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Phonics: A Large Phoneme-Grapheme Frequency Count Revised
Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2004 by Fry, Edward
I have tried to give the vowel phonemes popular names to make the information more usable for teachers. The symbols within parentheses, however, are the Hanna et al. categories. The symbols between slash marks are those often used by dictionaries.
If a majority of words follow common rule, it is listed in the rule column in Table 1. Where no rule is apparent or specified, the correspondence is classified as:
Regular-usually the most common use
Unusual-frequency less than regular but more than 50
Rare-frequency less than 50 but 10 or more
Although this classification is somewhat arbitrary, users who wish to know the frequency of any of the correspondences to help them make instructional decisions will find that the data in Tables 1 and 2 provide an empirical frequency summary of phoneme-grapheme correspondences.
Tables 3 and 4 are a further simplification of the Hanna et al. study. They answer the question: "What are the most useful (highest frequency) phoneme-grapheme correspondences?" Table 3 ranks the most common vowel phoneme-grapheme correspondences and gives a few common alternate spellings (less common correspondences). Table 4 ranks the consonants. It differs from Table 3 in that it ranks the consonants by grapheme, not phoneme. In a majority of the correspondences the phoneme and the grapheme are the same, however.
Discussion
This study validates much that is common on phonics instruction, such as the teaching of short vowels before long vowels, the final E rule, the open syllable rule, schwa, and R-modified vowels (see Table 3). The basic correspondences for consonants are important but there are some important modifications and exceptions (see Table 4).
The many ways different phonemes can be spelled, as shown in Tables 1 and 2, provide content for spelling and reading programs. And since one must limit the amount of content, particularly for beginners, the information in the tables suggests what might be eliminated and what could be emphasized.
This study does not support the teaching of phonics or phoneme-grapheme correspondences arranged in alphabetical order. The teaching of/b/ is certainly not more important than the teaching of /r/ or /t/.
The findings of this study, particularly Tables 3 and 4, which show the ranking for vowels and consonants, can be used as a checklist or tool for evaluating published reading and spelling materials. Such a checklist could help district and state curriculum coordinators in developing language arts curricula. It may also help college instructors in developing reading teacher education curricula. It could also assist teachers of English-language learners.
There are about as many ways to teach spelling as there are to teach reading. Phonics is only one way; more often it is a part of a broader collection of techniques and content. The results from this study may inform such curricula. For example, this study might help teachers in selecting categories for word sorts (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston 2000).
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