All About Reading!

“The OECD highlights that a child’s love of reading is the single biggest indicator of future academic success.

On these pages we will explore reading; the purpose of explicit phonics instruction.

What Do We Mean by ‘Reading’?

The Mechanical View (Sub-skill)

Scientists sometimes use the word “reading” narrowly to describe the visual-to-phonetic loop. They talk about “reading non-words” or “word reading” because they need technical terms for studying what happens when the eyes encounter print and the reader attempts to convert it to speech.

But producing speech sounds from print is not, by itself, the functional outcome of reading.

The Functional View (Outcome)

In the real world, the entire point of the activity is to gain meaning.

If you walk away from a page having processed the sounds because the sentence contains only words with taught GPCs, but understood nothing, you have not actually read it. You have performed a mechanical exercise.

We see this with early ‘decodable readers’.

It is why teachers use things like Spot the King’s Sentence when assessing phonics skills:

The pan sat in the ant.
The ant sat in the pan.

A child can process the GPCs and produce the words in both sentences, but checking comprehension tells us whether they have actually read the sentence and understood what it says.

A child who doesn’t know any English can say /ænt/ when shown ‹ant› if they have been taught the relevant GPCs.

It doesn’t mean they know what an ant is.

From day one, we need to know whether they understand.

That is what is too often missing in existing synthetic phonics programmes.

Why the Definition You Choose Matters

If we define word reading only as sounding out words, without comprehension, we fail students.

English has an opaque orthography, and written English is deeply intertwined with oral language. A child cannot efficiently decode words if they do not have the oral vocabulary against which to check what they are producing.

Therefore, we cannot treat decoding as a separate phase, as though it happens before or separately from comprehension. They are deeply dependent on one another from day one.

Again, you cannot successfully decode a word if you do not know how it is pronounced.

You can use your knowledge of the alphabetic code to generate a plausible pronunciation. That does not mean you have decoded the word correctly.

I start most teacher-training sessions with the word:

gallimaufry

and ask them to ‘read it’.

They can use their knowledge of grapheme–phoneme correspondences to attempt a pronunciation. But if they don’t already know the word, how do they know whether the pronunciation they have generated is correct?

And even if they happen to pronounce it correctly, do they know what it means?

They start the session understanding an important distinction:

Producing a plausible pronunciation is not the same as successfully decoding a word, and successfully decoding a word is not the same as comprehending it.

Reading always ultimately includes comprehension. If producing a plausible pronunciation becomes the goal, we have lost sight of why we are teaching phonics in the first place.

What Happens When There Is No Word to Decode?

This distinction also matters when we ask children to ‘read’ pseudo-words, or ‘alien words’, such as those used in the Phonics Screening Check.

Imagine a child is shown:

‹chuss›

The 'Acceptable Pronunciation' might use ‹ch› as in chip and ‹u› as in up.

But a child could interpret ‹ch› as /k/, as in Christmas, and ‹u› as /ʊ/, as in put.

What tells the child that those choices are wrong?

There is no word chuss in their spoken vocabulary. There is no meaning to access. There is no known pronunciation against which they can check what they have produced.

This is fundamentally different from encountering an unfamiliar written word that represents a word the child already knows orally. With a real word, lexical knowledge can help the child resolve ambiguity and check whether their initial attempt matches a known spoken word.

With an alien word, there is nothing to resolve it against.

This can also create problems with marking. Unless the adult understands the different grapheme–phoneme correspondences the child may be applying, an unexpected response can look like a failure to apply phonics when the child may actually be demonstrating knowledge of legitimate correspondences.

A plausible pronunciation of an invented string is evidence about how a child is interpreting the alphabetic code. It is not evidence that they have decoded a word.

There is no word there to decode.

Speech + Spelling + Meaning

What’s great about working with children is that they want to know what words mean.

We can help them decode a new word by showing the code: showing which letters are the graphemes and their sound values, using Phonemies® as phonetic symbols for children.

But knowing how the word is pronounced isn’t the end point.

For the word to be stored in the orthographic lexicon, the child also needs to connect the written form with the spoken word and its meaning.

That is why we bring together three elements:

Speech. Spelling. Meaning.

It is also why so many teachers use The 60-Second Spelling Routine after establishing those three elements. The child knows the word, knows what it means, and can see how the phonemes in that word map to the graphemes.

Those connections support self-teaching.

The goal isn’t simply to teach children to process the GPCs in front of them.

The goal is for them to understand the alphabetic code, connect print with the spoken language they already know, learn new words and meanings, and increasingly teach themselves through reading.

Because the goal of teaching reading is not plausible pronunciation. It is reading.

The mother of this four-year-old child understands self-paced orthographic learning (SPOL) and knows what to do, to support self-teaching. We want everyone to know how to empower children in the early years. The benefits are wide-reaching.

At What Age Should Children Be Reading with Fluency and Comprehension?

By around the age of seven, children with the cognitive capacity to learn to read should be reading connected text with growing fluency and comprehension, and moving towards independent orthographic learning. This is not a claim that all children should read identical texts, at an identical rate, or display identical interests. It is an educational expectation: by this point, the foundational processes that enable children to learn new written words for themselves should be securely established.

The question is often framed as, “What reading level should a child be on?” This can obscure a more important question: has the child developed the phonological–orthographic knowledge needed to become an independent reader? Reading comprehension depends on both accurate word recognition and language comprehension. Neither is sufficient on its own (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Castles et al., 2018).

The period from birth to seven is especially important because children’s speech, language and early literacy knowledge are developing rapidly. It is not a fixed biological cut-off. However, delaying secure phoneme–grapheme learning beyond the early years can make later literacy acquisition increasingly effortful. Phonological skills, particularly phonemic awareness, are strongly associated with learning to read (Melby-Lervåg et al., 2012).

Children need to form secure connections between spoken words, their constituent phonemes, their spellings or graphemes, and their meanings. Ehri (2014) describes this process as orthographic mapping. These connections support accurate word recognition, spelling and vocabulary learning. Once children can use their phonological and orthographic knowledge to process unfamiliar words, each successful encounter with print provides an opportunity for further learning.

This is consistent with Share’s (1995) self-teaching hypothesis: phonological recoding enables children to acquire new orthographic representations from encounters with unfamiliar words. Explicit instruction should therefore have a clear destination. It should establish the knowledge and habits children need in order to become increasingly independent learners, rather than requiring them to remain reliant on whole-class instruction or a fixed programme sequence.

It is not enough to ask whether a child can appear to read. Some children compensate for insecure word-level processing through strong verbal memory, contextual prediction, picture cues or repeated exposure to familiar texts. A child may appear successful with levelled readers because they have memorised recurring words, patterns and story structures. This is different from independently decoding and spelling unfamiliar words, and it risks masking an underlying difficulty with word recognition (Castles et al., 2018).

The more useful questions are therefore:

Can the child isolate the phonemes in spoken words?
Can they segment words into phonemes and blend phonemes into words?
Can they identify the graphemes in words and explain their sound values?
Can they use this knowledge to read and spell unfamiliar words?
Are they becoming increasingly fluent, comprehending what they read, and choosing to read for pleasure?

Strong spelling may indicate that a child has developed robust phonemic awareness and phonological–orthographic knowledge. Conversely, a child who reads familiar texts but avoids reading, guesses at unfamiliar words or cannot spell the words they wish to write may still require support, even if their apparent reading level seems satisfactory.

By seven, the goal should be for children to be moving beyond effortful word-by-word reading towards reading to learn, imagine, explore and enjoy. This matters because print exposure is associated with later vocabulary, reading comprehension and other literacy-related outcomes (Mol & Bus, 2011). If children are not yet reading with sufficient fluency and comprehension to experience reading as worthwhile, they may understandably choose to do it less often, at precisely the point when reading volume becomes increasingly important.

Some are being led to believe that not every child with the cognitive capacity to learn to read can be expected to do so fluently and with comprehension by seven.

But before deciding that it is not possible, we should ask a harder question: regardless of how skilled, knowledgeable and committed the teacher, did the phonics programme make learning to read more difficult for that child than it needed to be?

The issue is not whether every child reaches an identical benchmark on an identical date. It is whether every child is given responsive, explicit support early enough to establish the foundations for fluent, comprehending and self-directed reading.

References

Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100618772271

Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104

Melby-Lervåg, M., Lyster, S.-A. H., & Hulme, C. (2012). Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 138(2), 322–352. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026744

Mol, S. E., & Bus, A. G. (2011). To read or not to read: A meta-analysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood. Psychological Bulletin, 137(2), 267–296. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021890

Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(94)00645-2

Cuddling up with a book creates a safe, comforting space that nurtures security and affection.

Hearing words read aloud introduces infants and toddlers to new sounds, sentence structures, and a rich vocabulary before they can even speak.

Children who begin reading for pleasure early in life tend to perform better at cognitive tests and have better mental health when they enter adolescence, a study of more than 10,000 young adolescents in the US has found.

"We found significant evidence that reading is linked to important developmental factors in children, improving their cognition, mental health, and brain structure, which are cornerstones for future learning and well-being"

Barbara Sahakian

Yun-Jun Sun & Barbara J. Sahakian et al. Early-Initiated Childhood Reading for Pleasure: Associations with Better Cognitive Performance, Mental Well-being and Brain Structure in Young Adolescence. Psychological Medicine; 28 June 2023; DOI: 10.1017/S0033291723001381.