2. Literature Review

2.1 The Definition of Phonics

The phonics instruction originated from English-speaking countries and has played a significant role in English education especially in initial English education for a long time. The definition of phonics varies. It was considered as a kind of instruction, and a type of relationship between written letters and their sounds.

A multitude of researchers regarded phonics as a kind of teaching instruction. Stahl (2002) considered phonics as an approach that teaches kids learn how to decode words. Ehri and Lirmea (2003: 3) considered phonics as “a method of instruction that teaches students correspondences between graphemes in written language and phonemes in spoken language and how to use these correspondences to read and spell words.” We can tell from these definitions that phonics are used to guide students manipulate sounds in written words through spelling, teach letter-sound correspondences, or indicate the patterns of similarly spelled words. To sum up, phonics helps students to learn the orthographic patterns of written English. 

Some else researchers considered phonics as a type of relationship between written letters and their sounds. Harris and Hodges (1995) saw phonics as a way to teach reading and spelling which stresses symbol-sound relationships. From Johnson and Pearson’s (1978) viewpoint, phonics is a term used for associating letters with sounds, and phonics instruction copes with how to teach children to pronounce an unfamiliar printed word. 

To sum up, though different researchers gave different definitions to phonics, they still reached a consensus that phonics helps children to pronounce and spell the words quickly and correctly by learning the sounds of singular letters, letter groups, and certain syllables.

2.2 The Development of Phonics 

From these definitions we can figure out that phonics works on the relationships between the pronunciation and written forms of words. Therefore, phonics instruction is regarded as a significant approach to teach students to read the words according to their forms. Phonics can be pided into analytic phonics and synthetic phonics. Analytic phonics and synthetic phonics include two technical items: phoneme and grapheme. Brooks (2003) defined phoneme as a distinctive speech sound, which makes a difference to the meaning of a word. For example, the initial phoneme in pass is /p/. In addition, Brooks (2003) also defined grapheme as a letter or combination of letters which is used to spell a phoneme. For example, the letters “p” and “sh” spell the phonemes /p/ and /∫/ in push. 

In 1790s, some English-speaking countries have established a new language teaching model, which aimed to improve students' reading ability. At that time, phonics has been used in teaching reading and writing. In 1967, Jeanne Chall made a great contribution to the study of the role of phonics in the initial education. Chall (1967) reviewed the existing research literature roundly in his work, and conducted a series of valuable observations in real classroom teachings. The work generalized that phonics dose enable children to make much faster progress than that with no phonics instruction, and synthetic phonics let children make much faster progress than analytic phonics. In addition, code-emphasis approaches enable children to make much faster progress than meaning-emphasis approaches. And his work found that teaching phonics with meaningful reading materials helps children to make faster progress.