Within each word are individual sounds called phonemes. For instance, the word plough has 6 letters, 3 phonemes and 1 syllable.



English has 43 phonemes in all, but is unusual in having over a thousand different letter combinations that can represent them.

In literacy education there are two main streams of technique used; phonics and real books.

Real books teaching works on the principal of exposure to text and learning through experience. In real books teaching, the child picks up the patterns of letters by repeat exposure and intelligent guessing using the context of the sentence and other clues such as associated pictures.

In contrast to that approach, the phonics system focusses on the structure of words and relationships between each phoneme and the different letter structures.

Phonics is split into two philosophies. Analytical phonics looks at the syllable structures within words and groups them along those lines. For instance, the words spare, rare and care would all be in a group. The learner becomes familiar with the main groups and then just distinguishes the words within the groups.

Synthetic Phonics takes the opposite approach. It teaches the individual building blocks of each phoneme. And then shows how to decode a word using these individual building blocks. The learner is taught to recognise the letter patterns for each phoneme and then how to blend them together to form the word.

Which is the best approach?

Well, the peak results of Synthetic Phonics seem to win, with 95%+ of learners successfully learning to read.

But rolling it out across the school system is harder because it is a highly technical approach, which many teachers find hard to deliver.

As a result, it has never had such good results in general use as in the test environment.

We have developed a new path, that takes the best elements of both systems. We deliver the more technical aspects of synthetic phonics over the Internet and then build on that foundation with Easyread TrainerText, which is a more Real Books approach.