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Traditional phonics instruction has marked benefits. Early reading often involves significant expansion of a child's mental lexicon, which includes words and their meanings. By focusing on the principle of linking specific sounds and letters, the child has the ability to recognize new words and derive meaning from them. Being able to adapt what they know about language to new words they experience is crucial to expanding their mental lexicon; this allows for productive reading that is the ability to read new words.[13]^[21] It also produces higher achievement for beginning readers and the difference is the greatest for those at risk of failing to learn to read. Overall, children who are directly taught phonics are better at reading, spelling and comprehension.^[13]

Traditional phonics instruction can also have the unintended consequence of promoting dysfluency. The difficulty lies in the coarticulated nature of speech; speech sounds are overlapping,^[22] while print is discrete and sequential. This can be appreciated if one shapes the mouth in position to begin to produce the word cat compared to the word cot. The initial hard c is colored by the subsequent vowel even before speech begins, i.e., the smiling position as one prepares to say cat, and the more limp position as one prepares to say cot. As early readers work from left to right, beginning with the onset consonant, they typically do not yet know the vowel with which it must be coarticulated. The vowel sound itself cannot be known until the remaining rime (the portion of the syllable beginning with the vowel and extending to its end: e.g. ight in right) is fully encountered. For these reasons, teaching reading through orientation to rime first and then adding the onset (ought-bought) can be helpful in promoting fluency through supporting the phonological problems of coarticulation. Emphasis on the rime also supports the development of an intuitive, and therefore more fluent, awareness of orthographic patterns.^[23]

Phonics is important because, as research has shown, understanding how letters relate to specific sounds in words is makes a large impact on the child's overall achievement.^[13] While some children are able to infer these rules on their own, most need explicit instruction on phonics rules or their reading, comprehension, and spelling will suffer. Research has shown that mentally sounding out words is critical in silent reading, even for highly skilled readers.^[13]

Synthetic Phonics is a method that is endorsed by the governments of The United Kingdom,^[24] Australia^[25] and Scotland.^[26] It also has considerable support in the U.S.A^[27] and Canada.^[28] In Synthetic Phonics, the student first learns to say the sounds (phonemes) that are associated with the letters (graphemes) in isolation and first before the sounds are "synthesized" or blended together to make a word. (e.g. /a/, /k/, /t/.) Then, when reading a word, he learns to say each sound in the word (e.g. /k/ - /a/ - /t/); and to "blend" these sounds into a pronunciation of the word (e.g. "cat").

Synthetic phonics does not teach whole words as shapes; and does not involve guessing at words from context, picture and initial letter clues.

There are other types of phonics, such as

Whole Language is widely used in the U.S.A. and Canada. It is a reading and learning method that trains students to focus on words, sentences and paragraphs as a whole rather than letters. This method aims to make reading fun and keep children motivated, which is beneficial because learning to read depends heavily on what the student does and not what the teachers does.^[13] While the child is typically very engaged in this method, many children struggle to infer the specific rules of the language on their own, which causes the child's comprehension and spelling to suffer in the end.

One subtype is Sight word, which is sometimes called the "look-say" method. A sight vocabulary of 50-100 words is first memorized ^[21] and subsequent words are learned as wholes, often by seeing them used repeatedly in the context of a story.^[13] It tells children to find meaning by guessing, by recognizing whole words they have memorized, by looking at the pictures, and by creating a context based on surrounding words. It encourages students to "construct their own meaning" (with guidance from peers and facilitator of consensus process).^[29] It relies heavily on the child's experience with language as a whole. The following are some features of the whole language philosophy:^[30]

• Children are expected to learn to read and write as they learned to talk, that is gradually, without a great deal of direct instruction.
• Learning is emphasized more than teaching; it is assumed that the children will learn to read and write, and the teacher facilitates that growth.
• Children read and write every day; and they are not asked to read artificially simplified or contrived language.
• Reading, writing, and oral language are not considered separate components of the curriculum or merely ends in themselves; rather they permeate everything the children are doing.
• There is no division between first learning to read and later reading to learn. (adapted from Weaver, C. 1990)

Which style use in teaching reading has divided educators for years. It is now known that using the two approaches together is more powerful than either program alone.^[13] The technical skills learned through phonics is irreplaceable when it comes to learning to read, spell, and general language comprehension but the engagement of children with language in the whole-language style is also important to keep the children motivated and excited to learn.

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