PHONICS
Phonics is a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system. Phonics is one of the primary building blocks of reading. Without an understanding of the relationship between letters and sounds, reading cannot occur. This multifaceted connection between print and pronunciation is an important component of any instructional program in reading because it provides readers with tools for discovering new written words.
For a little more information on phonics, check out this video from HowCast by Anne Glass.
For more ways and how to teach phonics to children, click on this video from WaysAndHow.com.
English Language Learners
Considerations when instructing ELLs in phonics
- Students who are not literate in their own language or whose language does not have a written form may not understand some concepts and need to be taught about the functions of print (Peregoy & Boyle, 2000).
- Students may have learned to read and write in a native language in which the letters correspond to different sounds than they do in English, or they may have learned to read and write in a language with characters that correspond to words or portions of words. For example, "alphabetic writing systems such as the three different ones used for English, Greek, and Russian represent speech sounds or phonemes with letters or letter sequences. In contrast, in logographic writing systems, such as Chinese, each written character represents a meaning unit or morpheme; while in syllabic writing systems, such as kana in Japanese and Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabify, each written symbol represents a syllable (Peregoy & Boyle, 2000, p. 241)."
- In Spanish (the native language of 77 percent of ELLs in U.S. schools, [NCBE, 2002]), the letters b, c, d, f, l, m, n, p, q, s, and t represent sounds that are similar enough to English that they may transfer readily to English reading for many students. Consequently, many students need minimal phonics instruction for these consonants. In contrast, vowel letters look the same in Spanish and English but are named differently and represent very different sounds. Therefore, English vowel sounds and their numerous spellings present a challenge to Spanish literate students learning to read English because the one-to-one correspondence between vowel letters and vowel sounds in Spanish does not hold true in English (Peregoy & Boyle, 2000).
From: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/english-language-learners-and-five-essential-components-reading-instruction