Whole to Part Phonics: How Children Learn to Read & Spell

Significant recent research in literacy learning casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of traditional phonics instruction. Researchers have discovered that traditional phonics, with its emphasis on letters, sounds, and words, ignores the complexity of children's natural learning processes, including children's inclination to focus first on the text, then on whole words, and then on their constituent parts. Whole to Part Phonics offers a concise, accessible introduction to this research and proven strategies for translating it into effective classroom practice.

MARGARET MOUSTAFA is a Professor of Education at California State University at Los Angeles. She is an experienced elementary school teacher and author of Beyond Traditional Phonics: Research Discoveries and Reading Instruction (Heinemann, 1997), "Children's productive phonological recoding" (Reading Research Quarterly, 1995), and co-author of " Whole-to-parts phonics instruction: Building on what children know to help them know more" (Reading Teacher, 1999). Using the research findings of other scholars as well as her own research findings on how children learn a phonic system, she developed whole-to-parts phonics instruction as a powerful, systematic, explicit way of teaching children a phonic system which is compatible with their natural cognitive processes.