Beyond Labels and Agendas: Research Teachers need to Know about Phonics and Phonological Awareness

Abstract

Teachers are asked to use reading science to inform how they teach phonics and phonological awareness. As teachers look to the research base to guide their practice, some questions and concerns regarding what best practice looks like have come up. This article starts with a brief description of phonics and phonemic awareness and then discusses topics of issue in a developmental order, addressing phonemic awareness, phonics, and morphology. Current research is used to discuss 10 questions teachers are asking as they navigate applying reading research in the classroom.

Early Elementary School Interventions in Reading and Mathematics

“…While research informed teaching is prescribed in the curriculum (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2022b), it does not guarantee that educators fully adopt the procedures and curricular material evaluated in educational research studies of instructional effectiveness, but instead make instructional decisions based on experience and personal beliefs (Cook & Cook, 2011). Special education teachers find support for specific instructional methods and practices through a wide collection of sources ranging from authority, teacher education, professional development to social professional forums (Guckert et al, 2016;Mesmer & Kambach, 2022;Travers, 2017), and thus encounter claims of evidence-based practices supported by varying, and incidentally with no information of research quality. Also, instructional strategies in special education are eclectic by nature, with influences from different sets of learning theories that are not always overt to the individual teacher (Odom, 2016).…”