Education Commons^™

The Status Of Phonics Instruction: Learning From The Teachers, Sherry Sanden, Deborah A. Macphee, Luminita Hartle, Stephen Poggendorf, Caleb Zuiderveen

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

Increasingly alarmed by instructional mandates more founded on journalistic rhetoric and popular opinion than on research findings or practitioner expertise, researchers gathered survey data from teachers to better understand the status of K–2 phonics instruction. Data demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of these K–2 teachers teach phonics, rely on a published curriculum, and teach phonics in systematic and explicit ways. These findings contradict media assertions that reading classrooms are largely devoid of phonics instruction and that teachers fail to include phonics as an important element of their reading instruction. Implications include calls for researchers to explore what teachers can share …