Phonics approaches have been consistently found to be effective in supporting younger pupils to master the basics of reading, with an average impact of an additional five months’ progress. Research suggests that phonics is particularly beneficial for younger learners (4−7 year olds) as they begin to read. Teaching phonics is more effective on average than other approaches to early reading (such as whole language or alphabetic approaches), though it should be emphasised that effective phonics techniques are usually embedded in a rich literacy environment for early readers and are only one part of a successful literacy strategy.
While there have been fewer studies examining phonics with older readers, there is evidence that it can be a positive approach. With any reading intervention, careful diagnosis is required on the difficulties that the reader is experiencing, regardless of age. If an older reader is struggling with decoding, phonics approaches will still be appropriate. Where readers are struggling with vocabulary or comprehension, other interventions may be more appropriate.
DuoLingo, YouTube teachers, and Russian as a foreign language books teach Russian in terms of sounding out the alphabet generally and I haven’t encountered any phonics approach to learning to read Russian. My method for Russian was initially an alphabetic approach (learning the individual sounds of letters), then moved to a whole language approach (reading while listening to associate the sounds of the words themselves to their written form).
Has anyone heard of phonics approaches for languages outside of English? Or maybe I haven’t heard of it with Russian because Russian is considered to a have a high phoneme-to-grapheme and grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence (though someone didn’t include Russian on this Wikidepia list)?