Because of the complexity of the English alphabetic structure, more than a century of debate has occurred over whether English phonics ought to be taught at all. Beginning in the mid 19th century, some American educators, prominently Horace Mann, argued this point precisely. This led to the commonly used "look-say" approach ensconced in the "Dick and Jane" readers popular in the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1950s, however, phonics resurfaced as a method of teaching reading. Spurred by Rudolf Flesch's polarizing, bombastic criticism of the absence of phonics instruction (particularly in his popular book, Why Johnny Can't Read) phonics resurfaced, but—owing to Flesch's polemical approach—the term "phonics" became associated with political ideology. The popularity of phonics rose, but many educators associated it with "back to basics" pedagogy and eschewed it.

Alphabetic principle

Synthetic phonics is a method employed to teach phonics to children when learning to read. This method involves examining every spelling within the word individually as an individual sound and then blending those sounds together. For example, shrouds would be read by pronouncing the sounds for each spelling "/ʃ, ɹ, aʊ, d, z/" and then blending those sounds orally to produce a spoken word, "/ʃɹaʊdz/." The goal of synthetic phonics instruction is that students identify the sound-symbol correspondences and blend their phonemes automatically.

Phonics is a widely used method of teaching children to read, although it is not without controversy (see "History and controversy" below). Children begin learning to read using phonics usually around the age of 5 or 6. Teaching English reading using phonics requires children to learn the connections between letter patterns and the sounds they represent. Phonics instruction requires the teacher to provide students with a core body of information about phonics rules, or patterns.