Teaching Implications of the DataBase

The DataBase demonstrates that many commercial synthetic phonic programmes teach skills that are low frequency and rarely appear in children’s books. They are consequently of little value when learning to read. Furthermore, when more than one phoneme is taught for a given grapheme, many of these phonemes represent phonic skills that are of extremely low frequency and so contribute little towards children’s progress in learning to read. In fact there is evidence to suggest that in many instances, teaching multiple phonemes for graphemes is counter productive. Pupils struggle to determine which phoneme, of several possible options, is being represented by the grapheme and become confused – and discouraged.