The New Phonics 

The Story Behind It

Phonics isn't new; it's how our country learned to read when it was young - until the late 40s and early 50s when psychiatry got it taken out of our schools and established the new Teacher's College. That's when our national SAT scores started it's plummet from which it's never recovered. Phonics was lost to the great majority of children even in most private schools until Hooked on Phonics brought it back in the 80s with overnight success. 

But our country had changed so much by that time that learning to read even with phonics was no longer a simple primary task for children being taught by teachers who were not taught themselves with phonics. This was true for most parents as well. So even with phonics reintroduced to the world, we had the blind teaching the blind, totally dependent on a home phonics program. Hooked on Phonics is a good program and does well with kids and adults whose light bulb easily comes on, or for parents and educators who have previous expertise in teaching phonics. But there were and still are far too many for whom the light bulb does not easily come on or will not come on at all. To this end, the home programs coming out were limited.

And why did our country change so that our kids couldn't compare with kids of the old days? They are the reasons we already know about: TV, working moms, the decline of education resulting in less trained teachers burdened with larger classrooms, a drug and alcohol society - including the masses on pharmaceuticals, divorce, family dinner with sane discussion being a thing of the past... and the list goes on. We all know of these. All of these changes have deprived our kids of a good education to whatever degree. But the main damage is in the over all dummying down of our kids. Learning aptitude is just nothing near what it use to be because of all of the above and more.

And the traditional phonics programs brought back the idea of learning the alphabet sounds and phonics rules such as the 'silent e making the vowel long or pronounce it's own name (Sam becomes same) etc. A lot of rules to learn and sounds to memorize. But phonics was back and that's what they used when more than 99% of our kids could learn to read when they were in the first-grade and move up smoothly. It was finally back.

But our children were already victim to the above American changes and many couldn't learn to read so easily with the return of traditional phonics. It was working, but not well enough for far too many. And most teachers and parents were uncertain in application of the traditional phonics; not being certain they were saying the sounds correctly themselves. And when the sounds were finally memorized, it was a new arduous chore to use those sounds to read words. 

The commercial programs were able to get the student to know the first sound of the first letter of a beginning level word such as the 'c' in 'cat'. But it was just counted on that the student would be able to figure out the rest of the word. There was no method to teach sounding the word out. Those who were able to sound out words still didn't know how they did it or how to teach it as a generality. So they would just have the student say the first sound and then try to read the word. The child - or adult - was still learning to read the word by repetition (memorization), with the acceptance of the first letter. Following this, the phonics rules would be drilled and grilled, often even before the student could read the words. Still thousands of kids could not 'sound out each letter of the word'. Why not? Well, they would say each sound sort of chopped up, and then forget what they had said and they would not have an ear for what sounds they had said and so still didn't get the word, blending it into a whole. It was big problem with the return of traditional phonics.

Then came a change in the method and philosophy of teaching phonics itself. It came after the big commercial phonics programs had their day in the bright lights but were still the shinier stars. It was developing quietly behind the scenes by a private small town tutor, until her first article was printed in the Washington Post and picked up here, by Cybertown's CyberNews in 1996. The article hit home to parent and educator nationwide and spread at first slowly and then began to snowball as new programs integrated this new phonics into its curricula one after another until nearly every phonics program being promoted, on the Internet today touts its innovative discovery or solutions to struggling phonics students. But history takes it back to this one article entitled, 'Phonics the Right Way and the Wrong Way'  by Tracy Sherwood.

Since its appearance on Cybertown in 1996, this article has weathered massive new competition and still managed to stay in the top 10 placement of many major search engines, until web site positioning experts were able to force new competition ahead with paid positioning and keyword strategy. Although this article has had no editing in keywords or content in the entire eight years of its existence on the Internet, it still remains one of the most widely read and with no doubt the most influential article on the subject of teaching phonics today.

What was it about this tutor's discoveries that changed the face of phonics forever? It was the author's twenty-four years of tutoring experience with the most difficult students and adults that by necessity, the tutor had to find the cause for the barriers to this problem plaguing traditional phonics. The tutor, Tracy Sherwood, began an experiment which consisted of nothing more than pure observation in her tutoring sessions. Rather than push the student to read the word, she simply observed the mistakes of both children and adults, learning disabled and dyslexic, preschooler and practicing teacher. Before she could determine the solutions, she had to spot the thought process of each student with each mistake made and make notations. This was a year long process and at end, the solutions to various difficulties were in plain sight and in every case, universal.

Sherwood was the first to discover, or at least to make known, that traditional phonics was being taught backwards and made no sense to the student. She saw that teachers and parents would never see this as they would too quickly resort to telling the student the word when he failed to sound it out. And frustration depleted patience. Following that came disability labels, remedial reading programs with absolutely no challenge nor remedy and accompanying all this, special interests such as psych-based experts and drug companies inciting the forwarding of the controversy of whether phonics is or is not as effective as it's supporters do tout.

Yet with the sweeping popularity of this Cybertown article, the entire approach to teaching beginning and remedial phonics began to win the day with its superior results and made its way into millions of homes, private schools and even public schools - however limited in quality of delivery. Prior to the release of this article, phonics was simply learning the sounds, reading the words in groups of similar sounds, and learning the phonics and spelling rules. There was no additional help or mention of observing one's own speech as a separate practical from reading the letters. There was no talk of sound-blending techniques and games, or teaching babies and toddlers to put attention to how the mouth forms individual sounds to make words. There were no electronics, card, or other games in which the correct sound must be found when heard and spelling was not decoded by saying the word one sound at a time. Dyslexic adults were not coached on reading a word backwards when attempting to guess rather than sound out, or when omitting or randomly adding a sound that wasn't there. The Phonics Game was the first to tout these missing basics and came on the television scene some four months after the publication of the Superphonics article and eight months after the release of Superphonics for Babies & Toddlers. History traces the discoveries of the exact difficulties and developments of techniques for their remedy, to this Superphonics article and its Babies & Toddlers Guide.  When Sherwood promoted her discoveries and solutions to the world, literacy began it's upward climb out of the dark downward spiral of illiteracy. The face of phonics has greatly changed for the better. And it all started right here at Cybertown.

Read Phonics the Right Way and the Wrong Way

By Tracy Sherwood Copyright Tracy Sherwood

August 26, 2003  Cybertown's CyberNews.  Go to Cybertown Homepage     visit superphonics.com