There are, however,
a number of limitations to phonics which teachers should be aware
of:
- Although phonics can be very useful, it becomes very complicated
and unwieldy if one attempts to teach all the pronunciation and
spelling rules.
- In trying to teach phonic rules, there is a danger that the
language we ask pupils to read is rather artificial. A feature
of many traditional phonics exercises is that they involve very
unnatural sounding texts.
- If words or phrases are taught without any context they can
easily be rendered meaningless, difficult or confusing.
- It is difficult to apply phonics approaches to function words
such as he, the, they, there, here. Although all these words contain
'h' and 'e', they have quite different sounds.
- By breaking texts into words, letters and sounds there is the
danger that the meaning of the text becomes secondary.
- English is not entirely based on a set of sound-symbol relationships.
A phonics approach can only help with most of the commonest words
in English.
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