ABSTRACT
Tackling the reading of Shakespeare or Dickens proved a challenge for most students; the elaborate word choices were like inscrutable relics for students like James. Every teacher is a teacher of reading and every teacher is a teacher of academic vocabulary. They are the most vital tools for learning that our children possess. Our approach as a profession should reflect these most basic of truths. Most of the people reading this book won't have studied and developed vocabulary through strategic explicit teaching, but this implicit approach to academic reading presents us with winners and losers. Literacy is one of the most researched topics on the planet, and the corrosive influence of illiteracy is still an international issue that politicians and teachers are struggling to eradicate the world over. Phonics is the method of instruction that teaches students to recognise how sounds and letters map onto one another, with all the varied sound and letter correspondences and their tricky variations.
