How structured phonics teaches kids to read irregular words

I was asked a great question yesterday, which was: "How do we teach kids to read irregular words like comb/bomb/tomb?"

I love this question, because the answer makes it clear why a structured, phonics-based approach is the best way to learn to read, even if many of the words you’ll encounter are irregular.

Think of reading as a fuzzy matching process between an imperfect written representation of a word, and the actual word that you know in your head.  There are easy words with a 1-1 deterministic matching like "sat", "top", "cat", etc.

Some words have slight differences like "sam", "ham", "ran" (the "a" sound becomes more nasal) but if you know your letter sounds and master the skill of blending them together, the written representation is still close enough that it's pretty easy to figure out the actual word.  

(Getting to this point is roughly the common core kindergarten curriculum, or levels 1-20 in Mentava)  

After learning the most common sounds for single letters, the next step is learning about letter combinations. In English, we have 44 sounds but only 26 letters. That means that many sounds are written with more than one letter (e.g. "sh", "ch", "oi", "er/ir/ur", silent-e words, etc). Words with these letter combinations (like "mash", "chat", "rake", "fur", etc) are tricky because you have to look ahead to figure out what sound a letter is going to make, but at least it's deterministic. The sounds follow reliable rules.

There are also rules about letter locations, like vowels changing their sound when they're at the end of a word (eg, "met" vs me", "got" vs "go", "yes" vs "my").

Again, these rules are tricky, but at least they're consistent.  Mastering all these tricky but consistent rules is roughly the common core 1st grade curriculum, or levels 21-96 in Mentava.

There are also longer and letter combinations that are irregular but common across multiple words, like "ould" in "could/would/should", "other" in "other/mother/brother", "igh" in "high/sigh", "alk" in "talk/walk". I would put silent letters in this category as well, like "kn" in "knight" and "wr" in "write".

The next big step up in difficulty is learning to deal with letter combinations whose sounds are ambiguous, like the two different "th" sounds in "this" and "thin", or the two different "oo" sounds in "foot" and "food". There's no way to know how to pronounce these words just from the written form - you have to already have the word in your working vocabulary.

There is a similar challenge with some suffixes, like "-ed", which has three different pronunciations (eg "wanted", "walked", "played"). Sometimes there are rules, but generally it's easier just to have the word in your working vocabulary. For example, the plural -s changes its sound in "cats" vs "dogs" but you probably didn't even realize that.

And then finally, you get into sight words like "you", "your", "said", "most", etc, which just have to be memorized. Even in this case, a strong phonics foundation is still useful because these words are still pretty close to their written representation, just with a vowel that is pronounced in an irregular way.

Unfortunately this category does include many of the most common english words (eg "of", "more", "some", "one", "want", "to") as well as the comb/tomb/bomb words in the quoted post.

But the reason we use phonics to teach reading (instead of memorizing every word individually) is that being able to phonetically read the imperfect written representation of the word helps you figure out what that word is actually supposed to be.  The common core 2nd grade curriculum and the final levels of Mentava focus on these skills, which are the final ones a child needs to truly become an independent recreational reader.

They'll be learning new words and continually expanding their vocabulary for many years to come, but once they can read and understand 95% of the words on a page, they have the ability to start figuring out unknown words from context, essentially turning them into self-sufficient learners.

(As an aside, this is why it's silly to make fun of people who mispronounce words. It just means that they learned the word from reading instead of conversation, and they never had a chance to hear the correct pronunciation!)