Whole to Part Phonics: How Children Learn to Read and Spell

Significant recent research in literacy learning casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of traditional phonics instruction. Researchers have discovered that traditional phonics, with its emphasis on letters, sounds, and words, ignores the complexity of children’s natural learning processes, including children’s inclination to focus first on the text, then on whole words, and then on their constituent parts. Whole to Part Phonics offers a concise, accessible introduction to this research and proven strategies for translating it into effective classroom practice.

The contributors to Whole to Part Phonics recognize that children need to understand letter-sound relationships in order to become independent and fluent readers. But, they argue, this knowledge is of little value unless children learn how to use it in context. Accordingly, the authors maintain that children’s encounters with print lay the groundwork for effective phonics learning. By drawing on children’s wider experience of reading and on their preferred modes of learning, whole-to-part phonics offers an exciting alternative—students focus on the construction of meaning rather than the decoding of text.

In Part I, Henrietta Dombey explains how phonics works in English and surveys the research evidence for whole-to-part phonics. Margaret Moustafa then offers advice on using whole-to-part phonics strategies in a rich, literature-based reading program. Olivia O’Sullivan of the Centre for Language in Primary Education (CLPE) surveys research that investigates the connection between developmental spelling and reading. In Part II, the staff of the CLPE offers a set of detailed, practical suggestions for promoting the knowledge children need to learn letter-sound relationships and use them effectively in both their reading and writing.

Margaret Moustafa is a Professor of Education at California State University at Los Angeles. She is an experienced elementary school teacher and author of Beyond Traditional Phonics: Research Discoveries and Reading Instruction (Heinemann, 1997), "Children's productive phonological recoding" (Reading Research Quarterly, 1995), and co-author of " Whole-to-parts phonics instruction: Building on what children know to help them know more" (Reading Teacher, 1999). Using the research findings of other scholars as well as her own research findings on how children learn a phonic system, she developed whole-to-parts phonics instruction as a powerful, systematic, explicit way of teaching children a phonic system which is compatible with their natural cognitive processes.

Dr. Myra Barrs was until recently Co-Director of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). She has worked as a teacher, a publisher, an adviser, and a consultant in the UK, the USA and Canada.

Myra Barrs is co-author and editor of many publications, including the Primary Language Record Handbook, The Reading Book, Whole to Part Phonics, Boys and Writing, The Reader in the Writer and Boys on the Margin. She produced the CLPE video series Learning to be Literate. Other publications include books on assessment, such as Words Not Numbers and Record-Keeping in the Primary School. She has written many articles for academic journals and professional journals on topics including assessment, children’s writing, gender and literacy, and imaginative play. Her research interests include children’s writing and its links with other ways of symbolising meaning.

Myra Barrs was recently elected to the International Reading Association’s Reading Hall of Fame. She is a Visiting Professor at the University of East London.