The case for orthographic knowledge

Abstract

Scholes (1998) argues that phonemic awareness cannot be the driving force behind reading development, because this skill develops as a consequence of learning to read. Evidence is reviewed which supports the view that the role of phonemic awareness has been overstated, but it is clear that awareness of phonemes in spoken words does make some contribution to the development of word recognition skills. Scholes also argues that due to the irregularities of the English spelling system, a phonics approach to reading cannot work since it relies on knowing what the word is. This ignores the fact that there is a considerable amount of evidence that a phonics‐based approach is a very effective way of teaching reading. Phonics is not a branch of phonetics – children can even ‘sound out’ irregular words and still obtain the correct pronunciation. They may activate words which look and sound like the target word – i.e. activate orthographic information – and select the most appropriate word using contextual information. Although, as Scholes argues, the ultimate purpose of reading is comprehension, the unskilled reader has to learn to recognise the building blocks of the sentence, i.e. words, and failure to capitalise on the alphabetic nature of English would make it as hard to learn to read as Chinese.