplary phonics lesson. The children are in a comfortable and child-friendly setting. The focus of the instruction is clear and explicit, and the teacher has planned the lesson to ensure students' active engagement. High-quality children's literature and activities focusing on oral language, phonics, writing, spelling, and social collaboration are integrated in the lesson. Furthermore, the teacher has also structured the learning experience in a way that allows immediate feedback to monitor students' understanding.

What Is the Role of Phonics in the Reading Process?

Phonics refers to the ability to match the sounds one hears within language to printed text. To be successful at phonics, one must possess the skills to hear sounds within words (known as phonemic awareness) and automatically to recognize letters of the alphabet (Adams, 1990).

Proficiency in phonics is essential to reading success (Cunningham, 2007). However, phonics mastery does not come easily to many learners, and teachers often struggle with how best to help their students with this critical reading skill (Allington & Baker, 2007).

This paper summarizes state-of-the art research on designing and implementing exemplary phonics instruction for 21st century learners.

While many teachers know that phonics ability is crucial to reading achievement, some educators may not be aware of why this is so. Figure 1 (adapted from Adams, 1990) illustrates the central and foundational role of phonics in the reading process. The diagram shows that reading can be thought of as consisting of three levels of processing in the brain (the foundation level/phonics ability, vocabulary meanings, and comprehension):