Issue 13: Supporting Structured Linguistic Literacy at home with games and decodable reading books | Clair Wilson

Reading is one of the most important skills we want our children to learn. We want our children to be able to read books, access information online, and engage successfully with language in the world around them. As learners, they also need to be able to read the increasingly complex and specialised language they will encounter in school.

Many of us can't remember how we learned to read, and over the years, there have been lots of ways reading has been taught. Current research indicates that a structured phonic approach to learning to read is the most successful.

Phonics involves learning the link between the words we say and how they are written on the page. The letters we see on a page are a representation of the sounds we say when we are speaking. As adults, we speak so fluently that we cannot always hear the sounds in the words we say, but all words - from very simple words like dog, which has just the three sounds /d/o/g/, to longer more complex words built of many sounds are built from the same bank of sounds.

The English language has 44 different sounds. These 44 sounds, in different combinations, make up all the words we want to say. The Structured Linguistic Literacy principle of teaching uses these 44 sounds as a starting point.

Why?

Because reading is a complex skill and needs teaching in the most coherent way possible to help make sense of it. English is a particularly difficult language to read and spell because some of the 44 sounds in speech are spelled in more than one way. There are over 176 accepted spellings of the 44 sounds in the English language. Recent research indicates this number of spellings could be as high as 500! Starting with the sounds and looking at the letters used to represent them offers a gentle structured approach to mastering this code. Children start with the simplest representations of sounds and move on to more complex ones once these simple ones are secure.

There are some basic principles a child needs to understand as they explore the idea that letters (the squiggles written on a page) represent the sounds in the words they say.

1. Some sounds are represented by more than one letter - for example, the sound /sh/ in the word fish.
2. Some sounds are represented by lots of different spellings - for example, the sound /a/ in the words rain, play, table, and cake.
3. Some spellings represent more than one sound - for example, the spelling ow represents two different sounds in the words clown and grow.