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The direct, systematic, and intensive teaching of phonics information (explicit phonics teaching) has been recommended as part of reading instruction for hundreds of years. For a large share of this time such instruction has received negative criticisms. This paper presents and evaluates the historical, ideological, empirical, and philosophical bases of this reproach to phonics instruction. The paper concludes with proposals for resolving the issues of whether, how, or how much phonics information should taught.Written English is an alphabetic language. Alphabetic languages are distinctive from non-alphabetic languages in that the written symbols they use ordinarily represent single speech sounds. This practice differs from written languages like Chinese where it is customary for a unique graphic form to represent more than a single speech sound, There would appear to be a distinct advantage for children learning to read and write an alphabetic language versus a non-alphabetic language since the former uses fewer written symbols. In a non-alphabetic language, it is usually necessary to provide a singular graphic sign for each of its words, word parts, or syllables. English, on the other hand, is written with a relatively small number of letters (26), fewer, in fact, than the number of speech sounds there are in the language (around 40). Spelling ReformWhether this parsimony in letter selection is desirable is a controversial issue. It has been argued, for example, that if we employed an exclusive letter for each speech sound (phoneme) our children would be able to learn to spell and read more easily than is now the case. The "spelling reform" movements that have forwarded this promise have never convinced the English-speaking world of its validity, however. English speakers thus remain reluctant to augment the number of letters in their alphabet so that each different phoneme they utter would be regularly represented by a single, particular letter. Certain problems attendant to such an augmentation appear to doom any attempts to implement this recommendation (Groff, 1976). The Argument for Phonics InstructionDespite the fact that English is not a perfectly matched letters-to-phonemes written language, it has been proposed for at least 450 years that teaching children about the Interchange, Vol. 21/4 © The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education 1

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