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Now, Phonics is a new teaching method not only for English phonetics teaching and learning, but also for cultivating the learners’ phonemic awareness while they are reading and writing the English words. By”phonemic awareness”, it means kind of an ability on the part of the learners to read, to hear, to identify and to memorize English words well through their own manipulating of phonemes in words on the very presumption that: There is a natural commensuration or equilibration relations between the usual phonemes in the English word formation and their articulately distinct speech sounds to match them in the word. That is the rule of English pronunciation, and that is the regulations of the so-called natural Phonics being discussed here in this paper. In order to teach the correspondence between the speech sounds and their spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them, the teachers, home and abroad, focus their attention on the natural Phonics teaching practice. And the goal of Phonics is to enable the beginners to learn to read and spell English well by decoding the sound phonemes in words by sounding them out, or in Phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns. Anyway, it is an effective way of language learning to a certain extent.
Academically speaking, Phonics is a kind of inductive teaching and learning method based on the pronunciation rules of letters and letter combinations for a better language acquisition on the part of the language learners. As we all know, there are 26 English letters and 44 basic sounds or phonemes accordingly in English language. And what can be achieved with Phonics teaching practices is that English language learners can read and spell words well by themselves without such phonetics learning tools as the International Phonetic Alphabet to be used in their picking up the word but with their accumulated knowledge of Phonics, or rather, their knowledge of phonemes. That is to say, they can pronounce and spell words correctly through picking up each inpidual sound phonemes and identify their respective pronunciation in the same word to match them like what Pinyin does to their relative Chinese characters (also pidable graphemes in one word).
For example, the word pat is spelled with three letters, p, a, and t, each representing a phoneme respectively, /p/, /æ/, and /t/. So the word ‘pat’ can be pronounced through putting the three letter sound /p/-/a/-/t/ together, the summation of each of the speech sound of the word “pat”. So, having mastered the correct speech sound of each letter or letter combinations which are also called syllables, and the spelling pattern of every syllable in the word formation, the English learners can read the word when seeing it or spell that word when hearing it spoken.
In fact, Phonic originally appeared in the United States and Canada in the middle of the 20th century. It was used in the English Enlightenment Education of children in western countries. In the US, for example, the debate has been continued for more than a century over whether English Phonics should or should not be used in teaching beginners in their learning to read and write, because of the complexity of both the pronunciation system and the spelling system in English language, which means there is not anything like a dead rule to follow both in English pronunciation and spelling, as can be found in French or in Japanese.
The use of Phonics in American education can date back at least to the work of Favell Lee Mortimer, whose works using Phonics includes the early flashcard set Reading Disentangled (1834) and text Reading Without Tears (1857). Despite the works of the 19th-century proponents such as Rebecca Smith Pollard, some American educators, prominently Horace Mann, argued that Phonics should not be taught at all. This led to the commonly used "look-say" approach ensconced in the Dick and Jane Readers popular in the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1950s, however, inspired by a landmark study by Dr. Harry E. Houtz, and spurred by Rudolf Flesch's criticism of the absence of Phonics instruction, Phonics resurfaced as a method of teaching reading.