Teaching young children how to read using `phonics`, which makes the connection between letters and sounds, is much more effective than other methods, according to a major survey reported in the March issue of Scientific American.
The survey, carried out under the aegis of the American Psychological Society, reviewed decades of research on the mental processing that underlies skilled reading and on how reading should be taught.
The researchers, who also wrote the Scientific American article, are five university professors in fields ranging from linguistics to psychology.
Stressing the importance of early reading skills, they say research has shown that children`s facility with reading in the first grade usually provides a good indication of what their reading proficiency in later grades will turn out to be.
This is because reading requires practice, and those who excel end up practising the most. Hence, the gap between more and less able readers in the first few grades generally grows over the years.
"Teaching children to read well early on obviously helps to develop a valuable lifetime habit; thus, it is no wonder that educators have placed enormous emphasis on finding the best way to teach these skills."
According to the authors, three general approaches to reading have been tried.
In one, called whole-word instruction (also known as the "look-say" method), children learn by rote how to recognise at a glance a vocabulary of 50 to 100 words. They then gradually acquire other words, often through seeing them being used over and over in the context of a story.
This is the predominant method used in Maltese schools.
A second approach is phonics, whereby children are taught how to use their knowledge of the alphabet to sound out words.
The third approach, the whole-language method, is similar to whole-word instruction but relies more heavily on the child`s experience with language.
For example, students are offered engaging books and are encouraged to guess the words that they do not know by considering the context of the sentence or by looking for clues in the story line and illustrations, rather than trying to sound them out. Often children are given the opportunity to write stories of their own, in an effort to instil a love of words and reading.
One of the key principles in this method is that the rules of phonics should not be taught directly. Rather, the connection between letters and sounds should be learned incidentally through exposure to text.
However, research has clearly demonstrated that understanding how letters relate to the component sounds of words is critically important in reading, the authors say.
"Our recent review of the topic shows that there is no doubt about it: teaching that makes the rules of phonics clear will ultimately be more successful than teaching that does not.
"Admittedly, some children can infer these principles on their own, but most need explicit instruction in phonics, or their reading skills will suffer."
Most psychologists today believe that reading is typically a process of rapidly sounding out words mentally, even for the highly skilled, says the article.
"This understanding suggests that learning the correspondences between letters and sounds - that is to say, phonics - is keenly important for beginners."
While systematic phonics instruction produces higher achievement for beginning readers in general, the differences are greatest for students at risk of failing to learn to read, such as those living in homes where the value of literacy is not emphasised, the authors claim.
Influenced by such findings, the Bush administration is now promoting the inclusion of phonics in reading programmes nationwide.
The head of the University of Malta`s Literacy Unit, Charles Mifsud, agreed that the phonics method was the most effective, saying that a whole body of research backed it up.
"In our case, Maltese lends itself to this method even more than English, because of the stronger correspondence between words and sounds."
However, he underlined the need for an eclectic approach.
In fact, the article says that using whole-language activities to supplement phonics instruction helps to make reading fun and meaningful for children, "so no one would want to see such tools discarded".
"Indeed, recent work has indicated - and many teachers have discovered - that the combination of literature-based instruction and phonics is more powerful than either method used alone.
"Teachers obviously need to strike a balance.
"But in doing so, we urge them to remember that reading must be grounded in a firm understanding of the connections between letters and sounds.
"Instructors should recognise the ample evidence that youngsters who are directly taught phonics become better at reading, spelling and comprehension than those who must pick up all the confusing rules of English on their own.
"Educators who deny this reality are neglecting decades of research. They are also neglecting the needs of their students."