This quote, often used to promote phonics, has been circulated widely, but it’s both mathematically and factually incorrect.

We checked the calculations ourselves. We’re word nerds who have mapped every word in English using our algorithm, and we traced the source back through multiple citations.
 

It appears that either Martin Kozloff was drawing on earlier work but misunderstood or oversimplified the original point, and the numbers were then repeated widely without verification, or he was misquoted.
 

It’s shared a ridiculous number of times by people selling phonics.
 

Children are not taught “the sounds of letters”. This is also something we have seen from the DfE, for example within this page entitled "Everything you need to know about phonics in schools". 
What is phonics?

Through phonics children are taught how to:

• recognise the sounds that each individual letter makes

• identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make - such as ‘sh’ or ‘oo’; and

• blend these sounds together from left to right to make a word. Children can then use this knowledge to ‘decode’ new words that they hear or see. This is the first important step in learning to read.

https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2023/10/everything-you-need-to-know-about-phonics-in-schools/

They reality is that they are taught specific phoneme–grapheme correspondences, as seen here.
 

Take <a>. A child may learn one or two phonemes linked to the grapheme <a>, but not all of 9 or 10 of its correspondences. They aren’t taught <a> as /e/, so they couldn’t read the word “any” based on explicit phonics instruction for example. You can see all, if interested, on this page!

Even if we took the 10 letters with the most sound correspondences, the calculations still don’t work, even if we artificially assumed children had learned every possible correspondence for those letters purely for decoding words made only from them.

But that’s not how phonics is taught in the first place, so the comparison doesn’t actually demonstrate what people think it does.

If people truly understood English orthography and had studied ‘letter sound’. correspondences, they would reject this quote immediately. Ironically, many of the strongest phonics advocates don’t seem to understand why the claim is false.

So much of what people believe about phonics simply isn’t true, yet the DfE continue to perpetuate the promise.

This might explain why at least 1 in 5 teachers in this UCL study said they would continue with synthetic phonics even when it wasn’t working, because it was government policy. 

I study how children move into the self-teaching phase and acquire the ability to decode hundreds of thousands of words. My work training teachers focuses on showing learners the code and developing self-teaching technology where children can click on unknown words and see how letters and sounds connect. I help them support children to move towards orthographic mapping, but in ways that are responsive to student needs.

Teachers who feel empowered to map words with children, and centre bidirectional word mapping around more authentic texts, rather than restricting children to a controlled set of GPCs, some high-frequency words and phonics readers, are often more responsive to what children actually need in the moment.

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This is interesting in light of findings from the National Education Union report Are You on Slide 8 Yet?, which found that teachers using non-standardised curricula reported higher levels of autonomy and higher instructional and engagement self-efficacy than those using standardised curricula (see Notes).
 

Most children are able to use phonological recoding and begin extracting the underlying correspondences from whole words, even without direct instruction. So even when shown “sight words” as whole words, many can still work out the speech-to-print correspondences without needing to be explicitly shown “the part that makes it an exception”.

And yet, to meet DfE validation requirements, SSP programmes had to:

“Ensure that only a small number of words are introduced as exceptions, primarily high-frequency words that are not yet fully decodable.”

These programmes “should teach children to read and then spell the most common exception words, noting the part of a word that makes it an exception word. These words should be introduced gradually.”
 

Only a relatively small group of children struggle to infer the mapping of words without explicit support. So this guidance potentially slows down many learners for the sake of the children who do need the code made visible, and yet those at-risk children often still do not master these words quickly either.

A simple 60-second spelling routine bonds speech sounds, spelling and meaning in the brain’s word bank.

This is why we launched the Speedie Sight Word Project. Every child should be able to recognise and spell at least the first 100 high-frequency words before the end of Reception when supported effectively.

Until people understand that, we won’t improve phonics instruction, and around 1 in 4 children in England will continue to struggle to reach expected literacy levels by age 11.

We need to focus more on improving teacher knowledge of how brains learn to read and spell, and less on training teachers to run synthetic phonics programmes with fidelity.

And stop sharing things without fact checking!

Emma Hartnell-Baker
PRE: Making Phonics Work for All.