The International Literacy Association has put out a new brief endorsing “systematic and explicit” phonics in all early reading instruction. “English is an alphabetic language. We have 26 letters.

A study of 300 Scottish primary school pupils suggests that those taught with explicit, systematic phonics—the letters and letter sounds that make up words—learn to read more quickly than their peers ...

Fletcher, Savage, and Sharon (Educational Psychology Review, 2020) have raised a number of conceptual and empirical challenges to my claim that there is little or no evidence for systematic phonics ...

Two of the synthetic phonics programs, Letters and Sounds (L&S) and Early Reading Research (ERR), used by English primary schools to teach young children to read are equally effective overall.

Corrected, May 23, 2024: An earlier version of this article erroneously presented synthetic phonics and the science of reading as synonymous terms. The headline and body copy have been updated to ...

The target for the proportion of children passing the phonics screening check – a test of how well children aged five and six in England can “decode” words – has been raised to 90%. This increase, ...

On a chilly Tuesday back in January, my 7-year-old son’s classroom in Minneapolis was humming with reading activities. At their desks, first- and second-graders wrote on worksheets, read independently ...

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked ...

Willem Hollmann is affiliated with the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLiE) and with the Education Committee of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB). Cathie Wallace is ...

Fed up parents, civil rights activists, newly awakened educators and lawmakers are crusading for “the science of reading.” Can they get results? Most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction ...

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