Did you know that phonics help a child to increase and understand more vocabulary?
Learning to read by phonics and the phonics spelling rules gives a child such a rich vocabulary and understanding of words, root words, usage, comprehension of words and sentences, better pronunciation, and best of all - confidence. No other reading method is this robust. In fact, sight-reading causes problems, dyslexia, and embarrassment.
Learning a word by sight does not help a child recognize it when its usage and prefix or suffix changes. The child must memorize a whole new word (word-shape) for each alternative. This is cumbersome and ridiculous. Adults who sight-read say a lot of Archie-Bunkerisms; hilarious but embarrassing.
And for words that don't follow the rules, first learning a "platypus" word phonetically helps a child remember it much easier than sight-reading because she has made common associations in her mind that are much more useful than guessing from the first letter of the word, its length and/or context (so cumbersome and confusing).
As mentioned in previous volumes of It's Not Rocket Surgery!, a sight-reader needs to memorize about 4,000 word-shapes to have a basic reading vocabulary; it’s easy to mix up similar words. Whereas a phonetic-reader only needs to memorize about 47 sounds to read, and easily increases his/her vocabulary regularly.
Mistakes are going to be made by early readers. But there is a big difference between a phonics mistake that is easily correctable and a lifetime of basic illiteracy beyond the limited sight-word vocabulary. As shown in VAS in previous chapters, we have seen otherwise intelligent college students that couldn’t write down a simple phone message properly- thanks to Whole Language.
http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/BeingaWiseOwl5reasonswhyagoodvocabularyneedsphonics
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