Phonics teaching, practice in phonemic awareness and segmentation, has a place in teaching early literacy. Of course it does. Language is largely transmitted between people by sound and we automatically apply sound, to varying degrees, to the practices of literacy. It remains, nonetheless, important that we remember that the phonic route to meaning is secondary, assembled and indirect. It is, relative to direct, visual reading, a clunky and laborious way to do it. Phonological text management is a secondary system; a relatively inefficient, slow, costly, sublexical and ‘assembled’ route to meaning. It is probably used as backup and as support for memory and so comprehension, switched into or out of the process as necessary.

Literacy itself is primarily a visual endeavour. It has to be admitted though, that it ‘feels as if’ it should be phonically done, because we normally talk and listen far more than we write or read. Precisely because of this seductive, but technically wrong, belief it is important that we remain aware of the need deliberately to present literacy to students visually, to exercise the visual pathways. Learners, from the earliest days, are well aware that ‘letters make sounds’ and will inevitably try to make them do this, sometimes inappropriately. We do not have to reinforce the very natural phonic approach. What we do need to do is to induce and support a visual approach alongside it. In real life literacy we use both as appropriate. Training students to use one method of attack, and only one method of attack, will mislead at best, disable at worst (and see discussion of learning styles in chapter 8). Many adult literacy students struggle precisely because they have been taught that reading is sounding out, and only sounding out, an approach which often fails, of course, leaving them ‘barking at print’. What they really need is flexibility around a basically visual approach, the capacity to deploy different means for different ends in different circumstances, just as we have.

We need to bear this constantly in mind because phonics is omnipresent and can be extremely seductive. Graded phonic programmes exist and are being produced anew. Some schemes demand (and I mean demand) exclusive phonics. There are ongoing attempts to enforce scripted phonic subskills training as the single, fundamental way to mastery of literacy (See McGuinness, McGuinness and McGuinness 1996, the synthetic phonics movement emanating from Clackmannanshire, Reading First in the USA). Phonic attack seems to have an almost religious significance to many people and, to be sure, phonic schemes can seem to deliver marvellously controlled programmes which apparently progress from well-defined goal to well-defined goal. The complexity of literacy can be reduced to measurable simplicities. Graphs and tables can be drawn. Politicians love it because of this. Phonics is admired as a silver bullet solution in this statistics-led and measurement-obsessed age. Heads and principals love how systematic phonics schemes appear to be. It is easy to develop a circuit of hoops for students (and their teachers) to leap through (or fail to leap through). Written language is made to appear miraculously reducible to items, schemes, levels and stages. Students can be marvellously exactly classified or, even worse, diagnosed.

This reductive approach can all be seductively reassuring, especially to the uncertain or inexperienced - or the man with an agenda or a product to sell. Teachers are inherently practical, often very busy people. They may come to like the feel of firm and pre-ordained ground beneath the tutorial feet. Graded, measurable, apparently ‘scientific’ phonic schemes promise, and at first glance appear, to deliver this satisfyingly. This leaves me, at least, with a niggling question; are such schemes really for the benefit of students, their teachers, their management, corporations or politicians? A quote from the world of adult literacy:

‘Many tutors .... have felt that phonic work gave a sound, unequivocal base of skills which could be imparted according to a systematic scheme that would sooner or later sweep up all the problems that a student might have .... The common experience, however, is that adults make but slow progress by these methods and usually find themselves quite unable to make the transition from practice-with-tutor to independent use in the real world.’
(Charnley and Jones 1981. p.11)

I should like to close this chapter with a summary of the reading wars issue written in the form of a caricature:

The whole-language faithful view the decoding-skills brigade as gaunt and humourless authoritarians in polished shoes who look as if they have just bitten into a lemon. All knowledge, to such desiccated people, is scientific; reality is revealed only in tables of figures; without a statistical formula there is no truth and statistics are truth. Children are ignorant and contrary; teaching is the cramming of facts or skills into these resistant creatures. These dry despots insist that literacy can, and should, be reduced to nothing more than layers of mechanistic and isolated skills which can be built up into ‘literacy’ through the endless and regimented repetition of drills last used in Victorian times. The efficient mastery of decoding trumps understanding. Beauty is off the agenda, and radar, altogether. Rectitude in detail is everything and failure is evidence of pathology, or wickedness. Literacy is a purely technical issue and mechanical and explicatory methods are all that is needed to wrestle it into submission.