Why Teach Phonics?
While Aleka Titzer may have deduced the rules of phonics by herself, it is not safe to assume that every child will do so. (Indeed, Aleka's father never assumed as much.)
Whether or not a child learns some first words by sight, there will come a point when she needs to know the sounds made by the letters of the alphabet. In order to progress to the level of a competent reader (with a vocabulary of 50-75,000 words), the ability to sound out new words is a must.
Around the world, whenever phonics is removed from the reading curriculum, literacy rates go down. It's a phenomenon that prompted the French government to ban pure whole-language instruction in 2005 (although some mixing of the technique with phonics is still permitted). Another European example is mentioned by Charles Sykes in the book Dumbing Down Our Kids:
In Britain, educational psychologists first noted a drop in reading scores in 1990, and a government report confirmed the falling scores the next year. The exceptions were schools that employed intensive phonics programs. As a result of the ensuing outcry over the dropping reading scores, phonics instruction is once again being included in England's national curriculum.
Samuel Blumenfeld, author of several books on education including The New Illiterates, makes the controversial claim that whole-language instruction actually causes dyslexia:
Holistic readers are indeed handicapped by the way they are taught to read. They are taught to look at words as whole pictures, which means that they are not bound to look at a word from left to right. They simply look for something in the word-picture that will remind them of what the word is. Thus they may actually look at a word from right to left, which accounts for the tendency of dyslexics to reverse letters and read words backwards.
Phonetic awareness makes all the difference between a good and a poor reader, notes teacher trainer Louisa Cook Moats in her 2000 paper, Whole Language Lives On:
Most of the variability in reading achievement at the end of first grade is accounted for by children's ability to decode words out of context, using knowledge of phonic correspondences. The most common and fundamental characteristic of poor text reading is the inability to read single words accurately and fluently. Skill in word reading in turn depends on both phonological awareness and the development of rapid associations of speech to print.
Phonics lessons have also been shown to work wonders for children beginning school with poor reading skills. In 2005, psychologists Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson published the results of a seven-year longitudinal study into the reading abilities of Scottish schoolchildren. Comparing a group of first graders in a phonics-based reading program to two groups enrolled in whole-language programs, they concluded:
At the end of the 16-week training period, the [phonics] group was reading words around 7 months ahead of chronological age, and was 7 months ahead of the other two groups. The [phonics] group's spelling was also 7 months ahead of chronological age, and was around 8 to 9 months ahead of the two [other] groups. These groups were spelling 2 to 3 months behind chronological age. The [phonics] group also showed a significant advantage in ability to identify phonemes in spoken words.