What confuses the issue in the continuing correspondence on phonics (Nixie Taverner and Jennifer Chew, December 14) is everybody’s obsession with the phoneme, casting as “irregular” words found not to be “phonic”, or (yet more linguistically inept) “phonetic”.
All spoken words are necessarily “phonetic”, just as all written words are evidently silent visual representations; the question is what they represent. Complex writing systems such as those for English and French systematically encode semantic and historical features which may override simple phonic cues.
Thus “phon-” encodes “ph” as the historical alternative to “f” to identify specific learned, scientific, technical words. This is quite regular. And “phon-” retains its semantic identity regardless of three quite different vowel sounds in the related forms “phoneme”, “phonetic”, “phonics”.
We, readers and writers, should be thankful for such lexical regularity, which phonics is powerless to explain except through the kinds of contortions Diane McGuinness contrives in Why Children Can’t Read (1998, Penguin). It’s these kinds of regularities that also need to be taught systematically, at some stage at least, if not initially, over and above the more obvious phonic cues. Just gesturing vaguely to “sight words” won’t do: “sight”, “site”, “cite” being usefully distinguished as lexical items.
It is clear that the phoneme is an uncertain guide. Varying in sound quality and use in spoken words according to accent and speech style, it is not in any case “a unit of speech sound” so much as a bundle of phonetic features which may themselves be sufficient to distinguish one word from another: “sighed” and “side” being distinguished from “sight”, “site” and “cite” mainly by final voicing in many, if not all, accents.
The general point is that the speech and writing systems of the language make different distinctions, and phonics, of whatever pedagogic persuasion, is at best simplistic, though it may do to start with.
Keith Davidson
NATE Council and College of Teachers Councilnbsp;
Hemel Hempstead
