‘Phonics,’ wrote Diane McGuinness, in her superb book Early Reading Instruction ‘is a problematic word.’ Never was there a truer thing said! Why? Because ‘phonics’ is an umbrella term for all kinds of approaches, some good and some-fair-to-middling-grim. According to McGuinness, the ‘classification is unsatisfactory because it does not identify the critical difference in logic between programs that teach the code backward from print to sound, and those that teach it forward from sound to print (linguistic phonics)’.
The Literacy Blog: Sound to print: the appliance of science.
The Echo Chamber 