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Vowels, at a level above the single letter, are sometimes quite consistent. Educators have often attempted to take advantage of this higher level of consistency by teaching phonic generalizations, i.e., rules about the language. Unfortunately most of these rules either lack consistency or are too complex to be useful in reading instruction.
We examined 22 other commonly taught phonic rules and found that only nine were sufficiently consistent and simple to be useful. | |||||
Unfortunately,
an analysis of the most frequently occurring approximately 18,000 words in our
language reveals that the "two-vowel rule" is correct only 26% of
the time and incorrect 74% of the time. This means that one who learns
this rule and follows it will be wrong 74% of the time when attacking words with
two adjacent vowels in them. Some of these exceptions include "early",
"poet", "coil", "you", "four",
and "does".
Note that if one were to follow the rule, the word "does" should be pronounced as the word for a female deer. Finally, even if the
rule were consistent, it is likely too complex to be useful in reading
instruction.