Stephen Downes

I was raised on phonics but early in life discovered there was a second way to read that did not involve sounding out words. This way, I could read a lot faster without losing comprehension. I don't begrudge the phonics; it helps my writing a lot to be able to 'speak' it internally as I compose.  But I would never have wanted to depend on phonics alone. Even as it is, it left me with a deficiency in formal and abstract thinking, which again I had to painstakingly recover later in life. That's why this article - and the research it references - is important to me. As Catherine Compton-Lilly and colleagues argue, "based on decades of reading research, continuing to focus only on phonics is educational malpractice." There's no one best way to teach reading; it depends a lot on context. "Complexities related to the teaching of reading lead to different children learning to read in different ways."