sense would seem to suggest that most teachers should, in fact, blend systematic skills instruction with the use of appealing literature·and many, in fact, do adopt such a teaching approach.
The teaching of phonics is central to the communicative hypothesis of language acquisition (Liberman & Mattingly, 1989,, pp. 489-494). Phonetic gestures, while they produce audible sounds, also are "specifically adapted to serve as the structural elements of phonology, a part of natural human grammatical capacity that, together with syntax, distinguishes language from all other forms of communication. The specific function of phonology is to make possible a vocabulary comprising vastly more than the number of holistically different sounds that humans can efficiently produce and perceive. This it does by providing a system for combining and permuting a few dozen gestures, specifically phonetic objects that belong, thus, to a natural class. But the system works in practice only because there is a specialization for producing these phonetic objects, that is, for translating the abstract gestural structures we call words and sentences into neuromotor commands for the articulator movements of particular utterances" (Liberman & Mattingly, 1989, pp. 489-494).
The traditional approach to the teaching of reading was to teach children the alphabetic code·the translation of abstract letters into sounds and words·before turning to actual reading (Nikiforuk & Howes, 1995, pp. 22-26).
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