What is the right time for phonics?

What is the right age and time to engage kids in phonics. There's a lot differentiated ideas when it comes to this topic. Fundamentally, the question has always been whether there's a correlation between phonics at an early age and how kids perform in early age reading. Based on my research and experience, let's dissect this topic today. Let's take it from the top.

We all know what phonics are. Or perhaps not. See, most of us think phonics are sounds, rather, it's a methodology. It is actually a way to teach kids to read and recognize the sounds of a language. So one of the methods in use today is the use of synthetic phonics, in which words are broken down into individual "phonemes". Yes, phonemes actually form the fundamental building blocks of audible language.  So sometimes when we say phonics, we actually are referring to phonemes. Another method is the whole language approach which has been a method in use in a place like the UK for decades. This emphasizes the use of books and stories to help learners discover unfamiliar words, because there's usually a direct link graphically during learning.

There are many diverse thoughts on when to use phonics with kids age-wise, some argue 3-4, others earlier and others later. However the common denominator is that, the earlier the better. The earlier a person learns the sounds of a language and its recognition, the better. And earlier refers to readiness, not a particular age.

So the issue most of the time hasn't been an inability to decide a particular age, but rather we lacking the proclivity to focus on when the student is ready or not. As educators, we need to be sensitive enough to know when a child is ready to move from just knowing words, and being able to read them. And there are usually tell signs. For instance, when you read a simple book to a child and they understand more than 80 percent of the vocabulary, it's time to give them a peak at what those words look like.

In teaching ESL, sometimes the mistake we make is comparing the learning process of native speakers to that of our students. Before native learners go to school, they usually can speak fluently even at the age of 3. It will be injustice to subject an ESL learner to the same process. And this means you have to bring up their vocabulary count first. Now when I was learning Chinese as an adult, my significant discovery was that, the more vocabulary you build, the easier it became to discover the patterns between words and learn them more easily.

It is not to say don't let kids have a look at letters and words from the beginning, but rather to manage your expectations and requirement that they be able to reproduce it