Should Phonics be taught in schools?

[Copernicus]

I don't think you need to teach it a tall, so much as encourage the development of it. Kids will learn to read all on their own given time and enough interest in doing so. A few comic books and no teacher is how a lot of my friends growing up learned to read, believe it or not. Some of them can now read and write better than I can.

Not all children teach themselves literacy, but you might be interested in the pioneering work of Charles Read: Invented Spelling and Spelling Development

Invented spelling refers to young children's attempts to use their best judgments about spelling. In one of the first major studies of children's beginning attempts at learning to spell, linguist Charles Read (1975) examined the writing of thirty preschoolers who were able to identify and name the letters of the alphabet and to relate the letter names to the sounds of words. The students had "invented" spellings for words by arranging letters.

Read writes, "One sees clearly that different children chose the same phonetically motivated spellings to a degree that can hardly be explained as resulting from random choice or the influence of adults." In other words, even at an early age, the children were able to detect phonetic characteristics of words that English spelling represents.

Read concluded that, by and large, "learning to spell is not a matter of memorizing words, but a developmental process that culminates in a much greater understanding of English spelling than simple relationships between speech sounds and their graphic representations."

What isn't mentioned here is that some preschoolers are given alphabet blocks to play with and taught to pronounce the names of the letters on those blocks. Some of those children invariably use the link between the letter and the pronunciation of the letter to spell out words of English. The spelling itself looks really weird, because the names of the letters contain sounds not linked to the phonemic sounds of the actual letters. For example, "H" can be used to represent a "ch" sound and "G" a "j" sound.