Ever heard of the ‘magic e’?
It’s a special phonics rule taught to kids worldwide. The magic of the ‘e’ that appears at the end of a word is that it supposedly lengthens the vowel before it.
For example, take the word cake. The e does its magic!
But what about come, love, and done? Something’s not quite right.
A recent research study found that the ‘magic e’ rule works only 77% of the time with a vowels, 16% of the time with e vowels, 75% of the time with i vowels, 58% of the time with o vowels, and 76% of the time with u vowels. So, on average, the ‘magic e’ rule only works 60% of the time.
That doesn’t bode well for a phonics rule.
Or how about “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking”? Here, the idea is that when there are two vowels together, the sound they will make is the long vowel relating to the first vowel, like in the word rain.
Big problem: this only works less than 50% of the time. Doesn’t sound like a trustworthy rule to me.
Of course, these little sayings are simply attempts at helping early readers remember irregular phonetic constructions. But their failure illustrates a bigger problem overall: traditional phonics may not be the best way to teach the English language.
That’s why we use Guided Phonetic Reading (GPR). GPR uses a visual approach to teach the letter-to-sound relationships in English. Little visual images floating above a word represent each of the phonics sounds in that word. They act as a support for the learner. It’s similar to learning to ride a bike with training wheels. Through decoding practice using phonics prompt that are always correct, even for irregular words, reading can be taught as a skill rather than a set of faulty rules. Over time, the child is weaned off those training wheels and no longer needs the image prompts to read.
And with GPR currently running around a 95% success rate, perhaps that’s the kind of “magic” we should be teaching in our classrooms.
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Sarah Forrest is a Reading Specialist for Oxford Learning Solutions, publishers of the Easyread System. Easyread uses innovative GPR technique to help learners struggling with reading due to visual-spatial learning styles, dyslexia, weak auditory processing, and more. www.easyreadsystem.com
