The phonics method of teaching reading is a traditional but highly effective one, as proven by both the National Research Council in 1998 and the National Reading Panel in its 2000 report. The basic idea consists of teaching children how to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters, which are then blended together to form new words. This allows the reader to sound out vocabulary words, even if they don’t know the meaning. While phonics is used today to teach the English language, the basic idea dates back to a Roman text The Doctrine of Littera, which stated that a letter consists of a sound, symbol, and name. These three elements are what students in phonics programs learn.The reason phonics works for English is that the language is based on an alphabetic principle. Other systems can be logographic (Chinese) or syllabic (Japanese). Some of the controversy about the phonics system has come from the fact that unlike Spanish, English spelling does not have a one-to-one correspondence, due to its roots in five different languages. The Great Vowel Shift between the 15^th and 18^th centuries has also contributed to a large variability in how a particular group of letters may be pronounced. One of the most common examples is the letter cluster ough, which has different pronunciations in each of the different words enough, though, through, cough, bough, bought, and hiccough.Teachers and parents should not be put off by these facts, though. The point remains that spelling rules in English are usually more than 75 reliable. Learning the “alphabetic code”, as Dr. Marilyn J. Adams put it in1994, allows children to free up their mental energy when learning new words, making it easier to comprehend meaning. This process can even help deaf children with the assistance of a hearing aid to understand the sounds.