This is such a hot issue, certainly in England, where so many people think reading success is about promoting a love of reading but many appear to be in danger of seeing 'phonics' as being in opposition to a love of reading, or they fail to appreciate the role of phonics as supporting the love of reading - great posting by Gordon here:
http://ssphonix.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/ ... ading.html
...However one of the more damaging errors of some educators over recent years, and even some schools now, is to think that fostering a love of books is enough in itself to turn children into readers. It may seem obvious, but it sometimes needs saying, that to become readers children not only need to grow to love books, they also need to be able to read them. They need to be able to operate efficiently the mechanism of translating the letters on the page back into the words they represent. They need to be in a position where they are not reduced to unreliable guessing, but understand how the system works and can operate it with automatic ease. This sounds mechanistic. That's because it is. There is much more to reading that this decoding. Of course there is. There are other aspects of reading to teach, but they are additional to, not alternatives for, phonic decoding.
