Criticizes Marie Carbo's article, "Debunking the Great Phonics Myth" (in Kappan's November 1988 issue), for waging a relentless debate against phonics and falsely attributing low U.S. reading achievement scores to a phonics emphasis. Clears up confusions and inaccuracies in Carbo's article concerning first and second editions of the…

Phonics has been taught from the time of the ancient Greeks to make the written language more accessible. The first task of learning to read is learning to recognize in print the language used in speech. As a result of many studies conducted during the 1960s which demonstrated the effectiveness of phonics, its use as an instructional method…