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Phonics: A Large Phoneme-Grapheme Frequency Count Revised
Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2004 by Fry, Edward
Phonemic awareness has come to prominence partly because of the National Reading Panel's meta-analysis (Ehri et al., 2001) and the summary by Smith, Simmons, and Kameenui (1995). This study provides some content for phonemic awareness instruction.
The National Reading Panel's (2000) meta-analysis for phonics showed some benefit for systematic phonics instruction. The data in this study provides much content for a systematic or an incidental phonics program and lesson, such as the Making Words technique (Cunningham & Cunningham, 1992).
Several limitations to this study need to be identified. First, although this study presents all major phoneme-grapheme correspondences, it is not a presentation of every possible phoneme-grapheme correspondence for either reading or spelling.
The present study is a count of all the phonemes used in over 17,000 different words without regard to word frequency. For example, the digraph TH occurs in some very high frequency words like "the," "this," and "that," yet the TH digraph occurs in only 411 different words. One could argue that TH is thus more important than the 411 frequency indicates. But to weight every one of the 17,000 different words by frequency of occurrence is well beyond the scope of this study. Teachers usually solve this problem by mixing the teaching of phonics with the teaching of high-frequency sight words (e.g. Instant Words (Fry, 1999)). Perhaps some well-funded future researcher would like to work on the weighting (type/ token) problem.
The present study does not deal with morphemes or meaning units (e.g., the prefix UN- has a very high frequency) rimes (phonograms), or other common letter clusters. As readers mature they tend to use larger clusters of letters than just graphemes (Adams, 1990).
One could question that the word database published in 1944 (Thorndike & Lorge) is a bit dated. Nevertheless, new words tend to have a lower frequency than the more common structure words such as "is," or common base words like "run." Thus, most of the words in the Thorndike list are still very relevant. Language does change, but it changes slowly and neologisms tend not to appear in phonics or elementary spelling lessons. However, even new words tend to use the same more common correspondences; hence, it is unlikely that using a newer English word list would substantially change the rank order of correspondences reported here.
Finally, the present study is not a child development study. It does not address which correspondences a beginning reader typically does or should learn first. However, there is an implication in the study that the more common or higher frequency correspondences should be taught first.
Phonics and phonemic awareness are keys to successful literacy acquisition (National Reading Panel, 2000). The results of this study provide reading instructors and curriculum developers with practical information for improving the precision and effectiveness of instruction in these areas.
References
Abbott, M. (2000). Identifying reliable generalizations for spelling words: The importance of multilevel analysis. The Elementary School Journal, 102, 233-245.
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