How much phonics is enough?

"Most researchers and educators now agree students need to learn letters and sounds explicitly and systematically to become proficient readers," writes Liana Loewus. But how much phonics is enough? What skills need to be taught and for how long? On those questions, there's a lot of disagreement.

"Five decades of research have shown that early readers benefit from learning letter-sound correspondences systematically," Loewus writes. But some now worry schools are spending more time than necessary on phonics, not enough on all the other things that enable reading comprehension.

“Everyone knows that real, actual reading is getting squeezed out because there’s so much attention to the components,” says Mark Seidenberg, a "science of reading" advocate and emeritus education professor.

Over-teaching includes teaching all the many phonics skills and patterns and rules, Loewus writes. Some aren't very important. But which ones are skippable?

In the old days, students learned “i before e except after c.” Now, "many phonics programs and online materials . . . encourage students to memorize a dozen or more spelling rules." It's a lot for kids to handle.

Teach only the essentials, says Holly Lane, who runs the University of Florida Literacy Institute’s program, known as UFLI and pronounced you-fly). Reading gains are "dramatic" for K-2 students whose teachers use the 30-minute-a-day program, reports EdWeek.

Tiffany Peltier, the director of professional learning at NWEA, a K–12 assessment and research nonprofit, recalls her days teaching kindergarten and first grade. She would review a phonics skill with the whole class, "then send her fluent readers off to 'book clubs,' where they would read independently and have discussions," writes Loewus. She'd teach the remaining students that day’s phonics skill, then release those who didn't need more help to read on their own. Then she'd concentrate on students who needed more practice.