Pros and Cons of Phonics

Pros	Cons
Phonics involves sounding out of words based on how they are spelled (Reyner, 2008, para. 4).	It becomes difficult to spell out certain words because the English language does not have a one-to-one sound symbol relationship and there are many homonyms (Reyner, 2008, para. 4).
Phonics is very formulaic. Once the basic rules are learned, it is easy to read a wide variety of literature (Reyner, 2008, para. 6).	It is estimated that half the words in the English language can’t be pronounced correctly using common phonics rules (Reyner, 2008, para. 5).
A student has better pronunciation and word recognition skills (Curtis, n.d., para. 4).	Differing sizes of vocabularies and different dialects vary in pronunciation rules (Reyner, 2008, para. 5).
	A student many have difficulty understanding the full meaning of a text because they are constantly breaking down words into smaller parts (Curtis, n.d., para. 4).
	Children might not enjoy reading and find it a pain because of the constant memorization of the rules of phonics (Curtis, n.d., para. 4).

Reading Wars: Phonics v. Whole Language


Whole Language v. Phonics